Author(s)

M. I. Rodríguez, A. L. Grindlay, M. M. Cuevas, M. Zamorano

Abstract

The relationship between water and territory has been determined throughout history by the successive construction of water infrastructures. From the first agricultural canals to the present day, water networks have transformed the territory, favouring the creation and development of human settlements, but also resulting in severe impacts. The complexity achieved by these networks and its environmental effects require the establishment of coordinated strategies between Land Use Planning and Water Resource Management, to generate sustainable land use scenarios. In this sense, threshold scenarios are proposed as a convenient tool to limit the uncertainty and determine the impacts of water infrastructures on the territory, helping with decision making and anticipating possible deviations from the plans’ forecasts. In this paper a study on the coast of Granada (Spain) is presented. It shows the importance of including threshold scenarios in an integrated water resource management, as a tool that can be used in the strategic environmental assessment to evaluate territorial integration in water management.

Keywords

land use planning, integrated water resource management, threshold scenarios, sustainability