With reference to Bangladesh.

With reference to Bangladesh.

With reference to Bangladesh.

Intended for aspiring and new practitioners of Participatory Research and Development (PR&D) as well as field-based researchers in developing countries. Highlights that agricultural research and development has become a joint approach to deal with diverse biophysical environments, multiple livelihood goals, rapid changes in local and global economies, and an expanded range for stakeholders over agriculture and natural resources.

The complexity of current water resource management poses many challenges. Water managers need to solve a range of interrelated water dilemmas, such as balancing water quantity and quality, flooding, drought, maintaining biodiversity and ecological functions and services, in a context where human beliefs, actions and values play a central role. Furthermore, the growing uncertainties of global climate change and the long term implications of management actions make the problems even more difficult. This book explains the benefits, outcomes and lessons learned from adaptive water management (AWM). In essence AWM is a way of responding to uncertainty by designing policy measures which are provisional and incremental, subject to subsequent modification in response to environmental change and other variables. Included are illustrative case studies from seven river basins from across Europe, West Asia and Africa: the Elbe, Rhine, Guadiana, Tisza, Orange, Nile and Amudarya. These exemplify the key challenges of adaptive water management, especially when rivers cross national boundaries, creating additional problems of governance.

Introduction to temperate floodplains -- Hydrology -- Floodplain and geomorphology -- Biogeochemistry -- Ecology: introduction -- Floodplain forests -- Primary and secondary production -- Fish and other vertebrates -- Ecosystem services and floodplain reconciliation -- Floodplains as green infrastructure -- Case studies of floodplain management and reconciliation -- Central Valley floodplains: introduction and history -- Central Valley floodplains today -- Reconciling Central Valley floodplains -- Conclusions: managing temperate floodplains for multiple benefits

The Vision for Water and Nature is the "environment and ecosystems" component of the World Water Vision exercise of the World Water Council. It represents the first meaningful attempt to fully integrate environment issues into the development of a comprehensive strategy for water resource management at the global level. The vision was developed by IUCN through an extensive consultation effort based on three thematic workshops on freshwater ecosystem management and social, economic and environmental security, respectively. Instead of considering the environment as one of many water management sub-sectors, IUCN's consultations led it to emphasize the crucial role of ecosystems as the basis of our life support systems, without which security cannot be achieved and sustained. The vision also proposes a plan of action to help us achieve the sustainable world we envision in 2025.

This book presents interdisciplinary advances in theory and practice pertaining to rural sustainability and sets forth an action research agenda and policy prescriptions to support rural sustainability with special emphasis on the Accession Countries to the EU. The book will address four themes.