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This book addresses the major challenges in assuring globally sustainable water use. Paradoxically, water resources have been identified both as too plentiful, producing major disasters, and increasingly vulnerable to shortages. Addressing both of these aspects requires attention to physical hydrological processes as well as human activities that affect water supply and demand.
Mountains regions are the sources of many great water systems and often have long traditions of effective water management and therefore provide special insights into general problems of water use, including upstream-downstream and transboundry relations as well as natural hazard management. This volume will address critical contemporary and global issues through the lens of global change processes and with a focus on mountain regions to bring state of the art science from numerous disciplines to examine important environmental and policy questions related to water resources.
Preface; General Concepts and Processes; Mountain Specificities.- 1. Framing the Study of Mountain Water Resources: An Introduction.- 2. 'Water Towers' -- A Global View of thee Hydrological Importance of Mountains.- 3. The History of Irrigation and Water Control in China's Erhai Catchment: Mitigation and Adaptation to Environmental Change.- 4. Scarcity, Equity, and Transparency: General Principles for Successfully Governing the Water Commons.- 5. From Principles to Action: Incentives to Enforce Common Property Water Management.- Multiple Uses and Competition for Mountain Water.- 6. Hydroelectric Resources between State and Market in the Alpine Countries.- Example of Water Rights: Concessions in the Valais, Switzerland.- 7. Cans0Montana: Water Resources Management in an Alpine Tourist Resort.- Water Conflicts and Conflict Resolution Mechanisms.- 8. Water Value, Water management, and Water Conflict: A Systematic Approach.- 9. Evolutionary Explanations of Syrian-Turkish Water Conflict.- 10 Water Use and Risk: The use of Prospect theory to Guide Public Policy Decision-Making.- Indigenous Knowledge; Technical Solutions.- 11. Disasters, Development, and Glacial Lake Control in Twentieth-Century Peru.- 12. Wetlands and Indigenous Knowledge in the Highlands of Western Ethiopia.- 13. A New Ancient Water Mill: Remembering Former Techniques.- 14. Water-Related natural disasters: Strategies to Deal with Debris Flows: The Cast of Tschengls, Italy.- 15. Flood Volume Estimation and Flood Mitigation: Adige River Basin.- 16. Hydrological Assessment for Selected Karstic Springs in the Mountain Regions of Bulgaria.- Policy Implications for Efficient and Equitable Water Use.- 17. Water and Mountains, Upstream and downstream: Analyzing Unequal Relations.- 18. Creating a Policy Environment for Sustainable Water Use.- Bibliography.- Index.
From the reviews: "This book, the latest volume in the 'Advances in Global Change Research' series, is a compilation of presentations from a 2002 international scientific colloquium in Sion, Switzerland. ! Readers can select any of the papers and find opening abstracts, well-written and scientifically supported text, and conclusions and/or recommendations. A bibliography lists over 500 entries. ! is a valuable contribution to the literature on regulating water resources that emanate from mountain sources. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate through professional water resource planning and management collections." (M. J. Zwolinski, CHOICE, Vol. 46 (1), September, 2008) "This book addresses the diverse challenges facing water resources within mountain environments, including temporal and spatial variability ! . Overall, the book contains useful and valuable examples and case study reports relating to a variety of water resource issues. ! This volume presents a collection of interesting papers that are well presented; most images are of good quality. ! it will be of value as a library reference source ! ." (Neil Macdonald, Mountain Research and Development, Vol. 29 (2), May, 2009)
