In settler colonial states like Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, water for the environment and the water rights of Indigenous Peoples often share the common experience of being too little and too late. Water pathways have been constrained and defined by settler colonialism, and as a result, settler state water law has both a legitimacy problem, in failing to acknowledge or implement the rights of Indigenous Peoples, and a sustainability problem, as the health of water systems continues to decline. In both Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, the focus of water law has historically been to facilitate use of the water resource to support economic development, excluding the rights of Indigenous Peoples and poorly protecting water ecosystems. However, in the early 21st century, both countries made significant advances in recognizing the needs of the environment and the rights of Indigenous Peoples. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi) provides an important bicultural and bijural framework that is beginning to influence water management. In 2017, as part of a Treaty dispute settlement, Aotearoa New Zealand passed legislation to recognize Te Awa Tupua (the Whanganui River) as a legal person and created a new collaborative governance regime for the river, embedding the interests and values of Māori at the heart of river management. In Australia, water recovery processes to increase environmental flows have been under way since the 1990s, using a combination of water buybacks and water savings through increased efficiency. There has been growing awareness of Indigenous water rights in Australia, although progress to formally return water rights to Indigenous Peoples remains glacially slow. Like Aotearoa New Zealand, in 2017, Australia also passed its first legislation that recognized a river (the Birrarung/Yarra River) as a living entity and, in doing so, formally recognized the responsibilities of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people as Traditional Owners of the river. This trend toward more holistic river management under a relational paradigm, in which the relationships between peoples and places are centered and celebrated, creates a genuine opportunity for water governance in settler states that begins to address both the legitimacy and sustainability flaws in settler state water law. However, these symbolic shifts must be underpinned by relationships of genuine trust between Indigenous Peoples and the state, and they require significant investment from the state in their implementation.
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Article
Environmental and Cultural Flows in Aotearoa and Australia
Erin O'Donnell and Elizabeth Macpherson
Article
Wastewater Reclamation and Recycling
Soyoon Kum and Lewis S. Rowles
Across the globe, freshwater scarcity is increasing due to overuse, climate change, and population growth. Increasing water security requires sufficient water from diverse water resources. Wastewater can be used as a valuable water resource to improve water security because it is ever-present and usually available throughout the year. However, wastewater is a convoluted solution because the sources of wastewater can vary greatly (e.g., domestic sewage, agricultural runoff, waste from livestock activity, and industrial effluent). Different sources of wastewater can have vastly different pollutants, and mainly times, it is a complex mixture. Therefore, wastewater treatment, unlike drinking water treatment, requires a different treatment strategy. Various wastewater sources can be reused through wastewater reclamation and recycling, and the required water quality varies depending on the targeted purpose (e.g., groundwater recharge, potable water usage, irrigation). One potential solution is employing tailored treatment schemes to fit the purpose. Assorted physical, chemical, and biological treatment technologies have been established or developed for wastewater reclamation and recycle. The advancement of wastewater reclamation technologies has focused on the reduction of energy consumption and the targeted removal of emerging contaminants. Beyond technological challenges, context can be important to consider for reuse due to public perception and local water rights. Since the early 1990s, several global wastewater reclamation examples have overcome challenges and proved the applicability of wastewater reclamation systems. These examples showed that wastewater reclamation can be a promising solution to alleviate water shortages. As water scarcity becomes more widespread, strong global initiatives are needed to make substantial progress for water reclamation and reuse.
Article
Water User Associations and Collective Action in Irrigation and Drainage
Bryan Bruns
If there is too little or too much water, farmers may be able to work together to control water and grow more food. Even before the rise of cities and states, people living in ancient settlements cooperated to create better growing conditions for useful plants and animals by diverting, retaining, or draining water. Local collective action by farmers continued to play a major role in managing water for agriculture, including in later times and places when rulers sometimes also organized construction of dams, dikes, and canals.
Comparative research on long-lasting irrigation communities and local governance of natural resources has found immense diversity in management rules tailored to the variety of local conditions. Within this diversity, Elinor Ostrom identified shared principles of institutional design: clear social and physical boundaries; fit between rules and local conditions, including proportionality in sharing costs and benefits; user participation in modifying rules; monitoring by users or those accountable to them; graduated sanctions to enforce rules; low-cost conflict resolution; government tolerance or support for self-governance; and nested organizations.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, centralized bureaucracies constructed many large irrigation schemes. Farmers were typically expected to handle local operation and maintenance and comply with centralized management. Postcolonial international development finance for irrigation and drainage systems usually flowed through national bureaucracies, strengthening top-down control of infrastructure and water management.
