Sustainability Issues

An Unnatural Disaster

Without concerted action, Hurricane Matthew will be remembered in the annals of climate change as a precursor to an era of intensifying and increasingly ruinous, unnatural storm disasters. Time is short. Neither denial nor incrementalism is acceptable. Nothing less than the well-being of our children, and their children, is in the balance.

Metro Boston Regional Climate Change Adaptation Strategy Report

Given the magnitude of climate change impacts on the natural environment, development and infrastructure, economy, and public health in the region, it is imperative that climate change adaptation is adequately addressed at the Regional Level. The primary goal of this Strategy is to prepare recommendations for local, regional, and state action to reduce vulnerability to future hazards and impacts of climate change within Eastern Massachusetts. This Strategy builds upon findings of the Massachusetts Climate Change Adaptation Report, September 2011 and other pertinent publications developed to date.

From Waste to Jobs: What Achieving 75 Percent Recycling Means for California

In October 2011, Governor Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 34, modifying the California Integrated Waste Management Act and establishing a policy goal that “75 percent of solid waste generated be source reduced, recycled, or composted by the year 2020.” Recognizing the significant benefits that an effectively implemented AB 341 holds for waste diversion, ecosystem protection, materials management practices, and economic growth in California, NRDC commissioned Tellus Institute to assess the job creation potential of meeting the 75 percent recycling goal by 2020.

Resilience Through Risk Prevention and Management and Environmental Sustainability

Prepared as input to the United Nations process to develop Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to guide the post-2015 global development agenda, this paper discusses the importance of building community resilience, including minimizing climate change impacts, and the challenges cities face while trying to effectively manage rapid population growth and alleviate poverty. It then identifies potential urban resilience targets within an urban SDG. This paper is part of a set of issues papers developed for the Communitas Coalition to address the critical role of cities and regions in advancing sustainable development.

Environmental, Social and Governance Investing by College and University Endowments in the United States: Social Responsibility, Sustainability, and Stakeholder Relations

With more than $400 billion in combined assets under management, US college and university endowments constitute an important segment of institutional investors involved in sustainable and responsible investing—defined here as the explicit incorporation of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues into investment decision-making and active-ownership activities. This study provides one of the most comprehensive analyses to date of the state of ESG investing by educational endowments.

Backcasting for Sustainability: Introduction to the Special Issue

This article introduces the special issue of Technological Forecasting & Social Change on “Backcasting for Sustainability.” It provides a background of backcasting and positions it within the wider context of future studies. It offers reflections on the diversity and variety of backcasting studies and experiments, as presented in the ten papers for this special issue, and concludes by formulating a future research agenda.

Developmental Benefits from a Low-Carbon Pathway

The release of the Interim Report of the Expert Group on Low Carbon Strategies for Inclusive Growth in May 2011 gives us an occasion to place India’s climate stance in perspective. The Report, while useful in discussing opportunities for greenhouse gas emissions reductions in various sectors, does not make inclusivity its priority. Rather, with growth as its starting point, it gives us little or no sense of what “inclusive growth” amounts to or indeed what should motivate the country to embark on a low-carbon pathway. Although such a growth path is socially, financially, and politically the right way forward, it must be articulated in much more explicit terms.

Originally published in Economic & Political Weekly 36, no, 34 (August 2011): 15-18.

More Jobs, Less Pollution: Growing the Recycling Economy in the U.S.

This study provides strong evidence that an enhanced national recycling and composting strategy in the United States can significantly and sustainably address critical national priorities including climate change, lasting job creation, and improved health. Achieving a 75 percent diversion rate for municipal solid waste (MSW) and construction and demolition debris (C&D) by 2030 would result in a total of 2.3 million jobs, lower greenhouse gas emissions, less pollution overall, and unquantified benefits of reducing ecological pressures associated with the use of non-renewable resources.

Work and Well-Being

In an economy focused on growth and individual gain, it is difficult to question the primacy of compensation among the indicators of welfare and create space for a broad discussion of the factors that contribute to well-being. Yet doing so is essential to corporate redesign. Earnings are but one contribution to a worker’s well-being. A long and satisfying work experience, rich in opportunity and fulfillment, depends on a host of tangible and intangible factors. The current economic crisis provides a rare opening for rethinking the linkage between well-being and work.

