Dear Colleagues,

Traditionally, the management of water resources has been considered a topic of natural and technical sciences, such as physics, hydrometeorology, technical hydrology, hydraulics, and water engineering. In developed countries, the need to satisfy a growing demand for hydroenergy and water supply has resulted in big engineering infrastructure waterworks, such as building dams for energy production and water supply, training rivers, and water channels and reclaiming humid areas for agricultural production. Although the topic of water has been recognized as multidisciplinary, until the end of the 20th century, the emphasis was put on hydrotechnical and economic aspects.

In the 1990s, a system approach to water resource management, called the integrated management approach, started with the UN Rio declaration and other publications. In this approach that is the keystone of IWRM, two main issues were added to traditional water resource management, namely, “environmental protection” and “social sustainability”. By defining “hydroresilience” as the capacity of a system to resist external pressures, such as anthropogenic activities and climate change, we may attain sustainability by increasing, as much as possible, the system’s hydroresilience. IWRM is a methodology that can be formulated as a policy directive. This is the case of the EU-WFD (Water Framework Directive) which is by law compulsory to be used by all EU member states since 2000.

This Special Issue aims to bring together critical views, difficulties of interpretation, and need for an improvement of the IWRM concept and also drawbacks and benefits for applying IWRM in the field. Papers on case studies demonstrating how IWRM can be implemented in different socioeconomic environments are welcome. Some main questions to be considered:

• How can IWRM interfere with sectorial policies of water management, such as agriculture and energy?
• How can social interaction and participation in decision making be improved?
• Is the application of IWRM costly, and how can developing countries deal with this?
• How can hydroresilience be improved under climate change?
• Interaction between IWRM and hydrogovernance.

Prof. Dr. Jacques Ganoulis
Guest Editor

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