Pilot projects in the 1970s in the Philippines and Sri Lanka inspired internationally funded efforts to promote participatory irrigation management in many countries. More ambitious reforms for transfer of irrigation management to water user associations (WUAs) drew on examples in Colombia, Mexico, Turkey, and elsewhere. These reforms have shown the feasibility in some cases of changing policies and practices to involve irrigators more closely in decisions about design, construction, and some aspects of operation and maintenance, including cooperation in scheme-level co-management. However, WUAs and associated institutional reforms are clearly not panaceas and have diverse results depending on context and on contingencies of implementation. Areas of mixed or limited impact and for potential improvement include performance in delivering water; maintaining infrastructure; mobilizing local resources; sustaining organizations after project interventions; and enhancing social inclusion and equity in terms of multiple uses of water, gender, age, ethnicity, poverty, land tenure, and other social differences.
Cooperation in managing water for agriculture can contribute to coping with present and future challenges, including growing more food to meet rising demand; competition for water between agriculture, industry, cities, and the environment; increasing drought, flood, and temperatures due to climate change; social and economic shifts in rural areas, including outmigration and diversification of livelihoods; and the pursuit of environmental sustainability.
Article
Environmental Humanities and Italy
Enrico Cesaretti, Roberta Biasillo, and Damiano Benvegnú
Does something like “Italian environmental humanities” exist? If so, what makes an Italian approach to this multifaceted field of inquiry so different from the more consolidated Anglo-American tradition?
At least until the early 21st century, Italian academic institutions have maintained established disciplinary boundaries and have continued to produce siloed forms of knowledge. New and more flexible forms of scholarly collaboration have also not been traditionally supported at the national level, as political decisions regarding curricular updates and funding opportunities have been unable to foster interdisciplinarity and innovative approaches to knowledge production.
However, an underlying current of environmental awareness and action has a strong and long-standing presence in Italy. After all, Italy is where St. Francis wrote The Canticle of Creatures, with its non-hierarchical vision of the world, which then inspired the papal encyclical Laudato si (2015). Italy is also where Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco The Allegory and the Effects of Good Government in the City and in the Country (1337–1339) already “pre-ecologically” reflected on the relationship between nature and culture, on the effect of political decisions on our surroundings, and on the impact of local environments on the well-being (as well as the malaise) of their inhabitants. Additionally, Italy is among the few countries in the world whose constitution lists specific laws aimed at protecting its landscapes, biodiversity, and ecosystems in addition to its cultural heritage, as stated in a recent addendum to articles 9 and 41.
However, Italy also experienced an abrupt, violent process of development, modernization, and industrialization that radically transformed its urban, rural, and coastal territories after World War II. Many of its landscapes, once iconic and picturesque, have become polluted, toxic, or the outcome of contested, violent histories. And the effects of globalization are materially affecting its ecologies, meaning that Italy is also exposed to constant risks (earthquakes, floods, landslides, volcanic eruptions) and presents geo-morphological features that situate it at the very center of planetary climate change (both atmospheric and sociopolitical) and migration patterns. Considering this, thinking about Italy from an environmental humanities (EH) perspective and, in turn, about the EH in the context of Italy, highlights the interconnections between the local and the global and, in the process, enriches the EH debate.
Article
IWRM: Ideology or Methodology?
Larry Swatuk and Adnan Ibne Abdul Qader
Integrated water resources management (IWRM) was introduced as a conceptual solution to solve complicated problems of water management; however, since its inception, practitioners remain divided on its utility. Critics argue that it lacks practicable and working examples and that ongoing support is tantamount to little more than an ideological position. Supporters counsel patience and point to a variety of positive—if partial—outcomes, while aiming to address some of the most meaningful criticisms involving the devolution of decision-making authority, stakeholder participation, and gender mainstreaming. While the notion of “integrated management” resonates positively across the water world, critics and supporters alike are quick to note that in application it will play out differently depending on physical, sociocultural, economic, and political factors. Put differently, while the idea has universal appeal, the means and methods of achieving IWRM will vary. Comparative analysis reveals some common characteristics of performance well known across the development industry. In particular, direct engagement of resource users from project and program conception through to implementation, monitoring, and evaluation increases the likelihood of long-term positive outcomes. In contrast, top-down, elite-driven actions are likely to be resisted. Far from a panacea, IWRM is most usefully regarded as a “sensibility,” offering practitioners a set of signposts to guide actions and loose parameters within which to set policy.
