ABSTRACT
The Economic and Social Research Council's Research Programme on Environmental Issues was established in 1984 as part of a five-year Council programme with the broad heading of "Change in Contemporary Britain". Its primary aim is to increase the intellectual and practical contributions of the social sciences to the understanding and amelioration of environmental problems. The Programme has many components, one very small element being the Workshop on Water Demand Forecasting reported in this book. In order to provide coherence and continuity for the ESRC programme an attempt has been made to identify themes which underly the individual components (Tait, 1985). It is to these themes that we now turn.
