Download or read book Bottom up Adaptive Management and Stakeholder Participation for Clean Water and Healthy Soils in a Complex Social ecological System written by Sarah Elizabeth Coleman and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Protection of water resources in a changing climate depends on bottom-up stewardship and adaptive management. From the ground up, a vital component is maintaining soil ecosystem services that regulate water, recycle nutrients, sequester carbon, provide food, and other benefits. Interacting spatial, social, and physical factors determine agricultural and stormwater management, and their impact on water. This dissertation explores these dimensions within a complex social-ecological system. The first chapter evaluates a participatory process to elicit solutions to complex environmental problems across science, policy, and practice. The second chapter studies on-farm soil assessment and its role in informing management decisions and supporting adaptive capacity. The third chapter investigates cross-scale dynamics of residential green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) for improved water resource management in a broader social-ecological context. Integrating participant feedback into current science, research, and decision-making processes is an important challenge. A novel approach that combines a Delphi method with contemporary "crowdsourcing" to address water pollution in Lake Champlain Basin in the context of climate change is presented. Fifty-three participants proposed and commented on adaptive solutions in an online Delphi that occurred over a six-week period during the Spring of 2014. In a follow-up Multi-Stakeholder workshop, thirty-eight stakeholders participated in refining and synthesizing the forum's results. The stakeholders' interventions from the crowdsourcing forum have contributed to the current policy dialogue in Vermont to address phosphorus loading to Lake Champlain. This stakeholder approach strengthens traditional modeling scenario development to include priorities that have been collectively refined and vetted. Healthy agricultural soils cannot easily be prescribed to farms and require knowledge and a long-term commitment to a holistic and adaptive approach. The second chapter addresses the questions: "to what extent do farmers use indicators of soil health, and does feedback inform management decisions?" A survey of farmers in two Vermont watersheds was conducted in 2016 showed relatively high use of fourteen soil indicators and high rankings of their importance. The finding that there were differences in use and perceived importance of soil indicators across management and land-use types has implications beyond the farm scale for agriculture, and the provision of ecosystem services. Soil management relates to broader adaptation strategies including resistance, resilience, and transformation that affects adaptive capacity of agroecosystems. Bottom-up adoption of environmental behaviors, such as implementing residential GSI, need to be understood in the context of the broader social-ecological landscape to understand implications for improved water management. A statewide survey of Vermont residents paired a cross-scale and spatial analysis to evaluate how intention to adopt three different GSI practices (infiltration trenches, diversion of roof runoff, and rain gardens) varies with barriers to adoption and household attributes across varying stormwater contexts from the household to watershed scale. Improved stormwater management outcomes at the watershed and local levels depend on management strategies that can be implemented and adapted along the rural-urban gradient, across the bio-physical landscape, and according to varying norms and institutional arrangements.

Download or read book Practical Panarchy for Adaptive Water Governance written by Barbara Cosens and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-18 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the results of an interdisciplinary project that examined how law, policy and ecological dynamics influence the governance of regional scale water based social-ecological systems in the United States and Australia. The volume explores the obstacles and opportunities for governance that is capable of management, adaptation, and transformation in these regional social-ecological systems as they respond to accelerating environmental change. With the onset of the Anthropocene, global and regional changes in biophysical inputs to these systems will challenge their capacity to respond while maintaining functions of water supply, flood control, hydropower production, water quality, and biodiversity. Governance lies at the heart of the capacity of these systems to meet these challenges. Assessment of water basins in the United States and Australia indicates that state-centric governance of these complex and dynamic social-environmental systems is evolving to a more complex, diverse, and complex array public and private arrangements. In this process, three challenges emerge for water governance to become adaptive to environmental change. First, is the need for legal reform to remove barriers to adaptive governance by authorizing government agencies to prepare for windows of opportunity through adaptive planning, and to institutionalize the results of innovative solutions that arise once a window opens. Second, is the need for legal reform to give government agencies the authority to facilitate and participate in adaptive management and governance. This must be accompanied by parallel legal reform to assure that engagement of private and economic actors and the increase in governmental flexibility does not destabilize basin economies or come at the expense of legitimacy, accountability, equity, and justice. Third, development of means to continually assess thresholds and resilience of social-ecological systems and the adaptive capacity of their current governance to structure actions at multiple scales. The massive investment in water infrastructure on the river basins studied has improved the agricultural, urban and economic sectors, largely at the cost of other social and environmental values. Today the infrastructure is aging and in need of substantial investment for those benefits to continue and adapt to ongoing environmental changes. The renewal of institutions and heavily engineered water systems also presents the opportunity to modernize these systems to address inequity and align with the values and objectives of the 21st century. Creative approaches are needed to transform and modernize water governance that increases the capacity of these water-based social-ecological systems to innovate, adapt, and learn, will provide the tools needed to navigate an uncertain future.

