After an introductory chapter, the book (and website) is divided into four parts:
- Part 1 provides an overview of water as a resource for human use, addressing basic questions about supply—how much water is available (including how availability is affected by climate change); demand—how much water we are using; and scarcity—the gap between supply and demand.
- Part 2 looks at how rivers are managed for instream uses (navigation, hydropower, fishing, recreation, flood management, waste disposal, dams), the ecological and social consequences of those uses, and how these consequences could be mitigated.
- Part 3 examines water governance, including issues of water allocation, environmental flows, tribal water rights, planning and coordination, and transboundary conflict and cooperation.
- Part 4 delves into offstream water uses—municipal, industrial, and agricultural—with the goal of understanding how those uses could better serve the people who are reliant on them while minimizing impacts on other communities and ecosystems.