5. 5.1 WATER AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY Water and the Environment 5.1.1. Policy: The environment is recognised as a resource base and a legitimate user of water in the SADC region and Member States shall adopt all necessary strategies and actions to ensure that the environment is sustained. The role of the environment as a source of water has not been adequately recognised in the past. However, the WSSD recognized the environment as a natural resource base for development. Environmentally sustainable water use combined with sound management generates sustainable benefit for humans. Polluting the environment or using the water faster than it is replenished poses a serious threat to the sustainability of watercourses in the region; therefore water resources development and management initiatives should take full cognisance of this interrelationship. Watercourse States and SWCIs should cooperate in adopting an ecosystem and river basin approach in protecting the environment as a resource base. Sound catchment management practices should be adopted to protect and sustain the ecosystem, biodiversity, estuaries and wetlands 5.1.2 Policy: Member States should, in their mechanisms for allocating water resources among many users, allocate sufficient water to maintain ecosystem integrity and biodiversity including marine and estuarine life. Environmental water requirements have a legitimate demand on the available water resources in the region. The lakes, rivers and wetlands are important sources of fish and other foods which are vital to the life of rural communities in particular and the rest of society. Tourism, which is an important industry in the region employing many people in urban and rural areas, depends on the integrity and the biodiversity of ecosystems. Therefore preserving the environment makes social and economic sense Releasing flows below dams to maintain minimum stream flows, ensuring the flooding of wetlands so as to sustain certain habitat or maintaining watering holes in game management areas are amongst the environmental flow requirements which should be considered as legitimate demands on the available water resources. For shared watercourses, all the Watercourse States should agree on the quantity of water for sustaining the environment. Such quantities will vary with the specific nature of the environment, seasons, and prevailing flows. SADC will need to develop common methodologies for determining environmental flow requirements. - 30 -