Rubber Dams in Sustainable Water Resource Management: A Comprehensive Review of Applications, Benefits, and Future Directions

Water scarcity and flooding are serious universal problems, which are aggravated by population growth, urbanization, and climate change, and which today impact over 2 billion people with a loss of economic value of about 100 billion dollars in 2020 alone. As inflatable hydraulic constructions constructed using reinforced materials, rubber dams have become an effective technology in controlling water flow and storage within rivers, lakes, and reservoirs. The analysis demonstrates that the proportion of the current literature in the analysis is that 76% of the literature is general design and that only 24% consider any case study, with a large percentage of literature originating in Asia being 78%. They are essential in flood management, irrigation, domestic and industrial water supply, and small-scale hydropower generation, and have proved to be efficient across the geographical setting, including Hong Kong and Bangladesh. The review lists the environmental advantages of rubber dams, such as flexibility to changing water levels and less ecological disturbance than traditional concrete dams, and major economic benefits of much cheaper (up to 50% less) construction and maintenance. Social benefits include, among others, improved irrigation to guarantee food security and leisure. Nevertheless, the technical issues, such as the erosion of materials and the short life span (usually around 20 years), environmental effects on aquatic ecosystems, and complicated regulations, are quite significant drawbacks. The research gaps in this paper are mainly the validation of the performance under different hydroclimatic conditions and reinforcement of the policy support.