Dimensions Of Water Management Research Articles

A new concept of drought feeling against the meteorological drought

Drought is a natural disaster that causes much damage to the communities. Recently, water demand has been increasing sharply due to the population growth and the development process. By approaching the amount of water demand to the natural supplies, any decrease in the water supply may lead to a considerable negative socio-economic consequence. In this condition, the sense of drought prevails over the physical drought. Therefore, usual drought indices can not be used for characterizing and monitoring the drought in a basin. In this paper, multivariate standardized drought feeling index (MSDFI) is introduced which represents two dimensions of water management: (1) water supply in terms of precipitation and (2) water demand in terms of population. The MSDFI is calculated and its variation over time is compared to the standardized precipitation index (SPI). According to the results, MSDFI values in the early years were usually higher than SPI values and vice versa in the last years. This situation is highly correlated with the population trend in the basin. Thereafter, intensity of drought index (IDI) was defined as the difference between MSDFI and SPI to show the role of water demand in the drought feeling. Results show that IDI has an increasing trend in the populated areas, generally downstream of the basin, where population growth is high. In contrast, in the sparsely populated areas generally upstream of the basin where population growth is low and even negative due to migration, the IDI does not show any significant sense of drought.

The social dimensions of water management at Petra, Jordan

The vast majority of scholarship on the water management systems of ancient Petra has focused exclusively on its built elements. While this work has contributed greatly to our understanding of the technological dimensions of infrastructure and its ability to harness a limited water supply in a semi-arid region, little is known about the social dimensions of infrastructural use and the institutions that operated in conjunction with the physical water infrastructure. Such a lacuna ultimately limits analysis to where physical infrastructure is extant and ignores the myriad other ways in which communities access and manage water. To address these issues, this paper reviews available sources and contextualizes them within broader archaeological, anthropological and ethnographic research focused on water management systems and infrastructure.

Entanglements of Water Management

This review essay investigates Andrea Ballestero’s A Future History of Water (Duke University Press, Durham, 2019), Jeremy Schmidt’s Water: Abundance, Scarcity, and Security in the Age of Humanity (New York University Press, New York, 2017), and Wade Graham’s Braided Waters: Environment and Society in Molokai, Hawai’i (University of California, Oakland, 2018) within the wider theme of water-human relationships. More specifically, these books provide insight into the human dimensions of water management as they explore the process of how water impacts and drives economic, social, and political change. By doing this, Ballestero, Schmidt, and Graham highlight water’s agency and the vital role it plays in a variety of locations and situations. Broadly speaking, works like these help move water beyond discussions limited to ecological science, giving this resource a starring role in crucial discussions ranging from policy and economics to community development and social equity. In this regard, environmental issues are holistic matters that must engage cultural, economic, political, and religious dimensions as well as ecological issues. Collectively these books show that water’s fluctuating nature dictates the structure of our world, permeating every issue from the daily to the global while reinforcing the need to look critically at this life-giving resource.

Preface: The spatial dimensions of water management – Redistribution of benefits and risks

The response of the scientific community was very unevenly distributed. The most submissions were dedicated to the topics 2 and 4. Floods are hotspots of applied hydrology and so many different research questions were raised in these contributions, e.g. methods for design flood estimations, impact assessments and operational flood forecasting. The second main component of the conference were hydrological regionalization issues. It became evident that after the completion of the PUB-Initiative of IAHS, which was summarized by Gunter Bloschl at the conference, many research activities are still going on to transfer hydrologic information from gauged to ungauged basins by new methodological approaches. Surprisingly, the “classical” fields of water management, water supply and water scarcity, were less represented. This could be caused by two reasons: there are some tools available which are widely used (e.g. stochastic optimization) but not further improved, or (and this seems to be more probable) there is a low interest to apply new scientific tools in practical water management to optimize existing systems or to improve the planning of new ones. Nevertheless very interesting and (in some cases) sophisticated methodological approaches were presented in this field at the conference under the topics 1, 3 and 4. With regard to future challenges of water research, the dynamic interactions and feedbacks between water and people becomes more and more important. One part of the conference was dedicated to these questions. Unfortunately the interesting presentations and discussions cannot be reflected completely in the proceedings. Nevertheless the participants got a comprehensive overview about the problems of sociohydrology and the need for interdisciplinary research. This conference was organized the second time at the Ruhr-University Bochum. In September 2006 scientists from all over the world met in Bochum for the 3th IWRM Symposium. In that time the conference accounted for the heterogeneity of world water problems by addressing the basic questions of Integrated Water Resources Management. Now, ten years later, the coherence between surface and groundwater, water quality and quantity or water and ecosystems are widely accepted aspects of modern water management. However the differences between hydrological conditions and the human expectations are still in the focus of research. More and more we become aware that water management is not able to serve societies in the solution of their water problems in a sustainable way if interactions and feedbacks between hydrological conditions and societies are not considered. The stationarity assumption has long been compromised by human disturbances in river basins. The dynamics of changing societies will face water management with new and unexpected problems. To give an example: If a water poor

The Adaptiveness of IWRM: Analysing European IWRM research

The Adaptiveness of IWRM provides new insights and knowledge on the challenges and solutions that current water management faces in a situation of complexity and uncertainty. Drawing on the available results from a wide range of European research projects under several framework programmes, the book provides an overview of the state of the art in European research on Integrated Water Resources Management on the topics of Participation, Transboundary regimes, Economics, Vulnerability, Climate change, Advanced monitoring, Spatial planning, and the Social dimensions of water management. The achievements of EU research projects are considered in view of the extent to which IWRM responds to the current complexity and uncertainty water management is facing. These achievements are positioned in a wider context of worldwide developments in the respective topics which account for the future challenges. From this, the book concludes with the required focus of European research in the near future and promotes the concept of Adaptive Water Management as the preferred direction for the development of IWRM. The book presents the achievements of European IWRM research on a range of water management topics and offers conclusions and recommendations for research foci that will be invaluable to water managers, policy-makers and academic researchers working in the field of IWRM.