Dutch water governance is world famous. It to a large extent determines the global public image of the Netherlands, with its windmills, polders, dikes and dams, and the eternal fight against the water, symbolized by the engineering marvel of the Delta Works. Dutch water governance has a history that dates back to the 11th century. Since the last 200 years, water governance has, however, undergone significant changes. Important historical events setting in motion longer-term developments for Dutch water governance were the Napoleonic rule, land reclamation projects, the Big Flood of 1953, the Afsluitdijk, the impoldering of the former Southern Sea, the ecological turn in water management, and the more integrated approach of “living with water.” In the current anthropocentric age, climate change presents a key challenge for Dutch water governance, as a country that for a large part is situated below sea level and is prone to flooding.
The existing Dutch water governance system is multilevel, publicly financed, and, compared to many other countries, still relatively decentralized. The responsibilities for water management are shared among the national government and Directorate-General for Public Works and Water Management, provinces, regional water authorities, and municipalities. Besides these governmental layers, the Delta Commissioner is specifically designed to stimulate a forward-looking view when it comes to water management and climate change. With the Delta Commissioner and Delta Program, the Netherlands aims to become a climate-resilient and water-robust country in 2050.
Robustness, adaptation, coordination, integration, and democratization are key ingredients of a future-proof water governance arrangement that can support a climate-resilient Dutch delta. In recent years, the Netherlands already has been confronted with many climate extremes and will need to transform its water management system to better cope with floods but even more so to deal with droughts and sea-levels rising. The latest reports of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change show that more adaptive measures are needed. Such measures also require a stronger coordination between governmental levels, sectors, policies, and infrastructure investments. Furthermore, preparing for the future also requires engagement and integration with other challenges, such as the energy transition, nature conservation, and circular economy. To contribute to sustainability goals related to the energy transition and circular economy, barriers for technical innovation and changes to institutionalized responsibilities will need to be further analyzed and lifted.
To govern for the longer term, current democratic institutions may not always be up to the task. Experiments with deliberative forms of democracy and novel ideas to safeguard the interests of future generations are to be further tested and researched to discover their potential for securing a more long-term oriented and integrated approach in water governance.
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Water Governance in the Netherlands
M.L. (Marie Louise) Blankesteijn and W.D. (Wieke) Pot
Article
The Development Path of Urban Water and Sanitation Tariffs and Subsidies: A Conceptual Framework
Dale Whittington, Marcus Wishart, David Kaczan, Hua Wang, Xiawei Liao, and Si Gou
The provision of universal, high-quality piped water and sanitation services on a financially sustainable basis continues to elude many urban areas globally. Water services suffer from political, technical, and financial “disequilibria,” in which governments are challenged to improve services, households are unwilling or unable to pay to cover the increased costs associated with those services, and both production and consumption efficiency remains low due to insufficient capital investment, low operating budgets, and poorly designed tariffs. Cities typically move along a water development path from low- to high-quality service provision, with movement between phases facilitated by shifts in these disequilibria. In the first phase, water supply coverage increases but quality of service and efficiency of consumption and production stagnates, trapped by insufficient government transfers and low tariffs. In the second phase, economic growth facilitates increased revenues, allowing for investments in service quality and increasing access to improved sanitation. Production efficiency improves, but consumption efficiency remains low due to weak price signals and poorly targeted subsidies, and environmental quality often degrades. In the third phase—which remains aspirational for many cities—governments and citizens demand improved environmental quality as well as improved service quality. Investments are made to improve the resilience of supply, and subsidies are more carefully targeted toward the poor. China demonstrates many of these patterns, with variation across cities reflecting different levels of development. There are, however, some differences that are a consequence of the country’s centrally planned economy prior to 1978. Reforms underway in China highlight the challenges of achieving this “third phase” urban water policy. These include revisions to the existing increasing block tariffs to improve financial sustainability, increased use of information provision to improve consumption efficiency, and asset management and investment planning that weighs the benefits and costs of new capital investments in the context of climate change.
