ABSTRACT
Decision-making in water resources systems management has been influenced in the last two decades by the introduction of a sustainability paradigm. It can safely be assumed that sustainability is the major unifying concept promoted, accepted and discussed by governments throughout most of the world. Planning, design and operational water resources management decisions today are made under complex circumstances of multiple objectives, conflicting interests and the participation of multiple stakeholders. Many of the decision-making problems are subjective, or non-quantifiable, and deal with the dynamic interactions between the human population and natural processes, both internal and external. Work on measuring sustainability has been conducted with two main emphases. The first focuses on sustainability indicators and the second emphasis is on the development of criteria for measuring sustainability. Reversibility evaluates the degree to which the aggregated set of anticipated or unanticipated impacts of a development project can be mitigated.
