Brian Richter: Chasing water-a guide for moving from scarcity to sustainability: Published 2014 by Island Press, 200 M Street, Suite 650, Washington DC 20036, ISBN-13:978-1-61091-536-6 (hardback), ISBN-10: 1-61091-536-4 (cloth), ISBN-13: 978-1-61091-538-0 (paper), 8 chapters; 171 pp

摘要

An often returning question of my students is "How many people can the earth ecosystem sustain?" I have no simple numerical answer to this question, but I try to help them appreciate the limits of our environmental assets. Among them, water (and not food, energy, or air) is the most constraining. The issue of sufficient amounts of drinking water in a wide variety of places worldwide ranked already high on the agenda of the World Summit for Sustainable Development (Johannesburg, South Africa) in 2002 and remained on the international environmental major concerns list since then. The issue settled in the perception of people as the "water crisis," which was illustrated by an increasing number of sometimes disastrous examples of water mismanagement and shortage. Long-term solutions to the problem are more rarely described. This book is exactly on these aspects: what do we learn from experiences in the past to move toward more sustainability in water scarcity management?