Bringing Global Thinking to Local Sustainability Efforts: A Collaborative Project for the Boston Metropolitan Region—Technical Report on Quantitative Scenarios

This report provides technical documentation for the quantification of scenarios developed by the Tellus Institute for the Boston Scenarios Project (“BSP”). It serves as a supplement to the BSP final report: Alternative Long-Range Scenarios for the Boston Region: Contours of the Future. The report analyzes three long-range scenarios for the Boston region (Business-As-Usual (BAU), Policy Reform, and Deep Change), presenting the quantitative inputs and assumptions used in developing the scenarios and projecting them out to the year 2050.

Contours of the Future: Alternative Scenarios for the Boston Region

Sustainable Solid Waste Management Using a Base-of-the-Pyramid Approach

This chapter discusses a range of arrangements and concerns associated with waste management in developing nations. The first three sections provide general background, discuss the standard form of privatization, and introduce an alternative. The fourth section introduces the base-of-the-pyramid (BoP) approach and explains how it provides a framework within which the two apparently antagonistic approaches—standard privatization and the sustainable alternative—can be combined. The final two sections describe the combination and explain how it addresses past failures and problems. The final section also provides a brief general discussion of sustainability in the BoP context.

Originally published in Prabhu Kandachar and Minna Halme, eds., Sustainability Challenges and Solutions at the Base of the Pyramid (Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf Publishing, 2008).

Automobility, Liberalism, and the Ethics of Driving

Automobility, or the myriad institutions that foster car culture, has rarely if ever been put under the lens of liberal political theory, even though driving is one of the most common and widely accepted features of daily life in modern societies. When its implied promise of guaranteeing both freedom and equality is examined more closely, however, it appears that the ethical implications of driving may be darker than initially supposed.

Originally published in Environmental Ethics 29 (2007): 77-90.

WEAP: Water Evaluation And Planning System User Guide (for WEAP 21)

The Water Evaluation and Planning System (WEAP) aims to incorporate concerns about allocation of limited water resources, environmental quality, and sustainable water use into a practical tool for water resources planning. As a database, WEAP provides a system for maintaining water demand and supply information. As a forecasting tool, WEAP simulates water demand, supply, flows, and storage, as well as pollution generation, treatment, and discharge. As a policy analysis tool, WEAP evaluates a full range of water development and management options and takes account of multiple and competing uses of water systems.

Climate Change Dilemma: Technology, Social Change or Both? An Examination of Long-Term Transport Policy Choices in the United States

This paper reviews the prospects for emissions reductions in the US passenger transport sector and the technical, economic, social, and political barriers to developing policies that focus solely on technology or pricing. Using scenarios, it shows that, in order to meet stringent emissions targets over the coming half century, technology and pricing policies may have to be supplemented by strategies to change lifestyles and land uses in ways that effectively reduce car dependence. In the medium to long term, bold initiatives that treat vehicle users as citizens capable of shifting their interests and behavior could form kernels of social change that, in turn, provide opportunities for removing many of the social and political constraints.

What Does Happiness Look Like? The Well-Being Mandala

Whether a Great Transition occurs is, to a great extent, a matter of choice. “Push” (necessity, avoidance of risk/harm) and “pull” (pursuit of attractive options) will guide our collective decisions. Well-being is an important pull. Our understanding of well-being will, in part, shape the choices we make, individually and collectively, as we create our future. A broad, sophisticated understanding of well-beng is essential if we are to choose wisely. Accordingly, this paper reviews various perspectives on well-being and offers its own conception: the well-being mandala, a nested image of various facets of personal well-being residing inside broader social and environmental well-being.

Genetic Engineering in Agriculture

This paper proposes a novel approach to including the public in evaluating the impacts of food and agricultural biotechnology modeled after the growing practice of sustainability reporting by companies. The most visible among those, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), when implemented properly, includes a wide range of stakeholders, including the financial institutions, companies, NGOs, and civil society, in an interactive multi-stakeholder discourse and collaboration. The reporting exercise would open the discussion about the R&D around new GMO products, and could mitigate potential adverse effects in an early stage (Constructive Technology Assessment). We specifically propose initiating a broadly based societal initiative aimed at developing a new sectoral supplement of GRI Guidelines, specifically designed for the food and agricultural biotechnology sector.

