Assessment of water resources through system dynamics simulation: from global issues to regional solutions

The growing scarcity of fresh and clean water is among the most important issues facing civilization in the 21st century. Despite the growing attention to a chronic, pernicious crisis in world´s water resources, our ability to correctly assess and predict global water availability, use and balance is still quite limited. WorldWater model is developed and used to assess global world water resources using system dynamics approach. It has shown that: (a) there is a strong relationship between the world water resources and future industrial growth of the world, and (b) the water pollution is the most important future water issue on the global level. Solutions for water problems are at the regional level and the work presented in this paper includes initial results of the transformation of WorldWater into CanadaWater regional model. Regional characteristics of Canadian water resources demand considerable increase in the complexity of the model. First, results indicate that CanadaWater model has a potential to identify water-related issues of national priority and assist policy makers in evaluating various sustainable solutions for Canadian ´troubled´ waters.