Water Security最新文献

Water security has emerged as a leading framework for water governance that integrates socio-politico-economic and physical attributes and is readily operationalized. Yet, in transboundary river basins it is unclear to what extent water-security framings have any resonance. We examine how water security has been employed in transboundary water research over the past decade. We find a water-security framing bolsters established governance approaches at the river-basin scale, but also advances new avenues that (1) re-examine the scope of local, national and non-state governance capacity or (2) extend beyond river-basin boundaries and outside the water sector. We examine conceptual and scalar challenges and limitations for transboundary water-security applications and highlight opportunities to expand beyond the river-basin as the dominant focus for transboundary water governance.

Ensuring resilient food systems and sustainable healthy diets for all requires much higher water use, however, water resources are finite, geographically dispersed, volatile under climate change, and required for other vital functions including ecosystems and the services they provide. Good governance for resilient water resources is a necessary precursor to deciding on solutions, sourcing finance, and delivering infrastructure. Six attributes that together provide a foundation for good governance to reduce future water risks to food systems are proposed. These attributes dovetail in their dual focus on incorporating adaptive learning and new knowledge, and adopting the types of governance systems required for water resilient food systems. The attributes are also founded in the need to greater recognise the role natural, healthy ecosystems play in food systems. The attributes are listed below and are grounded in scientific evidence and the diverse collective experience and expertise of stakeholders working across the science-policy interface: Adopting interconnected systems thinking that embraces the complexity of how we produce, distribute, and add value to food including harnessing the experience and expertise of stakeholders s; adopting multi-level inclusive governance and supporting inclusive participation; enabling continual innovation, new knowledge and learning, and information dissemination; incorporating diversity and redundancy for resilience to shocks; ensuring system preparedness to shocks; and planning for the long term. This will require food and water systems to pro-actively work together toward a socially and environmentally just space that considers the water and food needs of people, the ecosystems that underpin our food systems, and broader energy and equity concerns.

This article starts with the archaeology of justice in an attempt to get to the historical roots of the Iranians’ conception of justice. Justice has been founded on two conceptual pillars “social order” and “divine legitimacy” that were synthesized into the Iranian form of justice. Water justice has not meant equal distribution of water resources, but it has been more of an allocation system that distributed water among different territories according to their dissimilar geopolitical values.

This article explains how a causal relationship between justice, production system and political power could bring about the idea of the “circle of justice”. However, the circle of justice was an ideal model that could not find expression in real world, due to the taxation system whose inevitable malfunction led to the formation of another cycle called the “circle of water justice”.

This article draws an analogy between the historical polities and the present Iranian government in terms of “the circle of water justice”. After the 1979 revolution, this circle was based on an amalgamation between the traditional conception of justice and modern political philosophies, which prescribed socio-economic inequalities in favor of the least advantaged classes. Although “the circle of water justice” served to reinforce the political power, it fueled ecological degradation and social conflicts in the long run. This article concludes that Iran’s hydraulic mission is not the cause of their water crisis, but it is only the result of a subtle mechanism named “the circle of water justice”. Iran’s growing water crisis cannot be defused in the absence of a structural reform in “the circle of water justice”.

Drought is one of the complex and deleterious natural hazards that poses severe challenges to water security, food production, ecosystem, and socio-economic condition in India. Using efficient drought monitoring and assessment, the severe impacts of drought can be reduced. However, drought monitoring and assessment are associated with large uncertainty due to different datasets, methods, drought indices, and modeling approaches. Here, we examine the sources of uncertainty in drought assessment using multiple observational and future projections datasets, methods, and hydrological models. Moreover, we discuss potential ways to overcome the challenges associated with drought assessment in India. The drought assessment without considering uncertainty may cause overestimation or underestimation of risk in the observed and projected future climate, which further affects the planning and management of water resources. Therefore, a thorough understanding of these challenges is essential to improve the existing drought monitoring and assessment approaches.