Past and Future of Backcasting

Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren: Progress and Prospects After 75 Years

In 1930, as the Great Depression was beginning, John Maynard Keynes wrote the essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. In it, he looked 100 years ahead to a future in which learning to live well had replaced the struggle for subsistence as the basic problem facing humanity. The future discussed by Keynes is now only twenty-five years away. Beginning with current data on income, the paper shows that progress beyond the struggle for subsistence has been limited to the developed countries and will likely remain so through 2030. Among these countries, overwork, rather than living well, is increasing. This paper calls for a fundamental change in values—away from overwork and toward living well—among the developed countries that might have positive feedback effects on the prospects of developing countries as well.

Adaptation Policy Frameworks for Climate Change: Developing Strategies, Policies and Measures

The development of the Adaptation Policy Framework (APF) is intended to help provide the rapidly evolving process of adaptation policymaking with a much needed roadmap. The APF can be used by countries to both evaluate and complement existing planning processes to address climate change adaptation. As an assessment, planning, and implementation framework, it lays out an approach to climate change adaptation that supports sustainable development, rather than the other way around. The APF is about practice rather than theory; it starts with the information that developing countries already possess concerning vulnerable systems such as agriculture, water resources, public health, and disaster management, and aims to exploit existing synergies and intersecting themes in order to enable better informed policymaking.

Technical reports available here.

California Leadership Strategies to Reduce Global Warming Emissions

The state of California has been a historical leader on energy and environmental policy, and it is well-positioned to take a leadership role on climate. From August to November 2004, Tellus Institute worked closely with staff members of the California Energy Commission (CEC), the Air Resources Board (ARB), the California Environmental Protection Agency, and other state agencies to review existing forecasts, identify strategies, and compile estimates of potential emissions reductions that are likely to be compatible with strong, long-term economic growth. This report presents the methods, assumptions, and findings of this assessment and served as a basis for Governor Schwarzenegger’s climate target announcement on June 1, 2005.

Public Avenues to Public Spaces: Regulating the Car

Environmental regulation of automobiles faces the problem that the burden of causing air pollution cannot be borne solely by the manufacturer, the owner, or the driver. This paper explores the implications that this constraint has had on the regulatory modes adopted by the state of California to curb automobile pollution for the past three decades. It argues that California’s experience provides us with a particularly stark view of the regulatory conundrum because of the dual nature of the stakes: a highly automobilized society having severe local air pollution problems. Moreover, by creating for itself the global reputation of being the intrepid pioneer in the field, the state’s leading regulatory agency may have become victim of its own remarkable success and gotten locked into a particular pattern of regulation.

Originally published in J. D. Wufhorst and Anne Haugestad, eds., Building Sustainable Communities: Ecological Justice and Global Citizenship (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 1-9.

Technological Change and Regulation in the Car Industry

The choices we have made over the past 200 years about modes and technologies of transportation have brought us unprecedented global interaction and, in many respects, increased personal freedom. However, all this mobility has come at a cost to society, to the economy, and to the environment. This special issue of Greener Management International attempts to inform the broad and systemic change required in the wider concept of automobility by exploring the role of the regulator, in particular in the context of more recent co-operative and partnership approaches with private-sector stakeholders, particularly the automotive industry.

Originally published in Greener Management International 47 (Autumn 2004): 5-11.

Cutting the Gordian Knot: Adequacy, Realism and Equity

Despite the almost impossible complexity of the climate deadlock, it is possible to map its most profound contours. They range, unsurprisingly, outside the traditional domains of climate politics, across lands defined by post-Cold War geopolitics, the struggle for development, the challenges of sustainability. For all this, however, they define a tangle—a Gordian Knot—in which three principle strands may be clearly discerned: adequacy, realism, and equity. To help map the way forward, this paper proposes the concept of an “equity reference framework”—a framework that allows us to ask, before we prejudge what is and isn’t realistic, what would actually be fair. There will be no adequate way forward that does not involve a radical redefinition of realism.

Turning the Corner on Global Warming Emissions: An Analysis of Ten Strategies for California, Oregon, and Washington

This report makes a compelling case that the West Coast states can significantly reduce their global warming emissions over the next fifteen years. By 2020, the ten strategies in this report would reduce global warming pollution by 200 million metric tons—26 percent below the emissions that would otherwise occur, and 1 percent below today’s levels. While these reductions are not nearly enough to stabilize the climate, the ten strategies would represent a significant down payment on deeper emissions reductions.

