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Water resources have been essential to the evolution of life and human civilisation and have played a crucial role in socio-economic developments. The long-range management of water resources, especially international ones, poses a major challenge for the world community and can enhance international policy development and bio-diplomacy. Since most water resources are finite, it is becoming increasingly complex to manage them on a renewable basis. The development of efficient marine and fresh-water management plans is crucial to our survival on this planet and should become a priority on both the national and international level.

Easy access to water is not an end to itself for any society, but a means to other ends: health, industrial and agricultural production, economic development, to name a few. Pressures coming from population growth, such as greater demands for irrigation and greater resource needs worldwide, increase the competition for freshwater. Nowhere in the world is that competition more intense than in the arid and semi-arid parts of the world, where water scarcity has been, and still is, a chronic phenomenon which has played a major role in forming the political, social and economic relations in these regions for thousands of years. While water scarcity can increase because of rapid population growth, overutilisation of water resources – both surface and underground – and the pollution of water systems can also cause much concern in the developed world.

The equitable management of water resources has been addressed in virtually all B.I.O. international conferences, publications and activities. In 1997 B.I.O. held a major conference in Bratislava, focusing on the Danube river as an international water management model. The conference promoted new mechanisms for redress of the environmental pressures resulting from water pollution and the uncontrolled use of the land and sea, and also emphasised the international character of sustainable water management and its key role in conflict prevention and resolution. Stakeholders and citizens were encouraged to take more ownership of efforts to protect the environment and to be actively involved in international cooperation and bio-diplomacy for the protection of water resources. Click here to view proceedings.

A chapter on “Integrated Coastal Management” is published in Bio-Syllabus for European Environmental Education, an 880-page textbook available in print and electronically (CD-Rom). Based on this pioneering material is B.I.O.’s e-learning course on “Integrated Coastal Management,” which will soon be available online as part of our e-learning programme in environmental education.