Download or read book Social Ecological and Institutional Barriers to Adaptive Water Management written by Michael Antos and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The management of water poses unique and changing challenges for public administrators. New understanding of environmental degradation and climate change demands environmental restoration and protection, water conservation and system sustainability. To achieve this, integrated and adaptive management policies are being enacted. In 2002 California created the Integrated Regional Water Management (IRWM) Program to drive the transition to integrated water management in the state. The Program has since supported billions of dollars being spent on integrated planning and project implementation. Designed to reveal that integrated planning and shared governance was more efficient over the long term, the IRWM Program is a transition management policy. As a professional participant in the IRWM Program and four of the regions in Greater Los Angeles between 2008-2015, I observed uneven responses to the Program's design and goals. This research explores the unevenness as being a result of the character and make-up of the collaborative groups, the role of spatial and social scales on adaptive management efforts, and how participants perceive nature and the city. Through participant observation, content analysis and anonymous semi-structured interviews this research uses four IRWM regions as case studies that took different approaches, driven by local context, to execute the same program. Though the regions are dissimilar in many ways, the transition from traditional water management to integrated management is comparable between the regions. The findings suggest that the structure and management scale of the new collaborative institution and the diversity of participating organizations are important characteristics that should be implemented with deliberation. So too, building trust between participants and providing shared learning of the social-ecological water system are critical to producing an integrated management effort. For the transition to integrated water management to succeed in California, the program must more strongly influence how regional collaborations form and empower themselves. Additionally, the program must both demand and provide resources to support the building of trust among participants while strengthening knowledge of the complexity of managing social-natural water. Recent strategic planning by the State suggests that these needs have been observed and will be implemented in future years. The case studies reveal a confluence point for several lines of theory, as well. The nature of institutional transitions in sustainability contexts benefits from consciously confronting social-natural scales, and perception of social-nature. So too, exploration of the role of politics in urban ecological systems is strengthened when aspects of administration and state capacity are included. In this blending, the uneven response to the IRWM Program in the case-study regions is accurately described.

