Hydrology and water management in the humid tropics: proceedings ...

Second International Colloquium on
Hydrology and Water Management in the Humid Tropics
problems as though they were concerned only with the supply of drinking water. No, we
must start to think in terms of sustainability. A major strength in the concept of
sustainability is that it requires the enforcement of wider responsibilities for the impacts
of decisions. And this includes scientists.
Among the many important current issues that must be considered, perhaps the
most important one is that of urban growth and its many implications. Of the projected
huge metropolitan complexes expected to exist in 2025, most by far will be in
developing countries – in the tropical countries. Many more of somewhat smaller size,
and yet extremely large nevertheless, will also exist in the region. And it will get worse.
So there will be many, many more people to house, feed, provide with drinking water
and waste disposal facilities, and to keep healthy. And if that forecast seems bad, think
of this -- it is estimated that in the humid tropics more than 50 percent of the urban
populations even now do not have access to water that is reasonably adequate and could
be considered safe according to the World Health Organization standards.
Although sewage, if adequately treated and disposed of, poses minimal pollution
or health problems, its treatment can require heavy financial investment. Many of the
cities of the tropics would clearly rather spend their limited funds on something yielding
more immediate benefit, as their rivers and streams give ample testimony. As a result, in
the urban areas of Malaysia, for example, much of the population (particularly squatters
and the like) has no sewer facilities at all. Panama also has a lot of improvement to do.
Global warming, if it occurs, will cause changes in regional temperatures and
rainfalls, a rise in sea level, and an increase in the severity of weather events. The impact
of climatic change in the humid tropics could be substantial because the economies tend
to be highly dependent on natural resources, which themselves can be very sensitive to
fairly moderate changes in climate.
Sustainable water resource systems must be designed and operated in ways that
make them more adaptive, robust, and resilient to those uncertain changes. The water
resource systems must be capable of effectively functioning under conditions of
changing supplies, management objectives, and demands. And while sustainable
systems, like any others, may fail, if they fail they must be capable of recovering and
operating properly without undue costs. New approaches, the results of scientific
inquiry, become necessary.
In general the concept of environmental and ecological sustainability has resulted
largely from a growing concern about the long-run health of our planet. But it is
becoming increasingly evident that the present resource use and management activities
and actions, logging of the forests for example, will significantly affect the welfare of
those living within much larger regions in the future, and particularly in those countries
of the humid tropics.
As a result, water resource management problems can no longer be viewed as
purely technical and of interest only to those living within the individual watersheds
where those problems exist. Rather they must be seen as being closely related to broader
societal structures, demands and issues. Many so-called local water resources
development and management projects will need to be viewed much more from a multidisciplinary
and inter-regional perspective.
It is evident that if a country’s major goal is to be the increasing of the quality of
life of its people, it then becomes essential that there be continued scientific and
technological development. And this depends to a large degree on the extent of general
scientific development and on the scale on which the results of research are used.
While much of water resources research does not deal with technology per se– rather,
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