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The History of Synoptic Meteorology in the Age of Numerical Weather Forecasting
Kristine C. Harper
Despite some early attempts in the 19th century, national weather services did not regularly create forecasts for public consumption until the early 20th century, and many of those were based on a handful of surface observations of dubious quality. With the invention of the balloon-borne radiosonde in the 1930s, upper-air observations became more common, and knowledge of upper-level processes was melded into forecasting practice. World War II brought its own challenges and opportunities, expanding the number of trained meteorologists worldwide, establishing many new observing stations in tropical and high-latitude locations, and opening the possibility of using radar to identify short-range severe weather. But the big change was the development of digital electronic computers, and with them the opportunity to calculate the weather. The first efforts were marginal at best, but international teams in the United States and Sweden continued their efforts, and by the late 1950s, midatmospheric prognosis charts were being transmitted to forecast offices, which would prepare the final local forecasts. Unfortunately for the synoptic forecasters in the field offices, the new objective numerical weather prediction (NWP) products were not comparable to the old subjective forecast charts that they had used for years. The resulting push and pull between the atmospheric modelers and the synoptic meteorologists ultimately changed both groups: the atmospheric modelers used forecaster feedback to upgrade the models, and the synoptic meteorologists learned to use the objective forecasts. The anticipated improvements in weather forecasting, however, did not follow immediately. As the decades passed, computing power increased and the introduction of satellites with multiple specialized sensors, purpose-built weather radar, and other remote sensing devices increased the availability of ground and upper-air data. As a result, more variables and the physics that defined them were added to NWP models, and the resulting products changed the way synoptic meteorologists made their forecasts, even if they did not change their feel for the atmosphere. Those changes continued into the 21st century, fueling the desire for specialized forecasts from multiple interest groups and the public’s desire for accurate, up-to-the-minute weather forecasts that extend up to 2 weeks into the future.
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The Environmental History of the Antarctic
Sebastian Grevsmühl
The environmental history of the polar regions, and in particular of Antarctica, is a rather recent area of inquiry that is in many ways still in its infancy. As a truly multidisciplinary research field, environmental history draws much inspiration from a large diversity of fields of historical and social research, including economic history, diplomatic history, cultural history, the history of explorations, and science and technology studies. Although overarching book-length studies on the environmental history of Antarctica are still rare, historical scholars have already conducted many in-depth case studies related mostly to three major interrelated research topics: Antarctic governance, natural resource exploitation, and tourism. These recent historical efforts, carried out mostly by a new generation of historians, have thus far allowed the proposal of several powerful counternarratives, challenging the frequent yet erroneous assertion that environmental protection and conservation were completely absent from Antarctic affairs before the 1970s. In so doing, environmental historians started offering a much more complex and nuanced account of what is frequently referred to as the “greening” of Antarctica, going well beyond “declensionist” narratives and conservation success stories that commonly pervade not only environmental histories but also public discourse. Indeed, all recent historical studies agree that there is nothing inevitable about the “greening” of Antarctica, nor are conservation and environmental protection its natural destiny. Science, politics, imperialism, capitalism, and imaginaries all have played their part in this important history, a history that remains still largely to be written.
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Institutional Fit in the Water Sector
Cathy Rubiños and Maria Bernedo Del Carpio
Adequate water governance is necessary for the world’s sustainability. Because of its importance, a growing literature has studied ways to improve water governance, beginning in the early 2000s. Institutions, which refer to the set of shared rules, codes, and prescriptions that regulate human actions, are a particularly important element of sustainable water governance. Evidence shows that to design institutions that will generate sustainable economic, ecological, and cultural development, it is necessary to consider ecosystems and socioeconomic-cultural systems as social-ecological systems (SESs). In the past, practitioners and international agencies tried to find the government-led panaceas, but this search has been largely unsuccessful. Current views support efforts to move towards addressing complexity (e.g., Integrated Water Resources Management), and search for the fit between the institutional arrangements and SESs’ attributes.
The literature on institutional fit in SESs encourages planners to design institutions by carefully considering the defining features of the problems they are meant to address and the SES context in which they are found. This literature has been developing since the 1990s and has identified different types of misfits. A comprehensive fitness typology that includes all the different types of fitness (ecological, social, SES, and intra-institutional fit) helps organize existing and future work on institutional fit and provides a checklist for governments to be used in the problem-solving process for increasing fitness. The water governance and institutional fitness literature provide examples of management practices and mechanisms for increasing institutional fit for each fitness type. Future research should focus on improving the methodologies to measure different types of fit and testing the effect of introducing fit on SES outcomes.
