Abstract
The world faces serious water management challenges. Current planning and management approaches, technologies, and institutions have been insufficient to address the challenges of meeting future human needs for water, maintaining and even improving agricultural productivity of water use, achieving energy objectives, and satisfying growing industrial water requirements. These goals can and must be achieved while still protecting water quality and the biodiversity of vitally important natural ecosystems. We all need to work toward realizing this or other positive futures. We must debate what futures we might want, and then define and implement measures to move us in the right direction, toward those visions. Otherwise, business-as-usual approaches will lead us to a future we know is unsustainable and humanity will be much the worst off.
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Gulbenkian Think Tank on Water and the Future of Humanity. (2014). Water Projections and Scenarios: Thinking About Our Future. In: Water and the Future of Humanity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01457-9_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01457-9_8
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