The pressure on freshwater resources is leading to diminishing flows in some of the critical river systems across the globe. India is no exception, and this is mainly because of water withdrawal for irrigation, which is often to the tune of 70% to 80% of the lean season flows, with some proportion for domestic and industrial use. While graduating from the concept of environmental flows and its assessment methodologies in India, the water-managers, the researchers and the conservationists are now moving towards answering the next question, if the rivers are to be revived, where will the water come from, especially in the case of over-allocated rivers, including the River Ganga. While the logical way is to look at the biggest user of water, i.e., irrigation, it remains to be seen whether the irrigation water savings will actually lead to enhancing flows in a river, complementing the efforts towards maintaining e-flows in rivers, or whether it will lead to more area under agriculture, bring changes in cropping patterns towards more water-intensive crops or result in something else. This is a growing debate across the globe, where India is no exception, and there has been a wide range of opinions in this regard. This paper discusses the process, findings and lessons from a joint initiative involving farmers, the Uttar Pradesh state Irrigation and Water Resources Department, Bijnor District Administration and a conservation organisation, WWF, to enhance flows in a sub-tributary, called the Karula River, which is part of the Ganga River system. Another objective of this paper is to look at the scalability and replicability of similar approaches in other irrigation command areas to benefit nearby river systems in general. Under this initiative, the team attempted to enhance flows in the river Karula by routing the saved water from irrigation supplies in a canal commanded area. This saving of water is being achieved due to supply-side and demand-side measures that are being adopted in the project area. With the objective of ensuring the sustainability of the initiative, efforts are made to form an institutional arrangement, through which this initiative can be sustained beyond the project support.

We explore the oft-repeated claim that river water quality in Great Britain is "better now than at any time since the Industrial Revolution". We review available data and ancillary evidence for seven different categories of water pollutants: (i) biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and ammonia; (ii) heavy metals; (iii) sewage-associated organic pollutants (including hormone-like substances, personal care product and pharmaceutical compounds); (iv) macronutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus); (v) pesticides; (vi) acid deposition and (vii) other variables, including natural organic matter and pathogenic micro-organisms. With a few exceptions, observed data are scarce before 1970. However, we can speculate about some of the major water quality pressures which have existed before that. Point-source pollutants are likely to have increased with population growth, increased connection rates to sewerage and industrialisation, although the increased provision of wastewater treatment during the 20th century will have mitigated this to some extent. From 1940 to the 1990s, pressures from nutrients and pesticides associated with agricultural intensification have increased in many areas. In parallel, there was an increase in synthetic organic compounds with a "down-the-drain" disposal pathway. The 1990s saw general reductions in mean concentrations of metals, BOD , ammonia (driven by the EU Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive), a levelling out of nitrate concentrations (driven by the EU Nitrate Directive), a decrease in phosphate loads from both point-and diffuse-sources and some recovery from catchment acidification. The current picture is mixed: water quality in many rivers downstream of urban centres has improved in sanitary terms but not with respect to emerging contaminants, while river quality in catchments with intensive agriculture is likely to remain worse now than before the 1960s. Water quality is still unacceptably poor in some water bodies. This is often a consequence of multiple stressors which need to be better-identified and prioritised to enable continued recovery.

Increasing irrigation efficiency is often assumed to be a means of saving water and a route to increasing irrigated agricultural production or making water available for other purposes, such as communities, industry or ecosystems. There is a growing body of literature arguing that increasing irrigation efficiency does not reduce consumptive water use in agriculture, implying that no additional water is made available for supporting environmental flows. However, understanding the implications of changes in irrigation efficiency for environmental flows requires assessment at temporal and spatial scales between the daily to seasonal field level analysis of advocates for increasing irrigation efficiency to save water, and the annual basin scale view of some of its critics. When investigated at these intermediate temporal and spatial scales, there may be potential for improvements in irrigation efficiency to mitigate the effects of irrigation on flow timings to an ecologically meaningful extent. In situations where this is possible, in advance of implementing irrigation efficiency programmes, overall water consumption must be limited by an effective water allocation regime that explicitly recognises environmental flow needs in order to prevent expansion or intensification of irrigated agriculture. This paper sets out some of the key issues that practitioners working on environmental flows should consider in order to assess whether or not interventions to increase irrigation efficiency can support environmental flow objectives.

