Landscape Sensitivity, Resilience and Sustainable Watershed Management

The conservation and future sustainability of vulnerable fluvio-coastal environments, along with the need for viable planning criteria and policy instruments for their long-term management, are some of the central issues at the heart of the contemporary environmental discourse.¹ For example, in the Mediterranean, coastal, riverine and wetland areas are subject to increasing and unprecedented changes, as a consequence of human-induced processes, such as industrial activities, commercial harbour construction, land reclamation, drainage, canal construction and growing urban encroachments (Falkenmark and Lindh, 1993; Breton, 1996; Breton et al., 1996). But perhaps the single most important threat to sustainability is to be seen in the effects of a rapidly expanding tourist sector, along with its attendant hotel and service industries and their ever-growing demands for water — something particularly acute in semi-arid regions of Spain (Breton and Sauri, 1997). What is most worrying about such a situation and one that has largely developed over the last 40 years, is that historically such developments have frequently occurred in the absence of adequate planning and environmental controls. Indeed, in many cases, land-use planning has been short-termist, and decisions have been retro-active; that is, they have been concerned with ‘sticking plaster’ or coping solutions, rather than the implementation of long-term adaptive management strategies. An inevitable consequence of this tradition of ad hoc policymaking — and particularly the encouragement of mass tourist developments — has been the dramatic increase in pollution, soil erosion, pressure on water consumption and general degradation of the environment including its cultural and natural heritage (Pearson and Sullivan, 1995;McGlade, 2001a).