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APPROACHES TO THE SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT OF WATER RESOURCES AND THEIR APPLICABILITY TO THE ARCTIC RIVERS
Abstract
Intensive development of the Arctic is the cause of degradation of the natural environment, including water resources. Water quality does not meet the requirements now ?n the Russian Arctic. This is the reason for the need to assess the sustainability of water resources in this region. This paper provides a brief overview of existing approaches and frameworks to assessing the sustainability of water resources. It is shown that a multidimensional approach to the sustainability assessment of water resources is currently widespread. The indices offered by many authors are calculated on the limited amount of data available, but others are more specific. They are applied at the national, subnational, local and river basin levels depending on the end users and the presentation of the data. To assess the sustainability of the water resources of the Arctic river basins, it is necessary to use these indices on local or basin scales due to the mismatch between the boundaries of the basins and regions. The lack of data for the municipal level presents the greatest difficulty in assessing the sustainability of the river basins. The analysis performed on the example of WSI and WPI showed that for the Arctic rivers it is possible to carry out a sustainability assessment since 2006, when many of the data began to be in public domain. The data on water resources management is the most complicated to evaluate due to the fact that the development of this system started relatively recently.
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