Article
U.S. Water Policy and Planning With Respect to Climate Change
Caitlin Dyckman
The concept of a uniform U.S. water policy is a fallacy, instead resembling a mythological hydra with three primary necks that broadly encapsulate the following topics: (a) water usage patterns and demands, (b) governance structures (legal and economic), and (c) evolving scientific information and analysis (projection, planning, etc.). The body, feet, and tail of the policy and planning hydra are the physical hydrologic reality of natural and built systems, responding to the heads’ decisions. During the 20th and early 21st centuries, the hydra was governed by concepts of stationarity maintenance in each of the necks, with devolved and pragmatic fragmentation in the governance and scientific information and analysis necks, as follows. Water supply achieves stationarity through physical storage and centralized infrastructure; federal engineers altered hydrologic systems for flood control, more consistent water supply, and transportation/commerce. Water governance increasingly fragmented from the heterogeneity of water users’ interests, authority, and separation between water quality and quantity. Water law and economics coevolved to buffer demand’s nonstationarity. Planning responsibility shifted from federal agencies to states, with guidance from the country’s closest effort to manifest a unified national water policy through the National Water Commission’s 1973 report recommendations, despite its lack of official enactment. Stationarity negatively impacted aquatic ecosystems through dam flow alteration, omission in water use accounting, lack of legal protection in state allocation structures, lack of a market value, and only early 21st century inclusion in federal, state, and local water planning. Climate change further stresses these existing flaws in social and physical water management systems and processes. Its extremity in the body of the hydra reverberates through each of the necks and heads in variable ways, upending stationarity and challenging already fragmentated governance capacity. Policy and planning face greater uncertainty by geographic area, necessitating adaptive water management. Water managers must ubiquitously realize greater efficiency through innovative demand reduction mechanisms and decentralized infrastructure that can withstand significant hydrological cycle alterations, including changes to peak flow and more substantial reservoir evaporation outside the stationarity envelope. Climate adaptation in water law will require additional sacrifice concurrent with the early 21st century legal allocation and acknowledgement of historically marginalized water rights. Planning approaches must increase their flexibility, relying more heavily on water governance that embraces a cooperative, holistic perspective, recognizing interreliance and connectivity to increase resilience. The federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 may be the first step toward a unified national water policy since the 1973 report. Climate change forces the question of whether to cede full water management authority to the federal government or to sustain the creative and localized solutions fomented by pragmatic federalism.
Article
Water Resources Planning Under (Deep) Uncertainty
Riddhi Singh
Public investments in water infrastructure continue to grow where developed countries prioritize investments in operation and maintenance while developing countries focus on infrastructure expansion. The returns from these investments are contingent on carefully assessed designs and operating strategies that consider the complexities inherent in water management problems. These complexities arise due to several factors, including, but not limited to, the presence of multiple stakeholders with potentially conflicting preferences, lack of knowledge about appropriate systems models or parameterizations, and large uncertainties regarding the evolution of future conditions that will confront these projects. The water resources planning literature has therefore developed a variety of approaches for a quantitative treatment of planning problems. Beginning in the mid-20th century, quantitative design evaluations were based on a stochastic treatment of uncertainty using probability distributions to determine expected costs or risk of failure. Several simulation–optimization frameworks were developed to identify optimal designs with techniques such as linear programming, dynamic programming, stochastic dynamic programming, and evolutionary algorithms. Uncertainty was incorporated within existing frameworks using probability theory, using fuzzy theory to represent ambiguity, or via scenario analysis to represent discrete possibilities for the future.
As the effects of climate change became palpable and rapid socioeconomic transformations emerged as the norm, it became evident that existing techniques were not likely to yield reliable designs. The conditions under which an optimal design is developed and tested may differ significantly from those that it will face during its lifetime. These uncertainties, wherein the analyst cannot identify the distributional forms of parameters or the models and forcing variables, are termed “deep uncertainties.” The concept of “robustness” was introduced around the 1980s to identify designs that trade off optimality with reduced sensitivity to such assumptions. However, it was not until the 21st century that robustness analysis became mainstream in water resource planning literature and robustness definitions were expanded to include preferences of multiple actors and sectors as well as their risk attitudes. Decision analytical frameworks that focused on robustness evaluations included robust decision-making, decision scaling, multi-objective robust decision-making, info-gap theory, and so forth. A complementary set of approaches focused on dynamic planning that allowed designs to respond to new information over time. Examples included adaptive policymaking, dynamic adaptive policy pathways, and engineering options analysis, among others. These novel frameworks provide a posteriori decision support to planners aiding in the design of water resources projects under deep uncertainties.