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Multi-Objective Robust Planning Tools
Jazmin Zatarain Salazar, Andrea Castelletti, and Matteo Giuliani
Shared water resource systems spark a number of conflicts related to their multi sectorial, regional, and intergenerational use. They are also vulnerable to a myriad of uncertainties stemming from changes in the hydrology, population demands, and climate change. Planning and management under these conditions are extremely challenging. Fortunately, our capability to approach these problems has evolved dramatically over the last few decades. Increased computational power enables the testing of multiple hypotheses and expedites the results across a range of planning alternatives. Advances in flexible multi-objective optimization tools facilitate the analyses of many competing interests. Further, major shifts in the way uncertainties are treated allow analysts to characterize candidate planning alternatives by their ability to fail or succeed instead of relying on fallible predictions. Embracing the fact that there are indeterminate uncertainties whose probabilistic descriptions are unknown, and acknowledging relationships whose actions and outcomes are not well-characterized in planning problems, have improved our ability to perform diligent analysis. Multi-objective robust planning of water systems emerged in response to the need to support planning and management decisions that are better prepared for unforeseen future conditions and that can be adapted to changes in assumptions. A suite of robustness frameworks has emerged to address planning and management problems in conditions of deep uncertainty. That is, events not readily identified or that we know so little about that their likelihood of occurrence cannot be described. Lingering differences remain within existing frameworks. These differences are manifested in the way in which alternative plans are specified, the views about how the future will unfold, and how the fitness of candidate planning strategies is assessed. Differences in the experimental design can yield diverging conclusions about the robustness and vulnerabilities of a system. Nonetheless, the means to ask a suite of questions and perform a more ambitious analysis is available in the early 21st century. Future challenges will entail untangling different conceptions about uncertainty, defining what aspects of the system are important and to whom, and how these values and assumptions will change over time.
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Economics of Climate Change Adaptation
Babatunde O. Abidoye
To view climate change adaptation from an economic perspective requires a definition of adaptation, an economic framework in which to view adaptation, and a review of the literature on specific adaptations (especially in agriculture). A focus on tools for applying adaptation to developing countries highlights the difference between mitigation and the adaptation decision-making process. Mitigation decisions take a long-term perspective because carbon dioxide lasts for a very long time in the atmosphere. Adaptation decisions typically last the lifespan of the investments, so the time frame depends on the specific adaptation investment, but it is invariably short compared to mitigation choices, which have implications for centuries. The short time frame means that adaptation decisions are not plagued by the same uncertainty that plagues mitigation choices. Finally, most adaptation decisions are local and private, whereas mitigation is a global public decision. Private adaptation will occur even without large government programs. Public adaptations that require government assistance can mainly be made by existing government agencies. Adaptation does not require a global agreement.
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Water Security
Claudia Sadoff, David Grey, and Edoardo Borgomeo
Water security has emerged in the 21st century as a powerful construct to frame the water objectives and goals of human society and to support and guide local to global water policy and management. Water security can be described as the fundamental societal goal of water policy and management. This article reviews the concept of water security, explaining the differences between water security and other approaches used to conceptualize the water-related challenges facing society and ecosystems and describing some of the actions needed to achieve water security. Achieving water security requires addressing two fundamental challenges at all scales: enhancing water’s productive contributions to human and ecosystems’ well-being, livelihoods and development, and minimizing water’s destructive impacts on societies, economies, and ecosystems resulting, for example, from too much (flood), too little (drought) or poor quality (polluted) water.
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Environmental Accounting
Jean-Louis Weber
Environmental accounting is an attempt to broaden the scope of the accounting frameworks used to assess economic performance, to take stock of elements that are not recorded in public or private accounting books. These gaps occur because the various costs of using nature are not captured, being considered, in many cases, as externalities that can be forwarded to others or postponed. Positive externalities—the natural resource—are depleted with no recording in National Accounts (while companies do record them as depreciation elements). Depletion of renewable resource results in degradation of the environment, which adds to negative externalities resulting from pollution and fragmentation of cyclic and living systems. Degradation, or its financial counterpart in depreciation, is not recorded at all. Therefore, the indicators of production, income, consumption, saving, investment, and debts on which many economic decisions are taken are flawed, or at least incomplete and sometimes misleading, when immediate benefits are in fact losses in the long run, when we consume the reproductive functions of our capital. Although national accounting has been an important driving force in change, environmental accounting encompasses all accounting frameworks including national accounts, financial accounting standards, and accounts established to assess the costs and benefits of plans and projects.
