Developing quantitative metrics to manage water resources for a sustainable future

Sustainable water resources management has received attention from researchers with different backgrounds, including water resources engineers and sustainability experts, recently. On one hand, water resources engineers have been identifying ways to achieve hydrologic goals through implementation of recent environmentally-friendly approaches, e.g. Green Infrastructure – without quantifying the life cycle environmental impacts of the infrastructure. On the other hand, sustainability experts have been applying the ISO Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to quantify the life cycle environmental impacts of water infrastructure in implementation, operation and maintenance phases – without considering the important water resources engineering aspects through hydrologic and hydraulic (H&H) analysis. In fact, defining proper system elements and boundaries for watershed-scale sustainability studies requires both H&H and LCA specialties, which reveals the necessity of performing an integrated, interdisciplinary study presented in this paper.