Watershed Management. Integrated Water Resources Management
(IWRM), not to mention integrated land-water management, is
seen by many as the means by which to move away from unsustainability
in the water sector. Point sources of pollution, we are told,
are no longer the problem. Nonpoint sources are. And they, often
largely in association with stormwater runoff, are the causes
by which nutrients, sediments, and pathogens have become ranked
as national priorities in terms of the types of waterbody impairments.
These are issues of widespread concern, as much in the Oconee
and Chattahoochee watersheds of Georgia, as anywhere else. In
collaboration with environmental economists at Georgia State
University, we are investigating offset-banking as a mechanism
for pollutant trading in a watershed, amongst urban point sources
and rural nonpoint sources. For this we need to know in more
detail than previously (and in different ways) the costs of
building and operating point-source wastewater treatment facilities
and, in particular, the scope for minimizing the costs of adapting
existing infrastructure to meet upgraded performance requirements.
In the laboratory world of the computer, we can imagine exploring
watershed pollutant trading, under uncertainty, and in watersheds
vulnerable to transient pollution events. It will require a
model reflecting a balanced view of the inter-play between urban
and rural segments of the watershed; neither an urban model
treating the rural segment as mere boundary conditions, nor
a whole watershed model reducing the urban segment to some disembodied,
singular point source. It will require a model embracing the
notion of an urban wastewater infrastructure that is not for
ever in a state of invariant equilibrium. These are our current
goals. When the time is right for progress in practice, we shall
seek to embed this research within the framework of adaptive
community learning.