Decentralised Decision Support System for Water Planning and Management of Agricultural Basins. A Path to Sustainable Development

Foi apresentado no 48th Congress of the European Regional Science Association, ERSA 2008, em Liverpool, o trabalho de Vasco Silva, Luísa Calado, Fabíola Gil e Tomaz Dentinho do Departamento de Ciências Agrárias da Universidade dos Açores com o título: "Decentralised Decision Support System for Water Planning and Management of Agricultural Basins. A Path to Sustainable Development".

Environmental concerns over a series of issues such as biodiversity, water quality, and resource exhaustion, have lead to a change of politics with the objective of mitigating these problems, but these politics have in turn resulted in series of secondary problems of economic nature for the populations of the affected areas. Considering that sustainable development implies the continuous existence of environmental resources, but also the economic development of the affected populations, we propose in this work a Decentralised Decision Support System (DDSS) for water planning and management of agricultural basins, mainly dairy farming. This DDSS allows to analyse and draw conclusions on the impacts of land-management policies on water quality, measured in the form of NO3, simultaneously providing the estimation of the opportunity cost of water for different quantities and levels of quality on the different watersheds. The DDSS is based on an integrated operational model for land and water uses and will be applied to some basins of Terceira Island (Portugal). The existence of such a system can lead either to negotiations between the different interested parties or to the implementation of acceptable and sustainable watershed land and water use plans. The innovative aspect of this Decision Support System is the possibility of direct negotiation with the land users to achieve an acceptable water quality for the end users, promoting the sustainable development of the communities that manage the land use of the different agricultural basins; thus, we entitle this as a Decentralised Decision Support System.