ABSTRACT
Sustainable water use and management affects everyone as none of us, including the flora and fauna around us, can exist without it. The future supply of water is also looking bleak due to climate change and growing total demand. Solutions in sustainable water management are complex but known, suggesting hope for those tasked with teaching others. Economic perspectives and tools have provided a modern basis for sustainable water analysis and solution assessment, and so this chapter unashamedly explores teaching water sustainability primarily from an economic perspective. While some human needs for water can arguably be provided for free, most water uses are costly and challenging (e.g. agriculture), requiring some idea about the costs and benefits to achieve sustainable use. To sustainably manage water is also difficult where past choices and systems – together with future uncertainty – provide many supply and demand barriers, preventing changes today. But sustainable water management requires stable, not increasing, water uses into the future. This chapter outlines the reasoning for such thinking and teaching in water contexts and how we might achieve stable supply/demand over time.
