To balance water allocation in IWRM, it is necessary to quantify all benefits and negative impacts of allocating water to a certain use sector. Traditionally, the focus was on economic benefits, but nowadays also environmental sustainability and social equity are important criteria for evaluating water resources management strategies. In order to be able to assess social equity, defined as the distribution of positive and negative impacts over various stakeholder groups, also the importance of environmental flows for the well-being of each of these stakeholder groups must be quantified. Methods to quantify the value environmental flows have for human well-being (further referred to as human well-being values of environmental flows) are currently not available, yet are urgently required to facilitate and enhance equitable water resources management. The research objective for this thesis was therefore: To develop an approach for the assessment of human well-being values and social equity related to environmental flows for application in Integrated Water Resources Management.
