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Key Message

Healthy watersheds are being increasingly recognized as providers of real economic benefits that could be harnessed for building local capacity for integrated water resources management.

Water

Harnessing economic benefits to build local capacity

Two powerful policy concepts frame the challenges and opportunities for modern water resources management: first, the application of watershed-based integrated water resources management (IWRM); second, the emergence of the concept of ecological goods and services (EGS) to characterize the economic value of the services provided to society by healthy watersheds.

With an increasing emphasis on water and the resilience of food production systems, watersheds are becoming an important unit of analysis and management. Watersheds provide a place-based perspective with the messiness of overlapping authorities, multiple actors and competing natural resource uses, and yet, paradoxically, they also serve as a unifying and organizing element. The success or failure of adapting to multiple global and local forces of change will, to a large degree, depend on having institutional frameworks in place that can deal with the complexity arising from ecosystem/human system interactions.

The Global Water Partnership defines IWRM as "a process that promotes the coordinated development and management of water, land and related resources in order to maximize the resultant economic and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems." The basic logic of the watershed approach to integrated water resources management (IWRM) is accepted almost universally, but contrasts sharply with the generally weak institutional capacity for its implementation. Healthy watersheds, however, are increasingly recognized for providing real economic benefits that could be harnessed for building local IWRM capacity.

Our work currently focuses on facilitative policies for building watershed-scale IWRM institutional capacity, with water use efficiency, adaptive co-management and EGS payment systems as key organizing themes.

IISD hosted the Prairie Water Policy Symposium in Winnipeg in September 2005, bringing together 100 water experts to discuss IISD's research on the cumulative stresses on prairie water and the capacity to manage adaptively. Since then, IISD has been working on two projects that are direct outcomes of the symposium: a water resources master plan for the Manitoba Department of Water Stewardship; and a study linking payments for ecosystem services to IWRM. There are also other ongoing research activities that use the natural capital approach to water management. Natural capital is the land, air, water, living organisms and all formations of the Earth's biosphere that provide us with ecosystem goods and services imperative for survival and well-being.

The SNRM program's goal in the field of sustainable water management is to implement watershed-based adaptive management harnessing EGS markets for building and sustaining local IWRM capacity in Western Canada and around the world.