South-North Dialogue: Equity in the Greenhouse

Regardless of when or whether the Kyoto Protocol enters into force, the challenge of future climate negotiations will be to embed the next steps in a long-term framework that aims at an adequate and equitable global climate agreement that takes into account the right to sustainable development of all countries. This proposal examines equitable approaches to mitigation—including both deep cuts in the North and differentiated mitigation commitments for developing countries. It also examines adaptation, as no agreement will be equitable or adequate if it fails to incorporate appropriate burden sharing mechanisms to address the needs of those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

Critical Challenges for Sustainability Science

A letter to the editor in Science discussing a recent article, “Sustainability Science,” by Kates et al.

The letter argues that sustainability science will need to transcend the determinism and incremental responses to perturbation that still dominate much research on the dynamics of combined socio-ecological systems. It offers participatory scenario development as an approach for systematically addressing many of the core challenges the discipline faces.

Originally published in Science 297 (September 2002): 1994.

Civic Entrepreneurship: A Civil Society Perspective on Sustainable Development. Vol. 1: Global Synthesis

Civic Entrepreneurship: A Civil Society Perspective on Sustainable Development celebrates the impact civil society has had on actualizing sustainable development, with over one hundred successful examples worldwide. It is based on the premise that in today’s world, it is not only the past that determines what is and what shall be, but rather that the trends of the present can rewrite the history of what may be. In exploring this premise, the series attempts to understand what has worked for sustainable development, and thus what needs to be built upon to shape a future we want to see.

Carbon Abatement with Economic Growth: A National Strategy

This paper presents the results of a study showing that the United States could dramatically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions over the next two decades while the economy continues to grow. It examines a set of policies to increase energy efficiency, accelerate adoption of renewable energy, reduce air pollution, and shift to less carbon-intensive fuels. The policies are targeted within and across sectors—residential and commercial buildings, industrial facilities, transportation, and power generation. They include incentives, standards, codes, market mechanisms, regulatory reform, research and development, public outreach, technical assistance, and infrastructure investment.

Waste Reduction Program Assessment and Analysis for Massachusetts

This report focuses on what the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) needs to do between now and 2010 to reach the waste reduction goals articulated in Beyond 2000 Solid Waste Master Plan — A Policy Framework, its plan and vision for managing solid waste over the coming decade. The project includes an assessment of the best strategies to reduce waste at its source and increase participation in existing programs. It also identifies the most critical areas to expand recycling and composting access and infrastructure to move toward the 70% waste reduction goal. As such, this report is intended to provide a recommended roadmap for reaching this goal, identifying the sectors of the waste stream to target, the additional quantities of waste reduction that can be achieved in each sector, the strategies necessary to achieve these reductions, and the resource allocations required.

New England’s Global Warming Solutions

This report presents a new detailed analysis of the energy impacts, carbon and pollutant emissions reductions, and economic benefits in New England of the national policies and measures analyzed in America’s Global Warming Solutions. That study indicated that the region would reap about one sixth of the net national employment created. Now, achieving such benefits by 2010 would require an even more aggressive set and schedule of policies, or else the benefits would occur somewhat later in time. Nonetheless, these results show that a truly aggressive national policy commitment to the problem of climate change could achieve large near-term carbon emissions reductions along with environmental and economic gains.

Texas’ Global Warming Solutions

The economic analyses of America’s Global Warming Solutions indicated that Texas would be the state with the highest net job creation from the national policies evaluated. This report presents a new detailed analysis of the benefits that Texas would derive from those national policies and measures to combat global warming. Many of these policies and measures could be pursued in the state, appropriately tailored to its conditions and institutions, with similar results and benefits for Texas citizens.

America’s Global Warming Solutions

This study finds that the US could reduce its carbon emissions to its Kyoto target and, indeed, to significantly below that target. Moreover, this can be achieved with overall net savings in the costs of energy and energy-using equipment. These policies and measures yield many other benefits, such as for human and ecosystem health, technological innovation, and job growth. They would also demonstrate clearly to the rest of the world the seriousness with which the US is acting to meet its climate protection responsibilities and, thereby, to help advance the goals of the climate convention.

