Catchment Health and Management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Catchment Health and Management - Essay Example These concerns and conflicts gradually led community leaders to recognize the need for integrated catchment management (ICM), which is the planning and management of a river or groundwater catchment's natural resources to achieve sustainable use for social and economic development. 1. Give an example of a sequence of events relevant to catchment management that conform with a complete Adaptive Cycle. Describe the sequence in terms of the three properties or dimensions of the Cycle. The development of catchment-scale stream rehabilitation programmes in many parts of the world marks a shift from the application of reach-based engineering principles towards an adoption of ecosystem-centred, adaptive and participatory approaches to river management. From a biophysical viewpoint, this represents recognition of the importance of the inherent geodiversity of aquatic ecosystems and the benefits that are gained through enhancing natural recovery mechanisms. As this approach to river management matures, it is important that its key elements and assumptions are subjected to critical appraisal. In this paper, the main features of contemporary catchment-wide programmes are examined through a review of pertinent literature and through examination of various case studies from North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Emerging challenges and tensions include those of generating an authentic and functional biophysical vision at the catchment scale, of developing a proactive a daptive management approach, of achieving genuine community participation and of integrating biophysical and social factors in a transdisciplinary framework. Issues of scale, natural variability and complexity must be addressed in meeting these challenges. The effects of a non-station ary climate on a water management system in the Warta River Catchment in Central Poland which already suffers from seasonal water deficits are exam ined in this paper. To determine a range of possible implications of global change on the region of interest, two scenarios were selected for the study: the warm-dry scenario predicted by the GFDL model, and warm scenario obtained from the GISS model. It is shown that the basin's water supply and demand are both sensitive and vulnerable to clim atic changes. Possible adaptation options to cope with further degradation of domestic, industrial and agricultural water supplies are recommended. 2. There is increasing pressure to restore disturbed areas to aesthetically-pleasing and functional ecosystems. Although the former objective may be relatively easily met, the second is not so simple. Outline some of the complexities that the rehabilitation officer might encounter when trying to restore a disturbed area to a fully-functioning ecosystem. The effects associated with land-use change are multiple and have an impact on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems over continental, regional and local scales. Separating and ascribing a particular effect to any individual causal factor is difficult as it requires consideration not only of geographical scale but also the historical aspect of the land-use change. Increasingly, government