Sustainability Index for Water Resources Planning and Management

Abstract

This paper presents a water resources sustainability index that makes it possible to evaluate and compare different water management policies with respect to their sustainability. The sustainability index identifies policies that preserve or improve the desired water management characteristics of the basin in the future. This index is based on a previous sustainability index with improvements in its structure, scale, and content to make it more flexible and adjustable to the requirements of each water user, type of use, and basin. The Rio Grande transboundary basin is used as a case study demonstrating the use of the index. Tailor-made sustainability indexes are defined for water users in Mexico, the United States, the environment, and for meeting system requirements (international treaty obligations). Group sustainability indexes are calculated to summarize the results for groups of water users of each country, the environment, and the basin as a whole. Sustainability indexes by subbasins are calculated to identify areas of potential improvement and regions at risk.