Water resources fulfill a large variety of societal, economical and ecological functions. This often leads to conflicting management goals, for example improving water quality while preserving agricultural production. Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) yields a framework for tackling such complex problems. This calls for a greater integration of hydrologic perspectives with, for example, agricultural or urban sectors and interests. While IWRM is a technically difficult and socially complex problem for tackling current problems, further demand result when accounting for predictions and uncertainties associated with climate, land use or the economic projections of change. These prediction problems require an integrated systems approach that is embedded into a decision support framework. In addition there is a need for concepts and methodologies that can handle explicitly all major sources of uncertainties including appropriate model structures, observational evidence quality or parameter uncertainty.

To foster discussion in this broad field this session seeks for

a) contributions demonstrating how working in individual sectors
can be overcome such as to get compatible with IWRM including a transfer of the sectorial uncertainties into the broader context. Examples could come from agro-hydrology, e.g., from studies of water stresses on the evolution of future cropping systems and resulting feedbacks onto water resources, or from urban hydrology with a focus on investments into urban water infrastructure and effects on surface and groundwater quality in the future. Contributions are encouraged using novel approaches for coupling hydrology and human activities analyzing historical change or scenario studies of future developments.

b) contributions elaborating on how to incorporate uncertainty analysis into IWRM from a theoretical and a practical point of view. Contributions are especially encouraged that address how to incorporate uncertainties related to the future scenarios of climate, land use or technical development into IWRM and to propagate them through the modeled system to the final stage of evaluating management alternatives.