Water and coastal resources are critical to sustainable development. Freshwater is often viewed as the earth's most precious natural resource. Encompassing the entire hydrologic basin system, including rivers, streams, lakes, estuaries, lagoons, bays, aquifers, and nearshore coastal and marine environments, water resources contain tremendous biodiversity and high productivity that have always attracted human settlements and economic activity. However, mismanagement and degradation of freshwater and coastal resources are serious and growing problems.

Coastal and freshwater-dependent resources provide the primary source of protein for hundreds of millions of people, protect against storm surge and flooding, and comprise the most biologically productive ecosystems on earth. Coastal resources include coastal lands and watersheds, mangroves, seagrass beds, bays, estuaries, nearshore waters, coral reefs, and the plethora of biota sheltered in these habitats. Healthy coastal and riparian systems help to cleanse stormwater runoff and are in turn dependent on adequate supplies of clean freshwater.

Fisheries and aquaculture products are globally important sources of food and invaluable providers of employment, cash income, and foreign exchange. Fisheries products are the primary protein sources for some 950 million people worldwide, and are an important part of the diet of many more. Demand for freshwater resources of sufficient quantity and quality for human consumption, sanitation, agricultural irrigation, and industry will continue to intensify, as populations increase and as urbanization, industrialization, and commercial development accelerates. Similarly, aquatic resources and habitats are being seriously degraded in many parts of the world. Human demands are increasingly threatening the integrity and health of biologically rich aquatic ecosystems.

Pressure on coastal resources by humans is increasing at unprecedented rates. More than half the world's population lives within 60 kilometers of a shoreline and this percentage is projected to rise to as much as three-quarters by the year 2020. Pressures related to population growth and migration threaten the integrity and long-term productivity of coastal ecosystems and adjacent watersheds and, consequently, the welfare of many humans in the developing world. Fisheries products are the world’s most widely traded foods, with commerce dominated by the developing countries. In comparison to other sectors of the world food economy, the fisheries and aquaculture sectors are poorly planned, inadequately funded, and neglected by all levels of government. At the same time, fishing is the largest extractive use of wildlife in the world, and aquaculture is the most rapidly growing sector of the global agricultural economy.

For 35 years, USAID has led the international donor community in recognizing the value of integrated water and coastal resources management as a comprehensive and sustainable economic, social, and ecological good. Beginning in the late 1960s with single-discipline, supply-oriented engineering solutions, USAID has continually broadened and deepened the use of water-related interventions in international development. USAID’s water-related activities gradually expanded to include the role of water in health, sanitation, economic livelihood, and the ecosystem as a legitimate water user. By 1999, USAID issued the original Water IQC, which consolidated the best of the historical trends under one contract vehicle so that all task orders incorporated multisectoral and basin-/catchment-level analysis and focused on demand and demand management.

The current Water IQC mechanism continues this trend. The next generation of the Water IQC builds on the work of the recent pas while addressing new global realities in environmental management. Going forward, USAID’s Water IQC task orders will incorporate the lessons learned from past experience, including the importance of stakeholder participation, gender mainstreaming, better utility management, and the vital part that coastal and wetlands management plays in an integrated system. The IQC mechanism will complement USAID’s other water-related activities, including the Water for the Poor Initiative, which accelerates the UN Millenium Development goal of decreasing the population of people without access to clean, safe water by 50 percent by the year 2015. Already, more than one billion people lack access to an adequate supply of water, and more than 2.0 billion people do not have adequate sanitation. By the year 2025, as many as 52 countries, inhabited by 3 billion people, will be plagued by water stress or chronic water scarcity.

The Integrated Water and Coastal Resources Management IQC supports the USAID Office of Natural Resources, Bureau for Economic Growth, Agriculture, and Trade (EGAT/NRM Strategic Objective (SO) 1, “Increased and Improved Protection and Sustainable Use of Natural Resources,” with special emphasis on Intermediate Result 1.4, “Increased Conservation and Sustainable Use of Freshwater and Coastal Resources.”