Abstract
Sustainable development has become a popular concept in recent years. The threats of global climate change and a looming water crisis have made us aware of the need for more prudence in selecting development options. Water professionals have demonstrated a burgeoning interest in sustainability, especially through a growing literature promoting systems approaches for integrated and sustainable water-resources management.
There is an emerging understanding that some careful attention is required to figure out what the term really means. However, apart from the setting up of the Dublin Conference in 1992, at the global scale, water professionals have not been especially prominent in the explanation or promotion of the paradigm shift called for by the quest for sustainable development.
This presentation argues that owing to the prevailing confusion in sustainability terms, perceptions, and concepts, the actions and policies advocated by mainstream water managers and scientists cannot, and do not, conform to the basic idea of sound and socially equitable development. There is reason to voice serious concern about the questions water professionals ask and the answers they provide concerning sustainable development and water resources sustainability. There is definitely a need to clarify the semantics and to identify some weaknesses in current concepts and reasoning. The reality is that water management is often very different from what we think intuitively or what we have been taught.
Biography
Dr. Kaveh Madani is an Environmental Management Lecturer in the Centre for Environmental Policy at the Imperial College London. Prior to this he was an an assistant professor of Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering and an Alex Alexander Fellow at the University of Central Florida (UCF), where he founded and directed the Hydro-Environmental & Energy Systems Analysis (HEESA) Research Group and served as the faculty advisor of the Engineers without Borders (EWB) and American Water Resources Association (ARWA) student chapters.
His core research interests and experiences include integrated water, environmental, and energy resources engineering and management. Kaveh’s work includes application of systems engineering, conflict resolution, system dynamics, economics, optimization as well as simulation and modeling methods to water, environmental, and energy resource problems at different scales to derive policy and management insights.
He has a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Davis, Master of Water Resources from the Lund University, and B.Sc. in Civil Engineering from the University of Tabriz; and has done his post-doctoral studies in Environmental EconomicsKaveh is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management and has been recently selected as one of the ten “New Faces of Civil Engineering in 2012” by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).