Abstract
Ensuring sustainable management and an adequate supply of freshwater resources is a growing challenge around the world. Even in historically water abundant regions climate change together with population growth and economic development are processes that are expected to contribute to an increase in permanent and seasonal water scarcity in the coming decades. Previous studies have shown how policies to address water scarcity often fail to deliver lasting improvements because they do not account for how these processes influence, and are influenced by, human-water interactions shaping water supply and demand. Despite significant progress in recent years, place-specific understanding of the mechanisms behind human-water feedbacks remain limited, particularly in historically water abundant regions. To this end, we here present a Swedish case study where we, by use of a qualitative system dynamics approach, explore how human-water interactions have contributed to seasonal water scarcity at the local-to-regional scale. Our results suggest that the current approach to address water scarcity by inter-basin water transports contributes to increasing demand by creating a gap between the perceived and actual state of water resources among consumers. This has resulted in escalating water use and put the region in a state of systemic lock-in where demand-regulating policies are mitigated by increases in water use enabled by water transports. We discuss a combination of information and economic policy instruments to combat water scarcity, and we propose the use of quantitative simulation methods to further assess these strategies in future studies.
Highlights
Water scarcity is a growing problem impacting human health, economic development and ecological systems in many regions around the world (Wimmer et al 2015)
Once the investments have been made it is very difficult for the municipality to phase out water transports, thereby reducing water availability back to its previous level, without negatively impacting investors (Greve et al 2018). This results in a systemic lock-in, a phenomenon where historic events determine the future behavior of the system. These effects are well-documented in studies on human-energy systems (Seto et al 2016), and our results suggest system lock-ins can arise in human-water systems where they can greatly interfere with future water management policies
We have developed a conceptual model of how water transfers can lead to supply-demand cycles and cause system lock-in effects, pushing previously water-secure regions into a state of escalating water scarcity that is resistant to policy interventions
Summary
Water scarcity is a growing problem impacting human health, economic development and ecological systems in many regions around the world (Wimmer et al 2015). Pressure on global freshwater resources, driven by population growth, expansion and intensification of agriculture, urbanization, industrial development and climate change, are expected to push up to 50% of the world’s population into a state of permanent or periodic water insecurity by 2050 (United Nations 2018) Addressing this challenge requires integrated approaches that account for how water acts as a link between different parts of society and nature. The IWRM approach has gained critique for treating the social and hydrological sectors as isolated subsystems that to a large extent develop independently from one another (Blair and Buytaert 2016) This approximation may be sufficient for short-term management but for long-term planning and policy making, failing to account for the bidirectional human-water feedbacks can lead to unintended consequences and “policy resistance” (Di Baldassarre et al 2019; Sterman 2000a)
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