IWRM - Integrated Water Resource Management

Concepts and approaches to design a more robust ecologically mindful water infrastructure.

Water as a right

Method to redistribute a commodity

Redundancy

Best possible implementation

Cost of Waste in IWRM systems

MIT OpenCourseWare

Water as a right

Grandfathered water usage laws that treat water as a commodity undermines the water as a right responsible usage law structure. This is where you must buy your water from the water authority as a service and if you do not pay your bill they shut off your water.

Method to redistribute a commodity

Solutions that work in other places are buying all of the rights from the owners and then reselling the whole commodity to the redesigned IWRM like model. (This was how we handled upgrading frequency spectrum to digital. All the Radio and TV broadcast spectrum was purchased and then resold in smaller ranges allowing for more stakeholders to hold radio and TV frequencies.)

But this is only a reaction to the already implemented solutions treating it as a commodity where if we truly where to implement a sustainable responsible water management system it would not treat water as a commodity but more like a right, with over-usage fees, applying integrated inputs of energy, diverse methods of filtration/sourcing/and distribution, public private partnerships, also taking into account multiple management authorities in conflict susceptible areas so that modification to systems are from the divisive stakeholders.

Redundancy

Think redundancy for every step of your water infrastructure make sure every system has an alternative.

Have two sources of water such as ground water and surface water.

Have two different power sources for pumping water.

Best possible implementation

Think of the water infrastructure as the best possible implementation; do not be detoured, limited, or skew a solution because of the necessity to retrofit existing infrastructure.