GLOWS convened a special seminar at the 2007 World Water Week in Stockholm, partnering with a number of other leading organizations, to highlight the advantages of working with nature (freshwater ecosystems and their biodiversity) to achieve balanced multiple objectives for water use.

Freshwater biodiversity underpins essential goods and services provided by freshwater ecosystems. These are essential to human well-being, and some have a very significant role to play in both adaptation to, and mitigation of, climate change. Despite this importance, biodiversity receives little attention in water resource management programs.

Today water managers have at their disposal a wide range of policy, participatory, economic, and technical tools to effectively manage ecosystem services and to apply them in the implementation of water management programs. Emerging scientific tools such as the Ecological Limits of Hydrological Alteration (ELOHA) framework offer guidance on the determination of environmental flow requirements. Processes of social learning and institutional change may be applied to overcome the seeming trade-off between “ecosystem” and direct human water needs. Permanent platforms for stakeholder participation are giving voice to biodiversity concerns. Increasingly we see projects on the ground that are incorporating these principles into their design and carrying them beyond planning to implementation.

Sector-based approaches remain the major obstacle to progress. For this to change there needs to be a shift in political, economic and management thinking towards more holistic ecosystem services based approaches. By recognizing that we rely upon a suite of ecosystem services we will be better able to address the multiple problems and objectives for water use management. Effort is now needed to promote a shift in thinking by policy makers towards this more holistic approach and an increase in protection of ecosystem services by water managers.

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