Enhancing the value of water: the need to start from somewhere else

Abstract

Recently, there has been concern about social fragmentation, especially in western democracies, where trust in mainstream political processes and support of populist politicians has revealed that sections of the community feel isolated and disempowered. This phenomenon is also exemplified in the increasingly troublesome issues of environmental policy and management (Newig and Rose 2020). Responses to climate change have been inconsistent as systems approaches are required from societies when many institutions are currently organised only to deal with problems one at a time and in a sequential manner. The need for an integrated approach is best illustrated here by the requirements of water resources management. In the water cycle, there is an imperative to define each issue in terms of its relationship to another component. Everything is related to everything else. Upstream land use and management practices not only affect downstream water flows but also water quality (Fenemor et al. 2011a). There is little point in managing groundwater without understanding its relationship to surface water (Abbott et al. 2019; NZ Hydrological Society 2021). When catchment dams are poorly managed during drought, such as through spillway blocking or neglect, they can then fail under pressure from intense rain and exacerbate flood conditions (Tingey-Holyoak 2014; Pisaniello and Tingey-Holyoak 2017; Becker 2021). Problems occur when urban water is managed without reference to the catchments it comes from, or the receiving water environment (Vörösmarty et al. 2010). The way water is managed also has an obvious effect on uses and values as diverse as food production, industrial processing, recreation, and culture. This Special Issue addresses a range of policy issues pertaining to the economic, environmental, and sociocultural barriers and opportunities for more sustainable water management and planning. Papers on markets including investigating water trading in ways that go beyond popular approaches to consider the socioeconomic, ecological, and cultural needs, covering determinants of irrigators’ valuing of water in Australia (Haensch 2022), and whether water trading is a viable option for Aotearoa-New Zealand (Booker et al., 2022). Papers focused on equity and governance in water planning consider social justice implications of water planning (Brown et al. 2022; O’Donnell et al., 2022) and the need for improved stakeholder engagement (Broderick and McFarlane et al. 2022). Papers also consider the need for collaborative approaches, including how we design more holistic frameworks for New Zealand’s indigenous people (Robson-Williams, Painter, and Kirk 2022), how lessons from the past can inform the future and help design improved decisionmaking frameworks (Harcourt, Robson-Williams, and Tamepo 2022), and how intermediaries may assist in this process (Kirk et al. 2022). At the centre of these papers is the thesis that water underpins the wellbeing of the planet and the humans that live on it and has a critical role in spirituality (Caron et al. 2021; Cooper and Crase 2016). How well we manage the water cycle is a direct indicator of how well our societies are physically, mentally, and spiritually functioning and is a significant basis on which our human ecology will evolve (Abbott et al. 2019; Fenemor et al. 2011a). This editorial proceeds by considering what it is we are sharing through the lens of the Modified Sphere of Needs met by Water (Syme et al. 2008). Links to the papers in this Special Issue are then made and lessons for how we might do better in the future are derived.