Fresh water has become more and more of a scarce commodity. Water scarcity isn't first and foremost a cause of drought and wasting, but a cause of inequality and mismanagement. This is not only a problem for developing countries, and there can also be variations within countries. The municipality of Gotland has a development program called Vision Gotland 2025, with goals for growth and sustainable development. The aim of this study is to examine whether the use and management of water resources on Gotland and Vision Gotland 2025 is conformed to the Water Framework Directive and the Ecosystem Approach in terms of sustainability. Focus is on the quantitative aspects of water supply. The study has mainly been done by studying publications from the authorities concerned. Although annual precipitation in general is enough to provide fresh water for the population, water shortage occurs in some areas during the summers. Three of the four main catchment areas on Gotland have unsatisfactory quantitative status, and is likely to have so also when the time limit of the next evaluation is due in 2015. Since both the population and tourism is presumed to increase, according to Vision Gotland 2025, the conclusion drawn is that the use of water resources is not sustainable, even though the management per se does conform to the ecosystem approach.

Women are increasingly being recognised internationally as essential actors in successful water supply management. Despite this, women are nevertheless still being excluded from water management activities which have proved to frequently result in water project failure. This has great consequences for water supply and water distribution capacity and efficiency. Women‟s exclusion often stems from traditional and deeply rooted gender differences where women, compared to men, are not given the same rights and opportunities. Therefore, in particular focuses in this study are cultural barriers and socio-economic obstacles and challenges that may hinder female participation. Although Ghana is considered to have rich water resources, the production, distribution and use of water is not efficient, sufficient, or sustainable. This impedes the country‟s socio-economic development. Most affected are women and children as they are often directly linked to the water source through their role as water collectors. In relation to this, the study investigates the importance of women‟s participation in water management within the Republic of Ghana. Furthermore, the study examines the efficiency and adequacy of measures and actions implemented to improve female participation in water supply management.  For data collection, a case study approach was adopted including an in-depth literature review, interviews with essential actors in Ghana and document analysis of Ghana‟s National Water Policy and National Gender and Children Policy. Interviews and documents were analysed with a content analysis and a comparative analysis approach.  The study found that women in Ghana, despite acknowledging their important role in Ghanaian water „society‟, experience great limitations in their participation in water management. Traditional norms and practices constitute a major obstacle together with a strongly male-dominated society that often prevents women from participating in the public sphere. The study indicates that there is a need to reform the legal system and the procedures of enforcement to encourage female participation in the water management. Furthermore, the Government of Ghana ought to improve financial, human, and material support within its agencies and associates to facilitate and enable female involvement. Moreover, there is a great need to improve women‟s rights to, and attendance in, education. Additionally, raising the awareness of gender and women‟s issues in general is crucial in order to initiate changes of traditional norms and practices and consequently improve their participation in the water management. By reforming Ghanaian women‟s situation, their role and status will be strengthened, not only within water management, but as well in the wider society.

With the escalating levels of water demand, there is a need for expansion in the capacity of water desalination infrastructure and for better management and distribution of water resources. This dissertation introduces a systems approach to the optimization of macroscopic water desalination and distribution networks to tackle three problems: 1. Optimal design of desalination and allocation networks for a given demand, 2. Optimal operation of an existing infrastructure of water desalination, distribution, and storage, 3.Optimal planning for expanding the capacity of desalination plants to meet an increasing water demand over a time horizon. A source-interception-sink representation was developed to embed potential configurations of interest. Mathematical programming was used to model the problem by studying different objective functions while accounting for constraints the supply, demand, mass conservation, technical performance, and economic aspects. Such approach determines the type of technologies to be selected, the location and capacity of the desalination plants, and the distribution of the desalinated water from sources to destinations. For the operation and planning problems, the planning horizon was discretized into periods and a multi-period optimization approach was adopted with decisions made for each period. Short- and long-term water storage options (e.g., in storage tanks, aquifers) were included in the optimization approach. Water recycle/reuse was enhanced via the use of treated water and its utilization was improved by minimizing the losses observed in discharged water resulting from the linkage of power plants and thermal desalination plants and the lack of integration between water production and consumption. Several case studies were solved to demonstrate the applicability of the devised approaches.

A series of threats face campesino communities' water management practices in the Callejón de Huaylas (upper region of the Santa Watershed). Competition for water resources is escalating due to increasing demand, decreasing supply, and a rise in contamination levels, leaving campesino communities in a precarious state as a result of their marginalized position in Peruvian society. Competition for water resources occurs between upstream and downstream users and amongst sectors including mining, agriculture, hydropower, and domestic water users. The national government recently passed an integrated water resource management system to improve water governance. However, bureaucratic tendencies make it unlikely that campesinos will receive an adequate share of resources. Campesino communities in the Callejón need to adopt new strategies to improve their position vis á-vis other sectors and resist capture of resources. Campesinos are important to the discussion of water resource management because they have long established systems of self-regulated management and need to be included in the new system of watershed governance. This research first examines local water management strategies and integrated water management through four characteristics: 1) how is water framed, 2) is decision-making participatory, 3) is water management appropriate to the local and regional level, and 4) is it possible to monitor activity and impose consequences for unauthorized water usage. Interviews with campesino community members and leaders, local officials, regional representatives, and non-governmental organizations found opportunities to collaborate between groups and transfer some management responsibilities to a more regional watershed scale. Second, this research examines the opportunities and barriers to scaling up traditional management practices to meet regional needs while ensuring local water availability. Scaling decision-making is imperative for successful integrated water management and will allow campesino communities to continue to manage their water to meet local needs. Shifting the decision-making scale may facilitate more effective watershed governance with campesino community participation.

