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Water management is concerned with action on the ground. The goal of this paper is to conduct a multi-voiced decision model for water resource management in the urban area of Mar de Plata city, Province of Buenos Aires, through the use of a multicriteria analysis tool. Using the Criterium Decision Plus system, criteria and subcriteria were integrated into a multi-voiced decision model for the prioritization of zones for water resource management. The criteria chosen were Potable Water Supply, Sanitation, Water Quantity, Potential Sources of Contamination, Flood Protection, and Equity. The model identified four of the seven zones as 'high' to 'very high' priority. Priority scoring ranged from 0.15 to 0.543. Regarding the criteria, "Potable Water Supply," "Water Quantity," and "Flood Protection" were identified as the main ones contributing to the final model results. The results show the starting point for generating proposals for water management actions in this urban area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In developing countries, conflict between the objectives of environmental policies and those focused on economic development, a low availability of human resources and infrastructure, and the lack of continuity and incentives, contribute to the inability to successfully implement environmental policies. Moreover, in these countries, population growth in the peri-urban areas has resulted in serious water pressures, poor water management, and severe non-point source pollution. The aim of this paper is to implement a procedure of aquifer pollution risk assessment for identifying priority areas in an urban-rural interface based on multi-criteria decision tools. In this sense, a multi-criteria decision model was designed, in terms of environmental and socio-economic criteria and sub-criteria relevant to water resource management, by using the software Criterium Decision Plus 4.0. This model was applied to the northwestern peri-urban area of Mar del Plata City, Argentina, which is embedded in the second most important fruit-horticultural belt of the country. Here, groundwater is the only source of water supply. The proposed decision model allowed establishing a ranking of priority areas for defining action guidelines in order to minimize the risk of pollution of the aquifer. Aquifer pollution hazard criterion mainly contributes to alternatives classified as very high priority whilst in the case of low and very low priority classes, social vulnerability criterion mostly influences the final results. The first alternatives will require an intervention in a short-term time horizon, and the last ones must be monitored in order to avoid their shift to a worse environmental condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]