The uncoordinated pattern of urban growth happening in Greater Bangalore could be attributed to a lack of good governance and decentralized administration evident from lack of coordination among many para-statal agencies, which has led to unsustainable use of the land and other resources.
Failure to deal with water as a finite resource is leading to the unnecessary destruction of lakes and marshes that provide us with water. This failure in turn is threatening all options for the survival and security of plants, animals, humans, etc. There is an urgent need for:
- Restoring and conserving the actual source of water - the water cycle and the natural ecosystems that support it - are the basis for sustainable water management
- Reducing the environmental degradation that is preventing us from reaching goals of good public health, food security, and better livelihoods world-wide
- Improving the human quality of life that can be achieved in ways while maintaining and enhancing environmental quality
- Reducing greenhouse gases to avoid the dangerous effects of climate change is an integral part of protecting freshwater resources and ecosystems.
A comprehensive approach to water resource management is needed to address the myriad water quality problems that exist today from non-point and point sources as well as from catchment degradation. Watershed-based planning and resource management is a strategy for more effective protection and restoration of aquatic ecosystems and for protection of human health. The watershed approach emphasizes all aspects of water quality, including chemical water quality (e.g., toxins and conventional pollutants), physical water quality (e.g., temperature, flow, and circulation), habitat quality (e.g., stream channel morphology, substrate composition, riparian zone characteristics, catchment land cover), and biological health and biodiversity (e.g., species abundance, diversity, and range).
Conservation strategies should focus on conservation and maintaining the ecological health of watersheds and aquatic ecosystems so as to (Ramachandra, T.V., 2002):
- Maintain and conserve the distribution, diversity, and complexity of watershed and landscape-scale features to ensure protection of the aquatic systems to which species, populations, and communities are uniquely adapted.
- Maintain and conserve spatial and temporal connectivity within and between watersheds. Lateral, longitudinal, and drainage network connections include flood plains, wetlands, up slope areas and headwater tributaries. These lineages must provide chemically and physically unobstructed routes to areas critical for fulfilling life history requirements of aquatic and riparian-dependent species.
- Maintain and restore the physical integrity of the aquatic system, including shorelines, banks, and bottom configurations.
- Maintain and preserve water quality necessary to support healthy riparian, aquatic, and wetland ecosystems. Water quality must remain in the range that maintains the biological, physical, and chemical integrity of the system and benefits survival, growth, reproduction, and migration of individuals composing aquatic and riparian communities.
- Maintain the sediment regime under which an aquatic ecosystem evolved. Elements of the sediment regime include the timing, volume, rate, and character of sediment input, storage, and transport.
- Maintain in-stream flows sufficient to create and sustain riparian, aquatic, and wetland habitats and to retain patterns of sediment, nutrient, and wood routing (i.e., movement of woody debris through the aquatic system). The timing, magnitude, duration, and spatial distribution of peak, high, and low flows must be protected.
- Maintain the timing, variability, and duration of flood plain inundation and water table elevation in meadows and wetlands.
- Maintain and conserve the species composition and structural diversity of plant communities in riparian zones and wetlands to provide adequate summer and winter thermal regulation, nutrient filtering, appropriate rates of surface erosion, bank erosion, and channel migration, and to supply amounts and distributions of coarse woody debris sufficient to sustain physical complexity and stability.
- Maintain and conserve habitat to support well-distributed populations of native plant, invertebrates, and vertebrate riparian-dependent species.
- Aquatic ecosystem conservation and management require collaborated research involving natural, social, and inter-disciplinary study aimed at understanding the various components, such as monitoring of water quality, socio-economic dependency, biodiversity, and other activities, as an indispensable tool for formulating long term conservation strategies (Ramachandra, et al., 2002). This requires multidisciplinary-trained professionals who can spread the understanding of the ecosystem’s importance at local schools, colleges, and research institutions by initiating educational programs aimed at raising the levels of public awareness and comprehension of aquatic ecosystem restoration, goals, and methods. Actively participating schools and colleges in the vicinity of the water bodies may value the opportunity to provide hands-on environmental education which could entail setting up laboratory facilities at the site. Regular monitoring of water bodies (with permanent laboratory facilities) would provide vital inputs for conservation and management.
- Effective aquatic ecosystem management requires sound data, information and knowledge, including both data on surface and groundwater (quantity and quality) and social and economic data. Collection and processing of relevant data, easy accessibility and broad dissemination are eminent tasks of river basin management. To increase policy relevance, data should be aggregated into meaningful information, for example in the form of indicators and systems for benchmarking. Compliance monitoring (reporting, reviewing and evaluating) is very important for promoting the implementation of plans.
- Sustainable aquatic resources development and management depends mainly on proper planning, implementation, operation and maintenance, which is possible with Geographic Information System (GIS) and RS techniques, complement and supplement ground data collection in various facets of different kinds of water resources projects. The synoptic large area repetitive coverage provided by satellite sensors provide appropriate database.
- To support strategic planning, methods for analytical support should be developed that:
Integrated aquatic ecosystem management requires proper study, sound understanding and effective management of water systems and their internal relations (groundwater, surface water and return water; quantity and quality; biotic components; upstream and downstream). The water systems should be managed as part of the broader environment and in relation to socio-economic demands and potentials, acknowledging the political and cultural context. The water itself should be seen as a social, environmental, and economic resource, and each of these three aspects must be represented in the political discourse. To implement the general principles of the integrated aquatic ecosystem management requires a cyclic policy development approach. Such an approach would include the following steps: assessment of institutions, needs and resources, planning, implementation, compliance monitoring and evaluation.
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