Water resources management in the coastal zone: issues of sustainability

Water is one if not the controlling factor of regional development around the Mediterranean, and its political importance can hardly be exaggerated. While water budgets, supply and demand balances are in principle straight forward mass budget problems and amenable to quantitative analysis, the socio-economic framework that ultimately drives the water resources management introduces another layer of complexity. The paper describes an ongoing EU sponsored project under the INCO-MED framework, SMART, addressing problems of sustainable water resources management in the coastal zone. Starting with a discussion of sustainability in this specific context, the methodology developed is presented and illustrated with material from five parallel case studies. A system of simulation models within a framework of indicators and indices is being used to design, evaluate, and compare alternative scenarios of coastal zone development. Multi-criteria multi-objective DSS methods are used to build an assessment framework that can support the local and regional decision and policy making process in a participatory approach. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: The INCO-MED FW5 RTD project SMART( ICA3-CT-2002-10006) is funded, in part, by the Commission of the European Communities.