The overarching goal of SuMaRiO is to support oasis management along the Tarim River under conditions of climatic and societal changes. A main result envisaged is to develop an indicator-based Decision Support System (DSS) that allows a Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA) within regional planning. This SIA will take into account the perspectives of all relevant actors and consider relevant Ecosystem Services (ESS) in the problem field of land and water management in the Tarim River Basin. The perspectives will be obtained and analyzed through a transdisciplinary research process. Then, under given scenario assumptions, possible actions and their impacts are estimated. In the implementation phase, the goal is to train Chinese partners in the use of the English and Chinese DSS.
During the past five decades, intensive exploitation of water resources, mainly by agricultural water consumption, has resulted in changes of the temporal and spatial distribution of water resources and has caused serious environmental problems in the Tarim River Basin. The ecosystems and the ecological processes dominated by natural vegetation are seriously impacted by water diversion for irrigation purposes. The SuMaRiO cluster (Sustainable Management of River Oases along the Tarim River / China) aims at changing the land management strategies in the River Oases towards more sustainability under serious environmental challenges. This will have positive effects for nearly 10 million habitants, of which 80% are ethnic minorities. In consideration of the ecosystem functions and ecosystem services of the environment, SuMaRiO will analyze best solutions integrating social, economic and ecologic issues.