Download or read book Practical Panarchy for Adaptive Water Governance written by Barbara Cosens and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the results of an interdisciplinary project that examined how law, policy and ecological dynamics influence the governance of regional scale water based social-ecological systems in the United States and Australia. The volume explores the obstacles and opportunities for governance that is capable of management, adaptation, and transformation in these regional social-ecological systems as they respond to accelerating environmental change. With the onset of the Anthropocene, global and regional changes in biophysical inputs to these systems will challenge their capacity to respond while maintaining functions of water supply, flood control, hydropower production, water quality, and biodiversity. Governance lies at the heart of the capacity of these systems to meet these challenges. Assessment of water basins in the United States and Australia indicates that state-centric governance of these complex and dynamic social-environmental systems is evolving to a more complex, diverse, and complex array public and private arrangements. In this process, three challenges emerge for water governance to become adaptive to environmental change. First, is the need for legal reform to remove barriers to adaptive governance by authorizing government agencies to prepare for windows of opportunity through adaptive planning, and to institutionalize the results of innovative solutions that arise once a window opens. Second, is the need for legal reform to give government agencies the authority to facilitate and participate in adaptive management and governance. This must be accompanied by parallel legal reform to assure that engagement of private and economic actors and the increase in governmental flexibility does not destabilize basin economies or come at the expense of legitimacy, accountability, equity, and justice. Third, development of means to continually assess thresholds and resilience of social-ecological systems and the adaptive capacity of their current governance to structure actions at multiple scales. The massive investment in water infrastructure on the river basins studied has improved the agricultural, urban and economic sectors, largely at the cost of other social and environmental values. Today the infrastructure is aging and in need of substantial investment for those benefits to continue and adapt to ongoing environmental changes. The renewal of institutions and heavily engineered water systems also presents the opportunity to modernize these systems to address inequity and align with the values and objectives of the 21st century. Creative approaches are needed to transform and modernize water governance that increases the capacity of these water-based social-ecological systems to innovate, adapt, and learn, will provide the tools needed to navigate an uncertain future.

Download or read book Adaptive Governance written by Ronald D. Brunner and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing case studies, the authors of this work examine how adaptive governance breaks the gridlock in natural-resource policy. Unlike scientific management, which relies on science as the foundation for policies made through a central authority, adaptive governance integrates other types of knowledge into the decision-making process. The authors emphasize the need for open decision making, recognition of multiple interests in questions of natural-resource policy, and an integrative, interpretive science to replace traditional reductive, experimental science.

Download or read book Water Policy for Sustainable Development written by Dave Feldman and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2007-07-25 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The shortage of fresh water is likely to be one of the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century. A UNESCO report predicts that as many as 7 billion people will face shortages of drinking water by 2050. Here, David Lewis Feldman examines river-basin management cases around the world to show how fresh water can be managed to sustain economic development while protecting the environment. He argues that policy makers can employ adaptive management to avoid making decisions that could harm the environment, to recognize and correct mistakes, and to monitor environmental and socioeconomic changes caused by previous policies. To demonstrate how adaptive management can work, Feldman applies it to the Delaware, Susquehanna, Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint, Sacramento--San Joaquin, and Columbia river basins. He assesses the impacts of runoff pollution and climate change, the environmental-justice aspects of water management, and the prospects for sustainable fresh water management. Case studies of the Murray-Darling basin in Australia, the Rhine and Danube in Europe, the Zambezi in Africa, and the Rio de la Plata in South America reveal the impediments to, and opportunities for, adaptive management on a global scale. Feldman's comprehensive investigation and practical analysis bring new insight into the global and political challenges of preserving and managing one of the planet's most important resources.

Download or read book Science Policy and Stakeholders in Water Management written by Geoffrey Gooch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-08-12 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the major problems facing practitioners and scientists working with water management is how to integrate knowledge and experiences from scientific, policy and stakeholder perspectives. In this book this science-policy-stakeholder interface (SPSI) is examined both analytically and through the description of practical experiences from river basins in Europe, India and South-East Asia. These include the Tungabhadra (India), Sesan (Vietnam/Cambodia), Tagus (Spain/Portugal) and Glomma (Norway), which particularly highlight issues associated with pollution, severely altered river flows and transboundary conflicts. Following two chapters which lay the framework for the book the authors describe how SPSI was managed in the case study basins and how stakeholder participation and scenarios were used to integrate different perspectives, and to facilitate the communication of different forms of knowledge. Four important aspects of water management and SPSI are then discussed; these are water pollution, land and water interaction, environmental flow and transboundary water regimes. Short descriptions of the case study rivers are provided together with analyses of how SPSI was managed in water management in these basins and policy recommendations for the basins. The book concludes by providing a series of recommendations for improving the science-policy-stakeholder interface in water management. It represents a major step forward in our understanding of how to implement integrated water resources management.

