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This text builds on the shared focus of historians and engineers to understand how particular circumstances came to be. In their endeavours, engineers regularly turn attention to the past, many times with the explicit aim to build on the past. In this chapter, it is discussed why these water histories written by engineers are vulnerable to being less correct. Using a range of scholarship on water history and shared experiences within the International Water History Association, we discuss the core of any historical scholarship: a drive to demonstrate and understand the complexity of the past. As such, this chapter wants to warn against the engineering drive to use (water) history as a guide towards the future. Instead, we propose a perspective of history as a way of reading and understanding the complex paths we have travelled until now.

This chapter provides the background and rationale of this handbook. It touches upon the main challenges of contemporary water resources management. It guides the reader through the four distinct parts and 25 chapters of the handbook. The structure of this handbook facilitates different disciplinary and thematic perspectives whereby conceptually the review of ongoing discourses, introduction and analysis of concepts and contexts as well as examples to highlight successes and lessons to be learned provide the framework.

This chapter provides two different kind of examples illustrating the large variety of potential technical and non-technical options of water resources management. The first set of examples focus on protective infrastructures of flood control. Levees, dikes, polders and other alternatives of flood retention, as well as diversion measures of flood flows are discussed. Design principles, advantages and disadvantages are highlighted along with several solution examples. The second example introduces water demand management and its application in context of urban water supply schemes. It is followed by a review of effectiveness of demand management interventions, including water conservation and mechanisms for regulating water demand and price.

The graph model for conflict resolution GMCR, along with its associated decision support system GMCR II, are employed for systematically studying the strategic aspects of conflict existing among countries in the Aral Sea Basin of Central Asia. Competition for water is increasing in the central Asian countries in the Aral Sea Basin since they became independent in 1991. Disputes have developed between the three downstream countries, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, and the two upstream countries, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, in the basin in sharing water in its two main rivers, Syr Darya and Amu Darya. The downstream countries are heavy consumers of water for growing cotton while the upstream countries want to use more water for electricity generation and farming. Accordingly, GMCR II is utilized as a formal mechanism for better understanding the complex conflict existing at present among countries along the Syr Darya and for providing insights as to how these countries may interact with one another in attempting to reach a resolution acceptable to all. In particular, strictly following the present water allocation agreement by all parties is found to be the most preferred resolution for both the upstream and downstream countries.

Water is an important factor in conflicts among stakeholders at the local, regional, and even international level. Water conflicts have taken many forms, but they almost always arise from the fact that the freshwater resources of the world are not partitioned to match the political borders, nor are they evenly distributed in space and time. Two or more countries share the watersheds of 261 major rivers and nearly half of the land area of the world is in international river basins. Water has been used as a military and political goal. Water has been a weapon of war, and water systems have been targets during the war. A systemic approach has been taken in this research to approach resolution of conflicts over water. By helping stakeholders to explore and resolve the underlying structural causes of conflict our approach offers a significant opportunity for its resolution. We define the five main functional activities for assisting the conflict resolution process as: (i) communication; (ii) problem f...

Though Sri Lanka is a water rich country where many water resources development projects have been implemented, the country still very often faces many issues due to water scarcity. By improving the management of existing water resources development projects such issues could be addressed. The irrigation area coming under the Nachchaduwa Reservoir Scheme in the Malwathu Oya Basin has encountered severe water scarcities in the recent past. This paper presents a system dynamics based simulation model that will help in making decisions for managing the Nachchaduwa Reservoir for fulfilling the water requirements of its irrigation area. The model was developed using system dynamics concepts and the software used was Vensim Professional. The advantage of system dynamics modelling is its ability to model many different sectors such as water quantity, population, agriculture and economy using one single model making it possible to look at all sectors using the same model . The model developed for the Nachchaduwa Reservoir System comprised of the above sectors and was used to investigate several optional operation patterns of the system. Four different operational patterns were considered based on crop types and cropping areas. Initially, the developed model was tested for its applicability and thereafter it was used to determine the most suitable cropping pattern. The results indicate that the patterns consisting of 100% paddy during the Maha Season and 50% paddy and 50% maize during the Yala Season as the most suitable cropping patterns for the two seasons. The model also showed that the temporary increase in the population by the pilgrims and tourists visiting the area during festive seasons affects the amount of water available for crops.

Modeling a watershed can be very much useful to quantify water resources for effective system management. Rainfall runoff models are very much useful in forecasting floods, which will enable taking mitigation measures. Kalu-Ganga River basin in Sri Lanka is subjected to frequent floods. This paper presents a rainfall-runoff model developed for this basin using HEC-HMS lumped conceptual hydrologic model. Two different models, one having four sub basins and the other having ten sub basins were formulated. They were calibrated and verified using four historical flood events. Streamflow data at three gauging stations along the river were used in the calibration and verification. The resulting hydrographs at these three gauging stations were compared with the observed hydrographs based on flood peaks, time to peak and the Nash Sutcliffe coefficient The results show the suitability of the HECHMS software in the modeling of the Kalu-Ganga River basin. Further the results of the two models indicate that there is no impact of the number of sub basins considered in the modeling of the basin on the prediction of floods due to rainfalls.