There are several approaches to economic environmental accounting at the national level. Of these approaches, one purpose is the calculation of genuine economic welfare by taking into account losses from environmental damage caused by economic activity and gains from unrecorded services provided by Nature. Here, particular attention is given to the calculation of a “Green GDP” or “Adjusted National Income” and/or “Genuine Savings” as well as natural assets value and depletion. A different view considers the damages caused to renewable natural capital and the resulting maintenance and restoration costs. Besides approaches based on benefits and costs, more descriptive accounts in physical units are produced with the purpose of assessing resource use efficiency. With regard to natural assets, the focus can be on assets directly used by the economy, or more broadly, on ecosystem capacity to deliver services, ecosystem resilience, and its possible degradation. These different approaches are not necessarily contradictory, although controversies can be noted in the literature.
The discussion focuses on issues such as the legitimacy of combining values obtained with shadow prices (needed to value the elements that are not priced by the market) with the transaction values recorded in the national accounts, the relative importance of accounts in monetary vs. physical units, and ultimately, the goals for environmental accounting. These goals include assessing the sustainability of the economy in terms of conservation (or increase) of the net income flow and total economic wealth (the weak sustainability paradigm), in relation to the sustainability of the ecosystem, which supports livelihoods and well-being in the broader sense (strong sustainability).
In 2012, the UN Statistical Commission adopted an international statistical standard called, the “System of Environmental-Economic Accounting Central Framework” (SEEA CF). The SEEA CF covers only items for which enough experience exists to be proposed for implementation by national statistical offices. A second volume on SEEA-Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA-EEA) was added in 2013 to supplement the SEEA CF with a research agenda and the development of tests. Experiments of the SEEA-EEA are developing at the initiative of the World Bank (WAVES), UN Environment Programme (VANTAGE, ProEcoServ), or the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) (SEEA-Ecosystem Natural Capital Accounts-Quick Start Package [ENCA-QSP]).
Beside the SEEA and in relation to it, other environmental accounting frameworks have been developed for specific purposes, including material flow accounting (MFA), which is now a regular framework at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to report on the Green Growth strategy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guidelines for the the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), reporting greenhouse gas emissions and carbon sequestration. Can be considered as well the Ecological Footprint accounts, which aim at raising awareness that our resource use is above what the planet can deliver, or the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005, which presents tables and an overall assessment in an accounting style. Environmental accounting is also a subject of interest for business, both as a way to assess impacts—costs and benefits of projects—and to define new accounting standards to assess their long term performance and risks.
Article
Extinction
Mark V. Barrow
The prospect of extinction, the complete loss of a species or other group of organisms, has long provoked strong responses. Until the turn of the 18th century, deeply held and widely shared beliefs about the order of nature led to a firm rejection of the possibility that species could entirely vanish. During the 19th century, however, resistance to the idea of extinction gave way to widespread acceptance following the discovery of the fossil remains of numerous previously unknown forms and direct experience with contemporary human-driven decline and the destruction of several species. In an effort to stem continued loss, at the turn of the 19th century, naturalists, conservationists, and sportsmen developed arguments for preventing extinction, created wildlife conservation organizations, lobbied for early protective laws and treaties, pushed for the first government-sponsored parks and refuges, and experimented with captive breeding. In the first half of the 20th century, scientists began systematically gathering more data about the problem through global inventories of endangered species and the first life-history and ecological studies of those species.
The second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries have been characterized both by accelerating threats to the world’s biota and greater attention to the problem of extinction. Powerful new laws, like the U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973, have been enacted and numerous international agreements negotiated in an attempt to address the issue. Despite considerable effort, scientists remain fearful that the current rate of species loss is similar to that experienced during the five great mass extinction events identified in the fossil record, leading to declarations that the world is facing a biodiversity crisis. Responding to this crisis, often referred to as the sixth extinction, scientists have launched a new interdisciplinary, mission-oriented discipline, conservation biology, that seeks not just to understand but also to reverse biota loss. Scientists and conservationists have also developed controversial new approaches to the growing problem of extinction: rewilding, which involves establishing expansive core reserves that are connected with migratory corridors and that include populations of apex predators, and de-extinction, which uses genetic engineering techniques in a bid to resurrect lost species. Even with the development of new knowledge and new tools that seek to reverse large-scale species decline, a new and particularly imposing danger, climate change, looms on the horizon, threatening to undermine those efforts.
