ABSTRACT
There are many causes of land-use and water resource conflicts. They arise because of land-use demands ranging from the most fundamental – for land to provide both basic food supplies and water of sufficient quantity and quality to satisfy basic human needs for drinking and sanitation – to the more aesthetic, for example, the desire to have attractive land uses such as forests and water bodies as visual enhancements to the landscape. Tensions between the many different users –agriculture, forestry, industries, power and mines; urban and rural consumers; amenity, ecology and environmental users – exist in many parts of the world. Rights of access to water and equity considerations are highly emotive political considerations, as is the question, in some countries, of how water can be shared across international river basins. Consideration of the sustainability of the land and water resource for both present and future generations, always of paramount concern in some cultures, is now more appreciated by the western world. Although the land use and water resource issues and concerns are often as diverse as the different countries’ cultural, economic and technical development, there is, nevertheless, a certain common approach as to how governments treat the issues. This commonality has manifested itself as a steadfast reluctance to deal with the issues, particularly those that are not attractive from the point of view of gaining short-term political capital: to defer and fudge the issues as long as possible, has been the norm. Lack of awareness and lack of research may sometimes have been mitigating factors, but even where land use and water resource issues have been well researched and understood, the vision and enthusiasm for facing and taking up the issues is often lacking. Increasing pressures on governments, both external and from within, are now becoming such that procrastination is no longer an option. In some more enlightened countries, the revolutionary tide has turned.