Viewpoint: Economic Theory and Climate Change Policy

What is the appropriate role for economics in the development of climate change policy? Ideally, when formulating public policy, decision-makers should rely on expertise from a variety of disciplines, economics among them. Yet economics is often looked upon as the ultimate arbiter of policy choices, because it seems to offer something the other sciences do not: a theoretical framework capable of valuing the consequences of different policy choices with a single metric. This paper argues that this practice is not legitimate, and that most economic policy assessment models, in their current forms, are biased against non-marginal policy changes such as those required to meaningfully address the challenges of climate change.

Polestar: System Manual for Version 2000

The PoleStar System provides a flexible and user-friendly framework for building and assessing alternative development scenarios at regional, national, and global scales. It is an adaptable accounting and model-building framework designed to assist the analyst engaged in sustainability studies—not a rigid model reflecting one particular approach to environment and development interactions. With PoleStar, analysts can customize data structures, time horizons, and spatial boundaries—all of which can be expanded or altered easily. They can also introduce new variables, indicators, and relationships to match their needs. The system can synthesize information generated from formal models, existing studies, or any other sources upon which the user wishes to draw.

Sustainable Development in West Africa: Beginning the Process

The transition to sustainable forms of development will be a long and complex process. The objective of this project is to help launch that process in West Africa, focusing on the countries in the UEMOA region, the Union Économique et Monétaire Ouest-Africaine. The study is the first to assess current patterns of development and resource use in the region, with a view to evaluating the sustainability of current practices into the future.

Putting the Brakes on Sprawl: Innovative Transportation Solutions from the U.S. and Europe

There is no one formula for reversing the consequences of uncontrolled and unplanned growth, yet there are successful strategies that can help American towns and cities combat sprawl. This report examines some innovative transportation practices in six cities—practices that can lessen sprawl’s impact on our neighborhoods and on our environment. The report groups the problems and solutions under three, interrelated themes: (1) relieving traffic congestion, (2) overcoming inaccessibility, and (3) restoring neighborhood quality of life and downtown vitality.

Source Reduction in Massachusetts

Source reduction, also often called “waste prevention,” is defined by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as “any change in the design, manufacturing, purchase, or use of materials or products (including packaging) to reduce the amount or toxicity before they become municipal solid waste.” This project addresses source reduction in Massachusetts, focusing on three areas: the application of methods developed by Tellus for the US EPA to quantify the aggregate amount of source reduction for MSW generated in Massachusetts; description and quantification of specific source reduction efforts, such as backyard composting, in Massachusetts; and identification and documentation of successful source reduction programs or efforts implemented elsewhere which might be appropriate for adoption in Massachusetts.

Is Growth Enough? A Scenario Analysis Prepared for the World Bank

Eliminating poverty is an overriding objective of World Bank policy. Closely associated with it is the goal of achieving environmentally-sustainable growth. This study considers whether these goals can be achieved with current policy approaches. In particular, the study examines a key hypothesis implicit in the Bank’s present strategy: Is economic growth consistent with environmental goals and alone enough to reduce poverty, or are other strategies likely to be required?

A Small Price to Pay: US Action to Curb Global Warming is Feasible and Affordable

This report debunks arguments about the difficulty and costs of compliance with the Kyoto Protocol. Tellus Institute and the Union of Concerned Scientists surveyed and compared a series of studies from the past ten years that examine the future prospects for energy-efficient and low-carbon fuel technologies. According to such studies, great technological potential exists for the United States to significantly reduce its carbon dioxide emissions. In many cases, the resulting savings on energy bills from the use of more efficient measures would outweigh the cost of implementing those measures. Moreover, the same measures that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions would also yield other significant environmental and public health benefits.

An Evaluation of Integrated Climate Protection Policies for the US

This paper presents and discusses an integrated set of policies designed to reduce US carbon emissions over the next four decades. This innovation path also aims to promote environmental quality, particularly by reducing emissions of criteria air pollutants, to reduce US dependence on imported oil, and to induce technological innovation and diffusion in energy production and consumption. In addition to such environmental benefits, such a path would lead to net savings and substantial job growth.

Originally published in Ecology and Society 2, no. 2 (1998): 1-17.

