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FOREWORD

This publication and the workshop at IUCN's World Conservation Congress in October 1996 are very important steps in addressing two related subjects of major concern around the world today: water resources and human population trends.

At the root of the issue regarding water and human population dynamics is an ongoing explosive population growth, expanding the world population by 80 to 90 million new inhabitants every year, or almost a new India every decade.

One major dilemma is the fact that the most rapid growth is in the poorest countries, and those countries are often also poor in water-a vital, non-substitutable resource on which both life quality and socio-economic development genuinely depend.

Sectoral as well as disciplinary fragmentation in our conventional thinking form major barriers to a comprehensive understanding of the water-population linkages.

Traditionally we tend to think of water in a static way, discussing how it can be allocated to different sectors of society. In reality it is anything but static. The water in the landscape is always on the move downstream, above and below the ground as governed by gravity, and it carries with it the history of what happened upstream.

The water needs from different sectors of society are also often of completely different character. Some uses are consumptive, returning water to the atmosphere and thereby depleting the river for downstream users. Other uses add pollutant loads, polluting the river and reducing water usability for downstream users and ecosystems.

This increasingly serious predicament of the need for water resource availability for fast growing populations constitutes a tremendous challenge to human ingenuity.

A shift in thinking is called for, acknowledging "landscape realities." Landscape realities in a river system, for example, dictate that the river's water management involves attention to the sequential re-use of the water moving down the river basin from the water divide to the mouth of the river. In many countries with rapid population growth, the river gathers much of its water in the upstream mountain region. The challenge then is primarily how to share the rain over the drainage basin as a whole. Particularly as human populations continue to increase, the river will have to be consistently managed from the headwater to the mouth in a joint effort to reach the best possible use of the passing water for more and more people.

Human population is driving the water demand, for example, for drinking, household use, hygiene, and income generation (which might be dependent on access to water, and irrigation for agriculture). Landscape manipulations such as land clearing, tilling, draining and well-drilling, and water-waste often result in environmental degradation such as water pollution, soil fertility degradation, and ecosystem degradation. Human populations are also exposed to poor access to water or food and by the difficulties met when leaders try to adjust water-related policies. This variety of effects from linkages between population and water often manifest themselves as social problems such as hunger or disease, and may at some stage be expected to produce demographic effects such as child or adult mortality or migration.

In light of these issues the IUCN workshop on "Water and Population Dynamics" and this book of the meeting's proceedings are vital steps towards better understanding of the water and human population linkages. I attended the meeting as an invited expert and observed first hand how, through the overview papers and regional case studies that were presented and discussed at the meeting, we were beginning to address this important relationship with more and more expertise and confidence. These efforts provide an excellent springboard for future work on this topic.

Malin Falkenmark
Swedish National Science Research Council
Stockholm, Sweden

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