Abstract
Watershed management is the art and practice of understanding stakeholder values for ecosystem services within a watershed and instituting management practices that consider trade-offs to sustain these goods and services. Effective watershed management practices are hydrologically defined, ecosystem-based, inclusive, and integrate biophysical as well as socioeconomic decisions. The uncertainties and unpredictability of climate change create an ambiguous backdrop to the increasingly social problem of water resource management. Inequities in watershed decision-making processes often lead to the reinforcement of power and resource imbalances. Future watershed managers must be able to engage across socioeconomic and cultural boundaries to support decisions that advance water as a human right in an uncertain future. We offer a design for a graduate level, 15-week university course that uses publicly available resources to help emerging watershed leaders prepare for an uncertain future. The design is interactive and constructivist, engaging the refereed literature and leading to an increased understanding of ecosystem-based watershed management under climate scenarios, with special attention to vulnerable populations.
Highlights
Watershed or catchment management is the art and practice of understanding stakeholder values for ecosystem services within a watershed, enacting management to balance trade-offs and sustain those goods and services
Societal goals include a range of ecosystem services; in most cases, demands compete, requiring trade-offs
The Adaptive Watershed (TAW) is a capacity development program developed by The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)
Summary
Watershed or catchment management is the art and practice of understanding stakeholder values for ecosystem services within a watershed, enacting management to balance trade-offs and sustain those goods and services. Societal goals include a range of ecosystem services; in most cases, demands compete, requiring trade-offs. Collective management strategies rely on participatory approaches to generate social learning [2], a process defined as the collaboration among diverse individuals and organizations to reach shared understanding for collective action [3,4]. This process engages stakeholders to identify and prioritize trade-offs to form common goals, building capacity for sustainable watershed management [5]. The practice of collective management is supported by a wide range of capacity development efforts from local to international, that suggest management based on hydrologic boundaries rather than geopolitical ones provides greater transparency and accountability [5]
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