In this dissertation, we present two major lines of numerical investigation based on a control-volume approach to solve coupled, nonlinear differential equations. The first model is developed to provide better understanding of the water management in PEMFC operating at less than 100ºC, under transient conditions. The model provides explanations for the observed differences between hydration and dehydration time constants during load change. When there is liquid water at the cathode catalyst layer, the time constant of the water content in the membrane is closely tied to that of liquid water saturation in the cathode catalyst layer, as the vapor is already saturated. The water content in the membrane will not reach steady state as long as the liquid water flow in the cathode catalyst layer is not at steady state. The second model is to optimize the morphological properties of HT-PEMFCs components so as to keep water generated as close as possible to the membrane to help reduce ionic resistance and thereby increase cell performance. Humidification of the feed gas at room temperature is shown to have minimal effects on the ionic resistance of the membrane used in the HT-PEMFC. Feed gases must be humidified at higher temperature to have effects on the ionic resistance. However, humidification at such higher temperatures will require complex system design and additional power consumption. It is, therefore, important to keep the water generated by the electrochemical reaction as close as possible to the membrane to hydration the membrane so as to reduce the ionic resistance and thereby increase cell performance. The use of cathode MPL helps keep the water generated close to the membrane and decreasing the MPL porosity and pore size will increase the effectiveness of the MPL in keep the water generated close to the membrane. The optimum value of the MPL porosity depends on the operating conditions of the cell. Similarly, decreasing the GDL porosity helps keep water close to the membrane and the optimum value of the GDL porosity depends on the operating conditions of the cell. / text

This study assesses the effects of a changing climate and population growth on water resources by modeling groundwater supplies in the Tucson Active Management Area. The finite-difference flow model, Modflow, is used to incorporate agricultural, municipal, and industrial well pumping along with natural and artificial recharge. This study expands on a Modflow model created by the Arizona Department of Water Resources to determine the impacts from limited water supplies and increased demand (Mason and Bota, 2006). Groundwater conditions and pumping in the Upper Santa Cruz and Avra Valley sub-basins are modeled starting in the year 1940 and continue to 2009. The model predicts pumping and recharge for the period of 2010 to 2050. During this projection period, nine scenarios based on various climate and population conditions are evaluated. Climate impacts are reflected in the amount of recharge entering the groundwater system. Local and regional climate conditions are incorporated since a large portion of the Tucson water supply is provided by the Colorado River water delivered along the Central Arizona Project (CAP). A decrease of 10% to the mean natural flow in the Colorado River over the next 50 years is used to predict Colorado River flows and shortages. Additionally, a 20% streamflow reduction case and two scenarios that evaluate the local and regional shortages individually are presented. Operational rules for the deliveries of the CAP water during shortage conditions are utilized to represent the system. The percentage of population growth is varied around the current case, which is extrapolated from data provided by the Arizona Department of Water Resources. Water demand is based upon the initial population, annual population growth, and gallons per capita day, which is a measurement of water use per person. The three population scenarios are limited growth, current case, and high growth. Results indicate groundwater depletion conditions are the worst during the high growth/shortage scenarios and best for the limited growth scenario. The change in storage of the aquifer is greatly driven by the pumping, which is dependent on population. For the shortage condition, the decline in natural recharge has a much larger effect on the change in water storage compared to the artificial recharge reductions due to shortages of CAP water.

The Chilean Water Code of 1981 has been presented as a successful case of free-market water reforms. In the northern Atacama Desert, the Atacameño people have developed their indigeneity in the context of the forceful implementation of this radical free market system. This situation invites an examination of the connections between the Chilean state's free-market restructuring of water governance and the process through which indigenous groups claim their identity through water politics. This dissertation addresses the following questions: (Q1) Why and how have the Atacameño people claimed indigeneity within the context of the pro-market water reforms? (Q2) How have Atacameño identity and the water reforms been conceived, articulated, and reproduced in relation to each other? This question is broken down into sub-questions: (Q2a) How do pro-market water reforms and related conflicts inspire indigeneity and water practices among the Atacameños? and (Q2b) How do the articulation of indigeneity and water practices among the Atacameños, in turn, reshape the pro-market water reforms? During fieldwork it became clear that the water market was not as active as I expected and that Atacameños are not selling water rights, but buying them, leading to a third question: (Q3) Why are the Atacameños not selling their water rights to mining companies and urban water supply, despite the extremely high purchasing power of the former, and why have indigenous communities recently become the main buyers of water rights? In answering these questions, this dissertation explores how water management is not just about the management of the management of H20, but is also related to the production of new subjectivities. In the case of the Chilean Water Code of 1981, rather than being a threat to a certain genuine or fixed Atacameño tradition, community, or identity, it is seen as a key catalyst that has allowed a group of people to publically articulate a legitimate indigenous positionality upon particular historical sediments and political economic conditions. Here the Atacameños appear to be articulating their history with contemporary issues, knowledge, and multiple practices in relation to specific current claims about the control of water resources. This fact has questions the water reforms in terms that they were reshaped by the process of identity formation. Indeed, the Atacameños successfully mobilized their identity to partially reject the privatization process, thereby subverting the neoclassical expectations that, within a free market, water should flow toward its highest economic value uses. Finally, this dissertation shows how the Chilean model, rather than being a free market approach to water management that supposes the withdrawal of the state, relies heavily on the state's centralized actions. As such, this dissertation (1) questions the existence of a truly free water market for the allocation of water rights in the Atacameño area (2) highlights the role of the state as the main central and hierarchical source of water allocation for both mining and urban supply companies, and (3) argues that the implementation of the Water Code is another chapter in the history of the state's the internal colonialism of the Atacama Desert.