Water saving and conservation technologies (WCTs) have been promoted widely in India as a practical means of improving the water use efficiency and freeing up water for other uses (e.g. for maintaining environmental flows in river systems). However, there is increasing evidence that, somewhat paradoxically, WCTs often contribute to intensification of water use by irrigated and rainfed farming systems. This occurs when: (1) Increased crop yields are coupled with increased consumptive water use and/or (2) Improved efficiency, productivity and profitability encourages farmers to increase the area cropped and/or to adopt multiple cropping systems. In both cases, the net effect is an increase in annual evapotranspiration that, particularly in areas of increasing water scarcity, can have the trade-off of reduced environmental flows. Recognition is also increasing that the claimed water savings of many WCTs may have been overstated. The root cause of this problem lies in confusion over what constitutes real water saving at the system or basin scales. The simple fact is that some of the water that is claimed to be 'saved' by Was would have percolated into the groundwater from where it can be and often is accessed and reused. Similarly, some of the "saved" runoff can be used downstream by, for example, farmers or freshwater ecosystems. This paper concludes that, particularly in areas facing increasing water scarcity, environmental flows will only be restored and maintained if they are given explicit (rather than theoretical or notional) attention. With this in mind, a simple methodology is proposed for deciding when and where Was may have detrimental impacts on environmental flows. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Darwin Initiative funded project Tool kits for the Sustainable Management of Ghana’s Riverine Biodiversity was a collaboration between the Centre for African Wetlands at the University of Ghana, various units of the University of Ghana and the Ghana Wildlife Society. The project also involved collaborators from Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Togo and Benin. The project aimed to address the impediments that remain for Ghana (and its neighbouring countries) in applying the Ecosystem Approach (EA) to riverine wetland management and the delivery of the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD). Priority needs were identified as taxonomic capacity building, a contemporary assessment of the status of aquatic biodiversity in Ghana, the development of practical management tools for rivers and increased engagement of stakeholders in decision-making together with an enhanced environmental awareness throughout Ghanaian society. These were addressed in this project by regional and local staff training, reporting on the current status of aquatic communities, the production of educational and taxonomic resources for a range of users, the development of a set of nested indicators of ecosystem health adapted for use at various levels, and the production of a policy document outlining the means of applying the EA in the management of Ghana’s rivers.

The ecosystem approach is a widely accepted framework for natural resource management and has been adopted by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) as the primary framework for action under the convention. The ecosystem approach, as defined by the CBD, is underpinned by a set of twelve principles and points of operational guidance that are intended to aid the implementation of the approach. However, these are overarching principles and implementing an ecosystem approach in practice requires practical tools for local managers and policy makers that embody the principles but are appropriate for the challenges faced at a local level. Here, we present a set of indicators, and a toolkit to aid their application, that are intended to support the implementation of the ecosystem approach in the management of riverine ecosystems in Ghana. The application of the indicators is illustrated using data gathered for the Densu, Ayensu and Birim catchments. requires not only good scient i f ic understanding of ecosystem dynamics and environmental controls, but also the ability to influence human actions taken at a local level throughout the whole basin, not just in riparian areas. Such influences are invariably linked to patterns of agriculture and various economic and social policies not directly connected with concerns for the riverine environment. The ecosystem approach provides the concept and outline structure by which all these dimensions can be considered within a single framework with a better chance of succeeding in an improved balance of conservation and sustainable development objectives. Twelve principles and additional notes of guidance that have been distilled through a long process of consultation and development underpin the approach. In further endorsing the approach the Conference of Parties (COP) of the CBD recommended its implementation with appropriate adaptation to local, national and regional conditions. It also requested the identification of good case studies and the implementation of pilot projects (which could apply from the outset rather than retrofitting the logic and methodology of the EA). The COP also expressed the need for more awareness of the approach, experiencesharing and capacity building necessary for implementation. Above all, whilst there is increasing knowledge of what the ecosystem approach is trying to achieve there is still a major gap in the understanding of exactly how to do it. A suite of indicators of riverine ecosystem health, and tools for its application, has been developed for Ghana in order to address some of these gaps and support the implementation of the ecosystem approach in the management of riverine ecosystems. Riverine ecosystem indicators No single indicator can provide an adequate picture of ecosystem quality so a suite of indicators has to be chosen that gives a general overview of the condition of the river. The selection of metrics and parameters is the key challenge in developing a suite of indicators that reflect ecosystem quality in rivers. There are a large number of potential parameters or processes that could be measured but not all are suitable as indicators. Key considerations include the accuracy with which they can be measured and their spatial and temporal variability as, generally, indicators are infrequently measured in space and time and therefore highly variable ecosystem attributes may not be appropriate as indicators. The purpose of the indicators is also an important consideration. Potentially, indicators can be used to give a one-off assessment of ecosystem quality, to monitor changes over time, to provide early warning of problems, act as a communication tool or assess progress towards targets. In practice, the choice of indicators has to reflect the pract ical i ty of measurement , the information they can convey and the availability of standards or reference data to show how good or bad a particular value is. Compatibility with existing methodologies (e.g. water quality indices) is also an important consideration. Yli-Viikari et al. (2007) review quality criteria for indicators. Some commonly identified criteria for indicators include: • Measurable (availability of data and cost effectiveness of collection) • Analytically sound and based on science • Well documented • Responsive to changes in ecosystem state • Ability to adapt to different spatial scales of assessment; • Existence of a reference value • Easy to interpret • Policy relevance In addition to the general considerations of selecting good indicators, if indicators are to support the implementation of an ecosystem approach to management there are a number of additional considerations. The connectedness of running waters with their floodplains and catchments must be considered, as does information on the broader landscape-level management (Boulton, 1999). The principles of the ecosystem approach stress the importance of considering connectedness and the scale at which process operate. Water chemistry has been traditionally used in industrial countries as a measure of freshwater quality, but used in isolation it has several drawbacks and can only form a component of indicators based on an ecosystem approach. Only a few variables, out of several hundred thousands (including many persistent organic pollutants (POP) by which natural and polluted waters vary) are measured, so only a limited picture is obtained; water chemistry is relatively expensive to measure; many variables, including those of the most important polluting substances, vary greatly over short periods, usually much shorter than the sampling intervals; and for many chemical v a r i a b l e s ( i n c l u d i n g p H o x y g e n concentration, conductivity, major ions like calcium, sodium, chloride and sulphate) a simple standard has no meaning. A significant change will have meaning but can only be seen from a run of several years of observations. Much more useful and accurate information of the state of a water body is obtained from land use and ecological observations. Chemical variables are, however, included in the indicator scheme presented here to ensure compatibility with existing data. With these criteria, and the requirements of the ecosystem approach in mind, the indicators proposed here are intended to allow an ecosystem-based assessment of the overall condition of a river in a Ghanaian context. As such, they are intended to be relatively easily quantified used ecological field observations, simple measurements and ecological sampling. The indicator set also includes some water chemistry metrics but for the most part these have been kept as simple as possible and can be quantified using cheap and easily obtained equipment (e.g. temperature, conductivity). As a whole the indicator set encompasses catchmentscale indicators of disturbance, water chemistry and ecological indicators it reflects an Ecosystem Approach. Table 1 outlines the indicators adopted for this scheme and gives a brief outline of the rationale for including the indicator in the assessment scheme. A more complete description of the indicators and the caveats for their use can be found in the information sheets that accompany the indicators. The set of indicators developed here are intended to take into consideration the general requirements of ecosystem state indicators outlined above and to take into account the requirements of the ecosystem approach. The indicators incorporate an ecosystem approach in that they include consideration of the condition of the wider catchment, not just the location being Linstead et al.: Ecosystem-based Indicators for Monitoring the Status of Rivers in Ghana 3 2 West African Journal of Applied Ecology, Vol. 21 (3), 2012

