ABSTRACT
Several linked themes converged by the end of the twentieth century to re-define the practice of river channel management (7.1). Sciences were prompted to address the challenges faced in dealing with the catchment hydrosystem (7.2), which occurred in parallel with a worldwide increase in environmental awareness and politicization of the ‘state of the environment’, including river environments, leading to the need for environmental assessment (7.3). It became apparent that river channel management was as much about undoing the legacy of previous approaches as it was about responding to new management objectives (7.4) and that new methods were required to achieve the revised objectives (7.5). This chapter, therefore, reviews the shift from the ‘old’ to ‘new’ approaches to river channel management.
