Abstract
Abstract. To address the water related problems that society is facing in this time and age, hydrologists can no longer consider the hydrological system as if there is no human influence. The human and water systems are closely intertwined and in this interaction patterns emerge that are the result of two co-evolving systems. The hydrology and the water resources form conditions under which societies develop, but as a result, and in turn, societies influence the functioning of the hydrological system. This calls for a new science that tries to understand these interactions with the objective to explore feasible futures and strategies to guide this co-evolution towards sustainable use of our natural resources. After the closure of the PUB decade on Prediction in Ungauged Basins, the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) has taken up the challenge of trying to make fundamental contributions to this new science of integrated hydrological and societal processes under the title of "Panta Rhei", symbolising that everything changes in a perpetual dynamic interaction between people and water. This may be a big step in the science of hydrology, venturing well outside the comfortable boundaries of pristine hydrology, but the urgency of water issues around the globe forces us to do so, and in the process, hydrologists are likely to discover new paradigms, new modelling approaches, enhanced understanding of the human-water system, and hopefully new ways to steer our society towards a more sustainable future.
Highlights
Panta Rhei is the new research agenda of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) for the coming decade (2013–2022)
The Panta Rhei initiative aims to enhance our understanding of how people and the hydrological system interact and how they co-evolved under the influence of changing circumstances
The metaphor of Panta Rhei is the well-known observation by Heraclitus that “no person can step into the same river twice, because at the second time the river has changed and the person is no longer the same”
Summary
The metaphor of Panta Rhei is the well-known observation by Heraclitus that “no person can step into the same river twice, because at the second time the river has changed and the person is no longer the same”. Since people have continuously responded to environmental pressures and adjusted their management of natural resources to climatic drivers Learning from their mistakes, societies adjusted their interventions in a continuous feedback with the natural environment. In recent years these developments have accelerated such that it is no longer possible to study the natural system and the human system in isolation, or even in parallel as loosely coupled systems. One may doubt the level of realism of such exercises, but these models are not intended to correctly simulate what happened or what will happen Rather they are investigative tools to study the interactions and feedbacks between system states, to explore consistent possible futures, and to investigate to which (multiple) stable states these would potentially lead. We, hydrologists, have focused on pristine catchments or studied catchments that were “as natural as possible”, whereas society wanted us to inform them of the impact we have on the system
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