Built water infrastructure impacts the balance of services provided by a river and its flow regime. Impacts on both commercial and subsistence activities should be considered in water management decision-making. Various methods used to define mandatory minimum environmental releases do not account for the inherent and often complex trade-offs and synergies which must be considered in selecting a balance of ecosystem and engineered services. This paper demonstrates the value and use of optimised many-objective trade-off analysis for managing resource-systems providing diverse and sometimes competing services. Using Kenya’s Tana River basin as a demonstration it shows controlled releases from multi-reservoir systems can be optimised using multiple performance metrics, representing individual provisioning ecosystem and engineered services at different locations and relating to different time periods. This enables better understanding the interactions between natural and built assets, and selecting river basin interventions that appropriately trade-off their services. Our demonstration shows prioritising Kenya’s statutory minimum environmental ‘reserve’ flows degrades flood-related provisioning services. Low overall flow regime alteration correlates negatively with consistency of hydropower generation, but positively with other provisioning services.

建成的水基础设施会影响河流及其水流状况的服务平衡。在水管理决策中应考虑对商业和生活活动的影响。用于定义强制性最低限度环境释放的各种方法并未考虑到在选择生态系统和工程服务之间的平衡时必须考虑的内在且通常是复杂的权衡和协同作用。本文演示了优化的多目标权衡分析对管理提供多种多样且有时竞争性服务的资源系统的价值和用途。以肯尼亚的塔纳河流域为例，它表明可以使用多种性能指标来优化多水库系统的受控排放，代表位于不同位置并与不同时间段相关的单个供应生态系统和工程服务。这样可以更好地了解自然资产和建筑资产之间的相互作用，并选择适当权衡其服务的流域干预措施。我们的演示表明，优先考虑肯尼亚的法定最低环境“储备”流量会降低与洪水相关的资源调配服务的质量。较低的总流量状态变化与水力发电的一致性负相关，而与其他供应服务则正相关。我们的演示表明，优先考虑肯尼亚的法定最低环境“储备”流量会降低与洪水相关的资源调配服务的质量。较低的总流量状态变化与水力发电的一致性负相关，而与其他供应服务则正相关。我们的演示表明，优先考虑肯尼亚的法定最低环境“储备”流量会降低与洪水相关的资源调配服务的质量。较低的总流量状态变化与水力发电的一致性负相关，而与其他供应服务则正相关。