A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR GLOBAL ESTIMATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL FLOW

Abstract

There is a great concern for water resources scarcity all over the world, and global modeling of water resources assessment is required for many reasons. Environmental flow has become one of major water users in some part of the world and is estimated to grow rapidly in other part of the world, but its global estimation has not been carried out. Many studies and practices in various countries are overviewed to pick up significant factors which affect the setting procedure of environmental flow in a wide variety of regions. Those factors are then categorized into three types; climate, geographical, and human dimensions. The world can be divided to sub regions using these factors, and then appropriate environmental flow methods will be applied to each sub region to assess environmental flow requirement.