Comprehensive Assessment of the Freshwater Resources of the World

This report examines water requirements to the year 2025 at regional and national levels to assess emerging problems of stress on freshwater resources. The study focuses on Conventional Development Scenarios, which assume mid-range demographic and economic projections, a global convergence in consumption and production practices, gradual technological advance, and no major policy changes. The report finds that such scenarios would bring a continuing deterioration of water conditions in those areas that are already water scarce and an extension of new water stress conditions in major places throughout the world. The report concludes with recommendations for how to envision and achieve a more sustainable path.

Contributors: Peter Gleick, Paul Kirshen, Gil Pontius, and Kenneth Strzepek

Water and Sustainability: Global Patterns and Long-Range Problems

This inquiry summarizes global water resources and patterns of use, applies indicators of water sustainability in order to identify areas of water stress, and examines prospects for water sustainability in the twenty-first century. It introduces a long-range conventional development scenario based on a vision of the future in which the values, consumption patterns, and dynamics of Western industrial society will be progressively played out on a global scale. The scenario helps clarify the constraints of a conventional picture of water development and provides a useful point of departure for examining alternative long-range scenarios and their implications for water and development policy.

Originally published in Natural Resources Forum 20, no. 1 (February 1996): 1-15, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1477-8947.1996.tb00629.x/abstract.

Global Land and Food in the 21st Century: Trends and Issues for Sustainability

This report projects agricultural production and demand, as well as land use, patterns to 2050 rather than 2010, the standard time horizon for such projections. This longer time scale is necessary to capture crucial, slow-acting trends or long-delayed situations which nevertheless bear heavily on the visions and actions which we need to adopt today. These include probable reductions in the growth of population and per capita food consumption, widening disparities between regional food demand supply capacities, impending biophysical limits to the continued expansion of cultivable land, and possible production constraints due to other natural resource problems. This study is part of a wider systematic exploration of sustainable futures in the PoleStar project.

From Social Costing to Sustainable Development: Beyond the Economic Paradigm

Recent years have been characterized by a major transition in public policy regarding economics, the environment, and human well-being—particularly, the application of economic principles to environmental policy and the insertion of ecological principles into economic affairs. This article explores the evolutionary character of this transition and the contention in which it is often embroiled, such as debates over externalities valuation, discounting, and monetization. It then describes the PoleStar project and how it addresses the complex social, economic, and ecological interactions that will underpin human development in the twenty-first century.

Originally published in Olav Homeyer and Richard Ottinger, eds., Social Costs of Energy: Present Status and Future Trends (New York: Springer, 1994), 373-404.

Environmental Sustainability as a Goal in Resource Planning and Policy

Resource planning and policy must consider impacts on the quality of our environment. Economic theory offers both a basis for environmental policy—the allocation of resources based upon individuals’ willingness to pay—and instruments for achieving policy goals, for example emissions taxes and pollution trading systems. This paper points out some of the shortcomings of an economic-based approach, particularly when used as the basis for environmental policy. It calls for a shift to an approach in which sustainability is emphasized.

National Greenhouse Gas Accounts: Current Anthropogenic Sources and Sinks

This study provides spatially disaggregated estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from the major anthropogenic sources for 145 countries. The data compilation includes emissions from CO, CH4, N2O, and ten halocarbons, in addition to CO2. The sources include emissions from fossil fuel production and use, cement production, halocarbons, landfills, land use changes, biomass burning, rice and livestock production, and fertilizer consumption. The approach used to derive these estimates corresponds closely with the simple methodologies proposed by the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Task Force of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Simulation of Water Supply and Demand in the Aral Sea Region

The Aral Sea, a huge saline lake located in the arid south-central region of the former U.S.S.R., is vanishing because the inflows from its two feed rivers, the Amudar’ya and the Syrdar’ya, have diminished radically over the past three decades. The loss of river flow is the result of massive increases in river withdrawals, primarily for cotton irrigation in the basins. This paper uses a microcomputer model, the Water Evaluation and Planning System (WEAP), for simulating current water balances and evaluating water management strategies in the Aral Sea region. The authors perform a detailed water demand and supply simulation for the 1987–2020 period. The analysis provides a picture of an unfolding and deepening crisis.

Originally published in Water International 17, no. 2 (1992): 55–67.