The ecosystem approach is a widely accepted framework for natural resource management and has been adopted by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) as the primary framework for action under the convention. The ecosystem approach, as defined by the CBD, is underpinned by a set of twelve principles and points of operational guidance that are intended to aid the implementation of the approach. However, these are overarching principles and implementing an ecosystem approach in practice requires practical tools for local managers and policy makers that embody the principles but are appropriate for the challenges faced at a local level. Here, we present a set of indicators, and a toolkit to aid their application, that are intended to support the implementation of the ecosystem approach in the management of riverine ecosystems in Ghana. The application of the indicators is illustrated using data gathered for the Densu, Ayensu and Birim catchments.

Despite being a dry country, historically, Cyprus had many wetlands, both freshwater and saline. However, pollution, mosquito management, increased use of water and drainage of wetland areas for agriculture and building, led to the loss of many of the original wetlands. On the other hand, persistent water shortages have led to the construction of more than 100 dams on the island. In this study, the biodiversity of two natural wetlands, Ronnas River and Oroklini Lake, was compared to that of two man-made wetlands, Gecitkoy (Panagra) Reservoir and Achna Dam. Baseline ecological surveys of plants, invertebrates and birds were carried out at bi-monthly intervals from February to June 2006. In total, 495 plant species, out of which 22 were endemic, were recorded with Gecitkoy (Panagra) Dam showing the highest plant diversity and Oroklini Lake the lowest. A total of 13 invertebrate orders were recorded, however, no statistical difference was found between the number of orders in artificial and natural wetlands. Furthermore, 18 butterfly species were recorded, with the highest diversity found at Ronnas River on Centaurea sp., Onopordum cyprium, Pistachia sp. and Cistus creticus. Less diversity found at Oroklini Lake and Achna Dam was due to an absence of maquis vegetation in these areas. Moreover, the highest butterfly diversity in all wetlands was observed in February and April, following winter rainfall in February, and increasing temperatures in April. Lower insect numbers and diversity in May were due to windy conditions. A total of 83 bird species were identified, with 32 recorded at Ronnas River, 29 at Oroklini Lake, 25 at Gecitkoy (Panagra) Reservoir and 35 at Achna Dam. Most individuals were counted at Achna Dam (1493) and the least at Ronnas River (217). At Oroklini, Gecitkoy and Achna, the most abundant species was the Common Coot while most species recorded at Ronnas were terrestrial, with the Common Wood-pigeon being the most abundant species. However the outcome so far is that there is little difference between these two wetlands types in terms of biodiversity richness. This study has demonstrated that artificial wetlands do provide important habitats for flora and fauna and these sites should be managed with biodiversity as well as water resources.

