CONTENT / OBJECTIVES
OBJECTIVES
This project focuses on integrated water resources management in arid and semi-arid areas in Asia, specifically in China and India. With water needs growing at a tremendous pace to meet the demands of agricultural modernisation, industrialisation, urbanisation and the growing population, both river and groundwater is getting overexploited and, at the same time, increasingly polluted. All major cities in Asia today face acute water shortages and rural areas are strongly underserved by modern infrastructures while being increasingly unable to rely on their traditional water harvesting technologies.
In this context, the prime project objective is to develop a coherent set of innovative and relevant policy options and management strategies, which rely on a wide range of leading research on both state of the art and traditional knowledge to manage scarce water resources. This joint effort shall as well strengthen the capacity in INCO partner countries to integrate and make better use of excellent, but often fragmented, knowledge already available. In turn, this shall facilitate uptake and integration of solutions.
MAI-TAI will generally contribute to sustainable development, which is an underpinning focus of this project. In seeking to understand all stakeholders’ perspectives in a multi-stakeholder interaction, it will produce results that are adaptable and adapted to the context of individual case studies, and a methodology that will enable similar processes to be followed in comparable areas of the target countries. The expected results and outcomes are directly connected to the above mentioned activities, e.g. a set up of a comparative framework in view of the different institutional frameworks in the case study river basins, reports on state of the art as well as traditional technologies and practises for water management, an analysis of the existing used technologies and practises in the selected river basins in view of the potential for increasing use efficiency of water as well as recycling, development of information systems and decision support systems, etc. Gender roles will be explicitly addressed in several work packages, although the target of the project is an overall empowerment of whole local communities. The final expected result is a set of set of innovative, relevant and cooperative policy options and management strategies, enabling the partner countries to significantly improve the current situation.
This project focuses on integrated water resources management in arid and semi-arid areas in Asia, specifically in China and India. With water needs growing at a tremendous pace to meet the demands of agricultural modernisation, industrialisation, urbanisation and the growing population, both river and groundwater is getting overexploited and, at the same time, increasingly polluted. All major cities in Asia today face acute water shortages and rural areas are strongly underserved by modern infrastructures while being increasingly unable to rely on their traditional water harvesting technologies.
In this context, the prime project objective is to develop a coherent set of innovative and relevant policy options and management strategies, which rely on a wide range of leading research on both state of the art and traditional knowledge to manage scarce water resources. This joint effort shall as well strengthen the capacity in INCO partner countries to integrate and make better use of excellent, but often fragmented, knowledge already available. In turn, this shall facilitate uptake and integration of solutions.
MAI-TAI will generally contribute to sustainable development, which is an underpinning focus of this project. In seeking to understand all stakeholders’ perspectives in a multi-stakeholder interaction, it will produce results that are adaptable and adapted to the context of individual case studies, and a methodology that will enable similar processes to be followed in comparable areas of the target countries. The expected results and outcomes are directly connected to the above mentioned activities, e.g. a set up of a comparative framework in view of the different institutional frameworks in the case study river basins, reports on state of the art as well as traditional technologies and practises for water management, an analysis of the existing used technologies and practises in the selected river basins in view of the potential for increasing use efficiency of water as well as recycling, development of information systems and decision support systems, etc. Gender roles will be explicitly addressed in several work packages, although the target of the project is an overall empowerment of whole local communities. The final expected result is a set of set of innovative, relevant and cooperative policy options and management strategies, enabling the partner countries to significantly improve the current situation.
