Incorporating Ecosystem Services into Water Resources Management-Tools, Policies, Promising Pathways.

Ecosystems provide a range of services, including water purification, erosion prevention, and flood risk mitigation, that are important to water resource managers. But as a sector, water resources management has been slow to incorporate ecosystem protection and restoration, for a variety of reasons, although related concepts such as nature-based solutions and green infrastructure are gaining traction. We explain some of the existing challenges to wider uptake of the ecosystem services concept in water resources management and introduce some promising avenues for research and practice, elaborated in more detail through 12 papers, spanning five continents and a variety of contexts, which make up a Special Issue on "Incorporating Ecosystem Services into Water Resources Management". Cross-cutting themes include (A) ecosystem services as a flexible concept to communicate with stakeholders; (B) participatory processes to involve stakeholders in research; (C) multiple values, and valuation methods, of water-related services; and (D) applications of decision-support tools. We conclude with a summary of research gaps and emphasize the importance of co-producing knowledge with decision makers and other stakeholders, in order to improve water resources management through the integration of ecosystem services.

Ecological Sustainability Assessment of Water Distribution for the Maintenance of Ecosystems, their Services and Biodiversity.

Water provision and distribution are subject to conflicts between users worldwide, with agriculture as a major driver of discords. Water sensitive ecosystems and their services are often impaired by man-made water shortage. Nevertheless, they are not sufficiently included in sustainability or risk assessments and neglected when it comes to distribution of available water resources. The herein presented contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals Clean Water and Sanitation (SDG 6) and Life on Land (SDG 15) is the Ecological Sustainability Assessment of Water distribution (ESAW-tool). The ESAW-tool introduces a watershed sustainability assessment that evaluates the sustainability of the water supply-demand ratio on basin level, where domestic water use and the water requirements of ecosystems are considered as most important water users. An ecological risk assessment estimates potential impacts of agricultural depletion of renewable water resources on (ground)water-dependent ecosystems. The ESAW-tool works in standard GIS applications and is applicable in basins worldwide with a set of broadly available input data. The ESAW-tool is tested in the Danube river basin through combination of high-resolution hydro-agroecological model data (hydrological land surface process model PROMET and groundwater model OpenGeoSys) and further freely available data (water use, biodiversity and wetlands maps). Based on the results, measures for more sustainable water management can be deduced, such as increase of rainfed agriculture near vulnerable ecosystems or change of certain crops. The tool can support decision making of authorities from local to national level as well as private enterprises who want to improve the sustainability of their supply chains.