Review of Drought Management and Planning for Water Resources by Joaquin Andreu, Giuseppe Rossi, Federico Vagliasindi, and Alida Vela: CRC Press, Taylor and Francis Group, Boca Raton, Fla., 2006; ISBN: 1-56670-672-6; 252 pp. Price: $90.

The book Drought Management and Planning for Water Resources—edited by Joaquín Andreu, Giuseppe Rossi, Federico Vagliasindi and Alida Vela—summarizes the results of the project “Water Resources Management Under Drought Conditions: Criteria and Tools for Conjunctive Use of Conventional and Marginal Water in Mediterranean Regions” (WAMME project). The objective of the book is to present to potential users and the scientific community the results of a number of case studies in representative watersheds of the Mediterranean area. The book consists of nine chapters written by 20 different authors.

Chapter 1 discusses the droughts of 1990–1995 and 1998–2002 in the Júcar Basin in southeastern Spain. Approximately 80% of the water demand in the basin is for irrigation.

Chapters 2 to 4 deal with strategies for water management under drought conditions. The second chapter describes guidelines for the reuse of marginal water for agriculture, urban, and industrial use. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with conjunctive use of surface and groundwater and conjunctive use of conventional and marginal waters. Chapter 3 discusses methods for conjunctive water use and compares the different methods. The first part of Chapter 4 discusses the development of an optimization model for conjunctive use of ground and surface water and marginal waters. The latter part of the chapter discusses the results of applying the model to three real water systems in the Mediterranean area.

Chapters 5 and 6 focus on drought management. Chapter 5 discusses a decision support system for drought management. The sixth chapter describes a methodology that can be used to mitigate drought. The methodology is applied to four case studies in Spain.

Chapter 7 discusses the European Water Framework Directive, which establishes a framework for community action in water policy. The directive imposes a large number of tasks on European Union members. The chapter briefly describes the main aspects of the directive and discusses in detail its application to the Jucar River Basin in Spain.

Chapter 8 describes the direct wastewater reuse and desalinization activities in the Spanish state Comunitat Valenciana. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first part explains the legislation, social framework, and water situation in the region. Part 2 discusses water reuse in Comunitat Valenciana, and Part 3 describes desalinization.

The last chapter complements chapters 5 and 6. The chapter presents an application of a decision support system (DSS) and multicriteria analysis (MCA) to the assessment of drought mitigation to three case study areas in Italy and Spain. The DSS used in the analysis includes information systems to store, retrieve, and modify data; mathematical models to analyze the system; and user interfaces to facilitate data input and output.

The book should be of interest to water resource engineers, planners, and scientists who are engaged in drought management in Western Europe and in developing countries. The framework presented in the book can have worldwide application.