Developing National and Sub-National Sustainable Water Resources Indicators

Agenda 21 of the 1992 UN Earth Summit on Environment and Development called for the development of new ways to measure and assess progress toward sustainable development. The nation needs a framework for tracking and understanding changes to the health of its fresh and coastal waters, surface and groundwater, wetlands and watersheds. It also needs a methodology for understanding the implications of these long term changes for ecosystems, communities and businesses. The Sustainable Water Resources Roundtable, continues to work on these problems. The paper begins by describing the conceptual foundations that have been developed to aid in understanding sustainability. We recognize the importance of the 1987 Brundtland Commission definition, which relies on maintaining equity between generations to help define terms. Sustainable solutions to water resources problems can be found if people thoroughly understand the issues and how each aspect of the society contributes to them. When considering key questions about water sustainability, some important technical problems such as scale and geographic patterns immediately arise. Certain kinds of measures and indicators may be good for tracking national level phenomena, but questions may arise about how this kind of data relates to smaller geographic areas within the nation. One objective of this paper is to address the importance of scale issues and geographic patterns and how they may influence the formulation of key water sustainability indicators. By presenting statistics from which indicators are developed in graphical form, the paper highlights several available studies that have proved to be promising in generating concrete results for developing water sustainability indicators at various scales.