Expanding populations, intensive agriculture, climate change, water pollution and depleting natural water resources are the main drivers of water scarcity in India. Improvisations in wastewater treatment processes for the degradation of pollutants by cost-effective means are critical to ensure safe wastewater discharge and its reuse. While advancements in technology and science have provided alternatives to the traditional activated sludge process; owing to lack of infrastructure, funding and awareness; the majority of wastewaters being discharged remain untreated. Depletion of groundwater and its pollution threatens human well-being, food production, aquatic and terrestrial ecosystem balance and climate change. Previous urban planning programs such as Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission laid the foundation for today’s water infrastructure and policies for water management. Dedicated ministries and programs execute wastewater treatment and discharge, river and lake rejuvenation, groundwater management and wastewater reuse. This review highlights the existing scenario of wastewater treatment with respect to its discharge and reuse in India. Technocratic involvement of limited stakeholders in the management of the multifaceted issue of water management will further require collaborations and collective action with public and private partners for a robust ecosystem and climate-resistant water management. Key considerations in wastewater treatment, groundwater management, existing knowledge gaps, and policies for water management in India are discussed.

As the global community faces increasing water-related challenges, enabling safe and secure water access will require cooperation, purposeful water management, and a variety of expertise and interdisciplinary research collaboration. This review uses tools from bibliometrics and network science to explore overlap and collaboration of scholars studying transboundary water resources and water security management. We explore intersections between these communities through an analysis of publications trends, a content analysis of abstracts using natural language processing, and co-authorship networks. We glean five key findings from our results, including that slight variations in keywords used in the literature search in these two topic areas result in different communities of scholars and publications. Our results show that while publications on these topics are increasing over time and there is meaningful overlap between the two topics, the number of scholars publishing in both areas is not increasing over time. The co-authorship networks demonstrate that few authors participate in both transboundary water resources and water security management research communities, and that authors who have knowledge from both topic areas are uniquely positioned within their social networks to facilitate collaboration. We find no correlation between the betweenness centrality and the citation count for authors, measures which are both used to evaluate author influence. The content analysis of abstracts reveals important areas of overlap in the topics addressed, such as climate change, development, and governance, as well as areas of dissimilarity in the scales and focus of these works. Although we found that the broad scope of the water security framework included some of the most prominent scholars studying transboundary water resources, much of the transboundary water resource scholarship was not captured by water security keywords. This work demonstrates that if we are to continue to use integrative yet actionable frameworks in the pursuit of convergent water research, we must think carefully about how we craft these frameworks and whether our choice of language is constructive or destructive in bringing together relevant scholars and research.

Effective management of rivers and the maintenance of the integrity of linked biophysical systems require multidisciplinary approaches. Thus, River Science is a relatively new arena of scientific inquiry that focuses on problems of sustainable management of river systems and it actively integrates multiple scales and various concepts. This paper presents a review of new developments in hydrogeomorphic processes understanding, which are critical to assess water security for Indian river systems.

Indian rivers are under the influence of a diverse interplay of climatic, geomorphic, tectonic, and anthropogenic forces, and are broadly classified in terms of Himalayan and Peninsular rivers, which can be further subdivided into 6 major types. The Himalayan rivers have received greater attention in comparison to rivers in peninsular India. Within the backdrop of changing climate, an improved understanding of the interrelationships between hydrological, morphological and ecological processes is the key to quantifying water security for Indian rivers in the near future. Geomorphic threshold, hydrological and sediment connectivity, Groundwater-Surfacewater (GW-SW) interaction and Environmental-flow (E-flow) assessment are the essential elements to understand the hydrology-morphological-ecological processes. Such studies have been initiated in Indian river systems, however, these are still limited in number. Stream power distribution based approaches are frequently employed to understand hydrological controls on morphological processes and form in regulated and unregulated rivers. As a majority of the Himalayan rivers are hydrologically and morphologically disconnected due to large dams or barrages, the result is a discontinuum of channel processes. Peninsular rivers are dominantly bedrock and highly regulated river systems, which show significant short- to long-term flow variability and have tributaries which are not perennial. Disconnectivity due to extensive flow regulation and water withdrawals impose great stress on the flow processes and sediment transport, and result in the progressive decline in channel morphology, habitat, and ecosystem flow needs. A critical research question in highly regulated river systems is regarding how the flow regime at the reach scale and the associated hydrogeomorphic variability can be systematically characterized. Identification of geomorphic thresholds at different scales and quantification of (a) hydrological and sediment connectivity in river systems, (b) surface–groundwater interaction, and (c) E-flow assessment for different reaches in each river basin are the major gaps in River Science studies specific to Indian river systems. Especially, E-flow assessment for different river basins using a holistic approach must be the leading area of River Science research to aid management and policy making with the goal of enhancing water security. Relatively less studied peninsular rivers need more quantitative