In this study, I examine the history of colonial control, domination, and change that began in the Interior Plateau region of British Columbia in 1811 when interaction between the Syilx (Okanagan) and European explorers first occurred. I focus on water use practices in particular, employing an indigenous Syilx approach (En’owkinwixw) in order to display the negative impacts of colonial policies on the Syilx and their environment. The En’owkinwixw methodology, which calls for the incorporation of multiple perspectives, is thousands of years old, but has been modified here from its original consensus-based decision-making process. The manner in which the U.S. government developed resource and water management policies in America’s arid Far West directly influenced the models that were later adopted by British Columbia and Canada. U.S. Supreme Court decisions along with a number of international treaties and trade agreements between the United States and Canada have also compromised the ability of the Syilx to maintain a sustainable and harmonious relationship with their environment. Depression era policies in the United States led to the implementation of large-scale projects such as the damming of the Columbia River that had further negative consequences on the environment of the Interior Plateau. The Columbia River had been the destination for the world’s most prolific salmon migrations but their numbers dropped abruptly after the dams were built. In 1954, on the British Columbia side of the border, a flood-control project was completed that channelized a section of the Okanagan River that meandered between Okanagan and Skaha Lakes. Oral testimonials from Penticton elders are presented to demonstrate the severity of biological loss and give eyewitness accounts of the negative social, economic, cultural and political impacts caused by this radical alteration to the river. Evidence from four traditional knowledge keepers who continue to live near the confluence of Shingle and Shatford Creeks on the Penticton Reserve, indicates that water loss and ecological degradation in this area were caused by upstream water users outside of reserve boundaries. The study concludes with a proposal for the development of a collaborative and restorative ecological model based on application of the En’owkinwixw epistemology.

This research study develops a framework of indicators to evaluate the ‘institutional capacity’ of a municipality to implement the soft path approach. The soft path approach is a new strategy for water conservation that complements existing supply and demand water management regimes. The soft path approach aims to achieve sustainability by changing how individuals think about water and how water is used. The framework of indicators consists of qualitative descriptions of elements that should be present in a municipality to successfully implement the soft path approach. These indicators fit into eight themes: human resources, information resources, financial resources, policy and legal environment, political environment, community awareness and involvement, technological solutions, and practical considerations. These indicators are also applied to evaluate the institutional capacity of a case study (southern York Region, Ontario, Canada) for its potential to implement the soft path approach. The case study is compatible and equipped to implement the soft path approach, but this can only be accomplished if coordinated with other levels of government and external organizations.

Historically, a great deal of water has been allocated to the agricultural sector in Alberta to support economic development and to contribute to food security. However, demand from other areas has increased in recent years, notably from the environment. Meeting new demands while still satisfying existing users has become a significant challenge. The combination of increased water use efficiency and productivity combined with reallocating water from agriculture to other sectors has emerged globally as a solution to this challenge. Thus, new policies regarding water reallocation need to be developed. Designing policies that are acceptable to the various stakeholders involved poses a considerable challenge. The values held by individuals determine how they will react to new public policies. Hence, to support effective policy making, a better understanding of how the non-irrigator population perceives water reallocation issues is necessary. Using mail-out surveys to collect data from the populations of Lethbridge, Alberta, and the surrounding smaller communities, this research aimed to identify the values regarding water allocation held by domestic, non-irrigator water users, and to determine how these values influence their acceptance of water allocation policies. Findings from the survey reveal how non-irrigators’ values influence their opinion of water transfers from the irrigation sector to the urban and environment sectors, and the conditions under which they should take place. A pro-environment value orientation was most prominent amongst the urban sample, while the rural sample was mainly moderate in their value orientation. The large moderate value cluster within the rural sample represented both pro-economic and pro-environment values depending on the focus of the survey item. Statements that would affect the community (irrigation sector) were met with pro-economic values while statements that involved making a personal sacrifice in order to protect the aquatic environment were strongly supported. Value orientation was found to greatly influence the respondents’ perception of water reallocation policy.