Vladimir Smakhtin is Director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

Ecosystems in the Global Water Cycle

A floating village on the Tonle Sap Lake, Cambodia. Over 1 million people live in the greater Tonle Sap area, making their living primarily from the lake fisheries. © Vladimir Smakhtin

There are a number of challenges to large-scale implementation of ecosystem-centric approaches in water management. They include, among others, an overwhelming dominance of grey infrastructure solutions in the current instruments of many States, lack of quantitative evidence on how ecosystem-focused approaches perform, and a lack of capacity to implement such approaches.