SUSTAINABILITY IMPLICATIONS FOR WATER-RESOURCES PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT

Sustainability has proved to be a unifying concept that emphasizes the need for us to consider the impacts of what we do in our generation o n those who follow us in future generations. While we cannot know with certainty what these impacts may be, or what future generations will want or value, we can attempt to include what we think they will want or value in our current planning and management models. In this way we may at least estimate what they would like us to do today to allows t hem to better satisfy their needs and desires in the future. This then becomes a multiple objective planning problem, where if conflicts exi st, trade offs can be identified and debated. This paper presents some approaches for doing this, and discusses how they may be applied in p ractice in the water resources sector.