SMART:

Sustainable Management of Scarce Resources in the Coastal Zone

Project Related Publications

Fedra, K.

Water Resources Management in the Coastal Zone: issues of sustainability

submitted to the EWRA Symposium on "Water Resources Management: Risks and Challenges for the 21th Century" (Izmir, September 2004)

ABSTRACT

Water is one if not the controlling factor of regional development around the Mediaterranean, and its political importance can hardly be exagerated. While water budgets, supply and demand balances are in principle stright forward mass budget approaches and amenable to quantitative analysis. The socio-economic framework that ultimately drives the water resources management introduces another layer of complexity.

The paper describes an ongoing EU sponsored project under the INCO-MED framework, SMART, addressing problems of sustainable water resources management in the coastal zone. STarting with a discussion of sustainability in this specific context, the methodology developed is presented and illustrated with material from five parallel case studies. A system of simulation models within a framework of indicators and indices is being used to design, evaluate, and compare alternative scenarios of coastal zone development. Multi-criteria multi-objective DSS methods are used to build an assessment framework that can support the local and regional decision and policy making process in a participatory approach.