The importance of uncertainty analysis has been increasingly recognised, due to the influence of uncertainties in data, models and expert judgements. However, the successful integration of uncertainty analysis into multi-criteria analysis (MCA) has rarely been achieved. This paper analyses uncertainty sources in MCA. General methods of uncertainty analysis in MCA are reviewed, including probabilistic methods, indicator-based methods and fuzzy logic. Building on this review, an uncertainty analysis module developed for use within a GIS-based MCA tool for catchment management is presented. In this module, the influence of uncertainties on decision-making can be visually explored using an indicator-based method. The indicator-based method provides a pragmatic approach to communicating areas of uncertainty to decision-makers without assuming any prior knowledge of uncertainty analysis techniques. This enables uncertainty analysis to be more effectively operationalised within the decision-making process. An application example in the Tamar catchment, southwest UK, is used to illustrate the capability of the uncertainty analysis module when applied in a decision-making context. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction A Conceptual Framework From Information to Site Assessment An Operational AID to Wetland Management How the FAPS can Contribute to Better Management of Wetlands Conclusions References

name directly reflects this community approach.The CIAS design was, is, and will continue to be, guided by the needs of the user/stakeholder community as well as by modellers.Results: CIAS has now been built and allows various combinations of the following component modules to be connected together into alternative integrated assessment models: E3MG, a global energy-environmenteconomy module, including a representation of induced technological change, from the University of Cambridge (Barker et al 2006, linked to an emissions scenario converter, E3MG_ESM; (or alternatively IPCC_ESM, that provides emissions scenarios used in the IPCC assessments); a global simple climate module, MAGICC, from the University of East Anglia (Wigley and Raper 2001); a downscaling module, CLIMGEN, also from the University of East Anglia, which is a climate scenario downscaling system which covers the entire terrestrial land surface (Mitchell et al 2004); a global climate impacts module for biome shifts, which is also a component of the ICLIPS integrated assessment model from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research in Germany (Fuessel et al 2003); a hydrological module, MacPDM, from the University of Southampton, that simulates river flows across the globe at a spatial resolution of 0.5°x0.5°(Arnell, 1999; Arnell, 2003) and is subsequently combined with population projections to derive indicators of water stress (Arnell, 2004).; a coastal impacts model, DIVA, created by a large consortium (http://diva.demis.nl/files/)and a neural network model for simulation of species climate envelope shifts from the Universities of Oxford and Canterbury.There is ongoing work to incorporate alternative modules for climate modelling, specifically the intermediate complexity earth system model GENIE (Lenton et al 2007) and the simple climate model HadSCCCM1.The SoftIAM portal includes the facility to implement latin hypercube experimental design (Hankin 2005) facilitating formal uncertainty analysis.The portal allows the user to choose the (marginal) distribution for any subset of the parameters present in the model, and to specify the total number of model runs performed.The user may specify any of a wide range of statistical distributions for the parameter including the Normal, Lognormal, uniform, triangular, or beta distributions.One may also specify the Davies distribution (Hankin and Lee 2006), a distribution specifically designed for use in risk assessment.The CIAS system was then used to produce initial results detailing the benefits of some mitigation scenarios for climate impacts, particularly in the hydrological sector.Conclusions: A new distributed approach to integrated modelling has been developed that allows assemblage of sub-models from multiple institutions, which is particularly well suited to analysis of robustness of output to intra and inter model uncertainty.Initial results have been demonstrated.

This paper describes the development and first results of the “Community Integrated Assessment System” (CIAS), a unique multi-institutional modular and flexible integrated assessment system for modelling climate change. Key to this development is the supporting software infrastructure, SoftIAM. Through it, CIAS is distributed between the communities of institutions which has each contributed modules to the CIAS system. At the heart of SoftIAM is the Bespoke Framework Generator (BFG) which enables flexibility in the assembly and composition of individual modules from a pool to form coupled models within CIAS, and flexibility in their deployment onto the available software and hardware resources. Such flexibility greatly enhances modellers' ability to re-configure the CIAS coupled models to answer different questions, thus tracking evolving policy needs. It also allows rigorous testing of the robustness of IA modelling results to the use of different component modules representing the same processes (for example, the economy). Such processes are often modelled in very different ways, using different paradigms, at the participating institutions. An illustrative application to the study of the relationship between the economy and the earth's climate system is provided.