In the distant past, nomadic man needed water for drinking, feared floods, and used water environments for fishing and hunting. Only when he became a sedentary agriculturist along the flat plains of large rivers, did he dig wells, irrigate land, and build levees for protection from floods. These tasks required a well-organized society, thus helping to create states, and with them, civilizations. In that distant past, humans even used navigation, developed the river water wheel for irrigation, and perfected fishing technology

In ancient civilizations humans created water mills to grind wheat, developed drainage, built canals, aqueducts, and pipes for water transport. They invented water drainage of aquifers by building qanats, and built structures of water displays for aesthetic purposes. The Sichuan irrigation scheme in China already has served for 18 centuries. Large levees along Chinese rivers, Greek water supply systems, and Roman aqueducts are monuments to ancient water technologies. Reservoirs were built for irrigation. Ancient irrigation codes still impress modern irrigation specialists. Use of lead for water pipes may have been the most damaging feature of the advanced water technology of ancient times.

The Renaissance of the Middle Ages helped develop the basic principles of hydraulics, and created and perfected many hydraulic structures by using new materials. The Industrial and Post-industrial Age of the 20th and 21st centuries shaped the modern technology of water supply sewage disposal, building of dams and reservoirs, hydroelectric power plants, irrigation, drainage, pollution control, and navigation on rivers and canals. It created a new water discipline, hydrology, as the science of water distribution in space and time on continental areas. Water resources activities centered on development, conservation, control and protection. From simple structures the development went to multistructure systems, from a simple purpose to a multipurpose approach, and from a simple water source to the use of all sources. This resulted in a new, comprehensive, and integrated form of water resources planning and development.

A civilization may be conceived as a collection of various infrastructures. The 25–30 main purposes in water resources activities compose a large part of these infrastructures. All solutions of water problems may be sorted into nonstructural, structural, and mixed measures. Nonstructural measures include regulation and insurance. Structural measures consist of combinations of the four categories of structures: those that transfer water in space; those that change the water regime in time; those that change water power potential; and those that change water quality. Modern water resources planning uses the principles of advanced economics in matching water demand and water supply by selecting and sizing a set of structures as the water resources system. A system always may be decomposed into subsystems for easier analysis, modeling, and synthesis. Often a supersystem is conceived, like an urban water resources supersystem consisting of water supply sewage treatment and evacuation, and urban drainage.

Several new phenomena and trends in water resources will influence how civilizations of the 21st century will evolve. Conflicts of interest in water resources activities will likely sharpen, thus requiring all three mechanisms of conflict resolution to be improved: administrative, arbitration and market decisions. Re-allocation of water rights and concessions will be in focus. Pollution of water will be one of the major issues in future water resources planning and development, until consumers become eager to pay for its abatement. Controversies between water resources development and protection of the environment will increase until new methods for their resolution are designed. Cleaning polluted water environments, especially aquifers, will be on the main agenda of water activities in the first half of the 21st century.

Aging of hydraulic structures and water resources systems already poses many difficult problems for their revitalization. Pressures mount to extract maximum benefits from existing systems before building new ones. Society will continue to press for the decrease of some risks from water related structures. Water and water rights will be considered as market commodities. Priorities in using sources of water may switch due to the impact of various types of pollution. The climatic change phenomenon will have a large influence on water resources planning and development in future civilizations.