Sustainable water resources management under water-scarce and limited-data conditions

Urbanization and population growth increase the demand for freshwater abstraction, food production, rising thus the agricultural, economic, and productivity expectations. The need for improved water services, sustainable and resilient management under changing climate, are major drivers to set forth the redesigning of water planning. Water scarcity combined with the limited expansion of new infrastructure create competition among water uses and further stress the satisfactory coverage of the increasing needs. Integrated modeling is a way to simulate and address the above challenges, however, poor monitoring, incomplete databases, and complexity make its applications difficult. Questions such as what data to use, how to best exploit the (limited) available databases, what parameters to calculate, and how to satisfy both economic and environmental objectives, occur. This study presents a novel Decision Support System (DSS), combining hydrology, economics, engineering, and social aspects, aimed to participatory management, using simple concepts, and discussing assumptions for working with limited data, and useful parameters to estimate. Water availability and demand, water quality, profits, costs, and management scenario analysis, including nature-based solutions, are explored under climate change scenarios, and alternative policies are evaluated. The combination of the above and the useful modeling insights, under water- and data-scarcity conditions are novel elements, while the aim is to encourage integrated and sustainable water resources management through understandable and user-friendly DSSs.