Download or read book Wicked Environmental Problems written by Peter J. Balint and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-06-22 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Wicked" problems are large-scale, long-term policy dilemmas in which multiple and compounding risks and uncertainties combine with sharply divergent public values to generate contentious political stalemates; wicked problems in the environmental arena typically emerge from entrenched conflicts over natural resource management and over the prioritization of economic and conservation goals more generally. This new book examines past experience and future directions in the management of wicked environmental problems and describes new strategies for mitigating the conflicts inherent in these seemingly intractable situations. The book: reviews the history of the concept of wicked problems examines the principles and processes that managers have applied explores the practical limitations of various approaches Most important, the book reviews current thinking on the way forward, focusing on the implementation of "learning networks," in which public managers, technical experts, and public stakeholders collaborate in decision-making processes that are analytic, iterative, and deliberative. Case studies of forest management in the Sierra Nevada, restoration of the Florida Everglades, carbon trading in the European Union, and management of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania are used to explain concepts and demonstrate practical applications. Wicked Environmental Problems offers new approaches for managing environmental conflicts and shows how managers could apply these approaches within common, real-world statutory decision-making frameworks. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with managing environmental problems.

Download or read book Clean Soil and Safe Water written by Francesca F. Quercia and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-11-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses questions of relevance to governments and industry in many countries around the world, in particular concerning the link between contaminated-land-management programs and the protection of drinking water resources and the potential effects of climate changes on the availability of these same resources. On the “problem” side, it reports and analyzes methodologies and experiences in monitoring and characterization of drinking water resources (at basin, country and continental scales), pollution prevention, assessment of background quality and of impacts on safety and public health from land and water contamination and impacts of climate change. On the “solution” side, the book presents results from national cleanup programs, recent advances in research into groundwater and soil remediation techniques, treatment technologies, research needs and information sources, land and wastewater management approaches aimed at the protection of drinking water.

Download or read book Adaptive Environmental Management written by Catherine Allan and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-06-05 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adaptive management is the recommended means for continuing ecosystem management and use of natural resources, especially in the context of ‘integrated natural resource management’. Conceptually, adaptive management is simply learning from past management actions to improve future planning and management. However, adaptive management has proved difficult to achieve in practice. With a view to facilitating better practice, this new book presents lessons learned from case studies, to provide managers with ready access to relevant information. Cases are drawn from a number of disciplinary fields, including management of protected areas, watersheds and farms, rivers, forests, biodiversity and pests. Examples from Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada, the UK and Europe are presented at a variety of scales, from individual farms, through regional projects, to state-wide planning. While the book is designed primarily for practitioners and policy advisors in the fields of environmental and natural resource management, it will also provide a valuable reference for students and researchers with interests in environmental, natural resource and conservation management.

Download or read book Stakeholder oriented Valuation to Support Water Resources Management Processes written by Leon Hermans and published by Food & Agriculture Org.. This book was released on 2006 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, raising capacity in water resources management entails supporting stakeholders and decision-makers to reach a common understanding on the priorities and necessary arrangements for sharing and allocating water-related goods and services. Valuation is central to this process, as setting priorities and making choices implies valuing certain uses and arrangements above others. Water valuation can help stakeholders to express the values that water-related goods and services represent to them. It also offers a means for conflict resolution and planning, informing stakeholders, supporting communication, and facilitating joint decision-making on priorities and specific actions. This report confronts concepts from the literature on water valuation with practical experiences from three local cases where an effort was made to embed existing valuation tools and methods in ongoing water resources management processes. It uses the lessons from this exploration to provide a first outline for a stakeholder-oriented water valuation process. This is expected to provide a useful starting point to help water professionals and policy-makers improve the use of water valuation as a means to support participatory processes of water resources management.

Download or read book Civic Ecology written by Marianne E. Krasny and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-01-30 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offer stories of ... emerging grassroots environmental stewardship, along with an interdisciplinary framework for understanding and studying it as a growing international phenomenon.--Back cover.

