Water Quality Assessment and Management of Lake Kinneret Water Resources: Results and Challenges

Abstract

Management of a human-controlled social-ecological system should be based on a set of criteria allowing a compromise between the necessity to conserve the aquatic ecosystem in some predefined “reference” state and the necessity to provide the required ecosystem services such as water supply, a recreational site, and fishery. The task of water resource management can therefore be formulated as the optimization of an objective function (Q) of the economic activities (EA): anthropogenic activities in the lake watershed and intensity of water resources uses, water quality (WQ), and economic effectiveness of the management (costs versus benefits, CB): and assessment of the relationships between them should be a central task for establishing a scientifically based water resource management strategy. In reality, however, we demonstrate the problematic aspects of such an implementation.