Sustainability Assessment: The role of Indicator-based Frameworks in Sustainable Water Management

The concept of sustainability in water management remains an amorphous notion. Despite its widespread use, there is not a shared and accepted definition of the concept of sustainability in water management, including its monitoring and assessment, particularly at river basin scale. Sustainability Assessment (SA) can be defined as any process that aims at planning and direct decision-making toward sustainable development. An interdisciplinary approach for understanding, measuring and monitoring sustainability of water management practices includes the holistic development of Indicator-Based Assessment (IBA) frameworks as policy/decision support tools. The IBA refers to the positive, negative, and neutral qualifications of an indicator based on the comparison between its observed evolution (and/or status), and the desired evolution set for the indicator by means of a frame of reference. Therefore, developing IBA frameworks help to synthesize information and monitor changes in water management systems.

Recently, developing indicator-based assessment frameworks and constructing indexes have evolved significantly toward monitoring the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). However, there are limited studies on developing sustainability indexes or indicator-based sustainability assessment frameworks at the river basin scale for complex issues of water management. The aim of this work is to provide a review of i) the concept of SA in water management and also ii) the methodology of indicator-based framework development. Finally, a case study of developing an indicator-based sustainability assessment framework is presented for the Mashhad River basin in Iran.