Download or read book The United Nations world water development report 2018 written by WWAP and published by UNESCO Publishing. This book was released on 2018-03-26 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Ecosystems and Human Well being written by Joseph Alcamo and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecosystems and Human Well-Being is the first product of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a four-year international work program designed to meet the needs of decisionmakers for scientific information on the links between ecosystem change and human well-being. The book offers an overview of the project, describing the conceptual framework that is being used, defining its scope, and providing a baseline of understanding that all participants need to move forward. The Millennium Assessment focuses on how humans have altered ecosystems, and how changes in ecosystem services have affected human well-being, how ecosystem changes may affect people in future decades, and what types of responses can be adopted at local, national, or global scales to improve ecosystem management and thereby contribute to human well-being and poverty alleviation. The program was launched by United National Secretary-General Kofi Annan in June 2001, and the primary assessment reports will be released by Island Press in 2005. Leading scientists from more than 100 nations are conducting the assessment, which can aid countries, regions, or companies by: providing a clear, scientific picture of the current sta

Download or read book Towards a Natural Social Contract written by Patrick Huntjens and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book is a 2022 Nautilus Gold Medal winner in the category "World Cultures' Transformational Growth & Development". It states that the societal fault lines of our times are deeply intertwined and that they confront us with challenges affecting the security, fairness and sustainability of our societies. The author, Prof. Dr. Patrick Huntjens, argues that overcoming these existential challenges will require a fundamental shift from our current anthropocentric and economic growth-oriented approach to a more ecocentric and regenerative approach. He advocates for a Natural Social Contract that emphasizes long-term sustainability and the general welfare of both humankind and planet Earth. Achieving this crucial balance calls for an end to unlimited economic growth, overconsumption and over-individualisation for the benefit of ourselves, our planet, and future generations. To this end, sustainability, health, and justice in all social-ecological systems will require systemic innovation and prioritizing a collective effort. The Transformative Social-Ecological Innovation (TSEI) framework presented in this book serves that cause. It helps to diagnose and advance innovation and spur change across sectors, disciplines, and at different levels of governance. Altogether, TSEI identifies intervention points and formulates jointly developed and shared solutions to inform policymakers, administrators, concerned citizens, and professionals dedicated towards a more sustainable, healthy and just society. A wide readership of students, researchers, practitioners and policy makers interested in social innovation, transition studies, development studies, social policy, social justice, climate change, environmental studies, political science and economics will find this cutting-edge book particularly useful. “As a sustainability transition researcher, I am truly excited about this book. Two unique aspects of the book are that it considers bigger transformation issues (such as societies’ relationship with nature, purpose and justice) than those studied in transition studies and offers analytical frameworks and methods for taking up the challenge of achieving change on the ground.” - Prof. Dr. René Kemp, United Nations University and Maastricht Sustainability Institute

Download or read book Climate Change and Cities written by Cynthia Rosenzweig and published by . This book was released on 2018-03-29 with total page 855 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate Change and Cities bridges science-to-action for climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts in cities around the world.

Download or read book The Economics of Water written by Georg Meran and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-04 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access textbook provides a concise introduction to economic approaches and mathematical methods for the study of water allocation and distribution problems. Written in an accessible and straightforward style, it discusses and analyzes central issues in integrated water resource management, water tariffs, water markets, and transboundary water management. By illustrating the interplay between the hydrological cycle and the rules and institutions that govern today’s water allocation policies, the authors develop a modern perspective on water management. Moreover, the book presents an in-depth assessment of the political and ethical dimensions of water management and its institutional embeddedness, by discussing distribution issues and issues of the enforceability of human rights in managing water resources. Given its scope, the book will appeal to advanced undergraduate and graduate students of economics and engineering, as well as practitioners in the water sector, seeking a deeper understanding of economic approaches to the study of water management.