Article
A Century of Evolution of Modeling for River Basin Planning to the Next Generation of Models, Methods, and Concepts
Caroline Rosello, Sondoss Elsawah, Joseph Guillaume, and Anthony Jakeman
River Basin models to inform planning decisions have continued to evolve, largely based on predominant planning paradigms and progress in the sciences and technology. From the Industrial Revolution to the first quarter of the 21st century, such modeling tools have shifted from supporting water resources development to integrated and adaptive water resources management. To account for the increasing complexity and uncertainty associated with the relevant socioecological systems in which planning should be embedded, river basin models have shifted from a supply development focus during the 19th century to include, by thes 2000s–2020s, demand management approaches and all aspects of consumptive and non-consumptive uses, addressing sociocultural and environmental issues. With technological and scientific developments, the modeling has become increasingly quantitative, integrated and interdisciplinary, attempting to capture, more holistically, multiple river basin issues, relevant cross-sectoral policy influences, and disciplinary perspectives. Additionally, in acknowledging the conflicts around ecological degradation and human impacts associated with intensive water resource developments, the modeling has matured to embrace the need for adequate stakeholder engagement processes that support knowledge-sharing and trust-building and facilitate the appreciation of trade-offs across multiple types of impacts and associated uncertainties. River basin models are now evolving to anticipate uncertainty around plausible alternative futures such as climate change and rapid sociotechnical transformations. The associated modeling now embraces the challenge of shifting from predictive to exploratory tools to support learning and reflection and better inform adaptive management and planning. Managing so-called deep uncertainty presents new challenges for river basin modeling associated with imperfect knowledge, integrating sociotechnical scales, regime shifts and human factors, and enabling collaborative modeling, infrastructure support, and management systems.
Article
Crop Rotation and Climate Change Adaptation in Argentina’s Agriculture Sector
Ariel R. Angeli, Federico E. Bert, Sandro Díez-Amigo, Yuri Soares, Jaquelina M. Chaij, Gustavo D. Martini, F. Martín Montané, Alejandro Pardo Vegezzi, and Federico Schmidt
During the past two decades, extensive agriculture, particularly soybean production, has progressively replaced other crops in Argentina. This transformation was driven by economic, technological, environmental, and organizational factors, such as the increasing demand for agricultural commodities, technological advances, organizational innovations, and climate fluctuations. The expansion of soybean production has brought a substantial increase in agricultural revenue for Argentina. However, the predominance of soybean cultivation poses significant challenges, such as diminished soil fertility, reduction and increased variability in crop yields, ecological imbalance, increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and vulnerability to climate change.
Crop rotation, particularly balanced crop rotation, may result in very large positive impacts on soybean yields, especially in unfavorable climatic conditions such as those experienced during the La Niña ENSO phase in Argentina. In addition to this positive impact on agricultural productivity and climate adaptation, in some contexts crop rotation may also contribute to the reduction of GHG emissions, increased input energy efficiency, and improved environmental outcomes.
The 2018 Argentinian Association of Regional Consortia for Agricultural Experimentation and Inter-American Development Bank (AACREA-IADB) Integrated Crop Rotation Database compiled and harmonized the information from agricultural diaries kept by Regional Consortia for Agricultural Experimentation (CREA) members in Argentina from 1998 to 2016. This new consolidated data set has replaced previous regional templates, and it is expected to continue to be expanded with new information periodically, offering opportunities for further research on the impact of crop rotation on climate adaptation and on other topics in agricultural and environmental economics.
Article
Economic Development and Groundwater Sustainability
Cecilia Tortajada and Francisco González-Gómez
An analysis is made of the relationship between economic development and water sustainability in Campo de Dalías, in southeastern Spain. What used to be a poor, deserted region based on traditional agriculture has become one of the most prosperous regions in Spain. Economic development has been based on highly productive greenhouse agriculture, but this has resulted in the overexploitation of the aquifer that supplies water to different users in the region. Contradictions are considered between economic development and water sustainability in the area, as well as the plans and policies that have been put in place to improve the status of the aquifer but that have had limited success so far.
