Open and decentralized technologies such as the Internet provide increasing opportunities to create knowledge and deliver computer-based decision support for multiple types of users across scales. However, environmental decision support systems/tools (henceforth EDSS) are often strongly science-driven and assuming single types of decision makers, and hence poorly suited for more decentralized and polycentric decision making contexts. In such contexts, EDSS need to be tailored to meet diverse user requirements to ensure that it provides useful (relevant), usable (intuitive), and exchangeable (institutionally unobstructed) information for decision support for different types of actors. To address these issues, we present a participatory framework for designing EDSS that emphasizes a more complete understanding of the decision making structures and iterative design of the user interface. We illustrate the application of the framework through a case study within the context of water-stressed upstream/downstream communities in Lima, Peru
Water resources worldwide are under severe stress from increasing climate variability and human pressures. In the tropical Andes, pre-Inca cultures developed nature-based waterharvesting technologies to manage drought risks under natural climatic extremes. While these technologies have gained renewed attention as a potential strategy to increase water security, limited scientific evidence exists about their potential hydrological contributions at catchment scale. Here, we evaluate a 1,400-year-old indigenous infiltration enhancement system that diverts water from headwater streams onto mountain slopes during the wet season, to enhance the yield and longevity of downslope natural springs. Infiltrated water is retained for an average of 45 days before resurfacing, confirming the system's ability to contribute to dry season flows. We estimate that upscaling the system to the source water areas of the city of Lima can potentially delay 99 million m 3 yr-1 of streamflow and increase dry season flows by 7.5% on average, which may provide a critical complement to conventional engineering solutions for water security.
Scale framing makes an important difference to how complex environmental policy issues are defined and understood by different groups of actors. Increasing urban water demand and uncertain future climatic conditions in the Andes present major water governance challenges for the coastal regions of Peru. An understudied dimension of Peruvian water governance is how scale framing shapes the way problems are defined, and solutions are pursued. Here, we aim to strengthen the understanding of scale framing as it relates to highland-coastal interactions in central Peru between 2004 and 2015. By analysing this period of significant water governance reforms, we identify five prominent water-related frame dimensions and three differently scaled policy storylines and reveal how they developed and intersected over time. The storylines, supported by particular visualisations, either foreground 'urbanshed'-level investment in water supply infrastructure, community-level cultural restoration for improved local agricultural production, or nationwide watershed-level financial mechanisms for highland ecosystem conservation. Our study shows how the intersection of these storylines at different moments during the policy process often had a strengthening effect, creating a coalition of actors who were then able to generate sufficient momentum and support within the Peruvian government for the implementation of conservation-based watershed investments.
<p>Many regions in the world face declining water availability and increasing water-related risks, as a result of pressures such as environmental degradation, global warming, and population growth. Sustainable and integrated land management is an important tools to improve and safeguard catchment water resources, and to minimize flood and drought risk. However, land management to optimise water security is still severely hindered by a lack of hydrological information about the impact of different management practices on the catchment hydrological response. Statutory hydrological monitoring networks tend to be sparse in most of the world, and focused on operational purposes such as water supply and flood risk. Here we present the case of iMHEA, a participatory hydrological monitoring network in the tropical Andes that aims at characterising the hydrological impact of different land management practices in the upper Andes, especially conservation, livestock grazing, and forestry. The network monitors currently 59 catchments in 22 Andean sites from Venezuela to Chile. It operates as a community of practice, exchanging experimental designs, technical expertise on monitoring equipment, protocols, and experience. It largely follows a pairwise catchment comparison approach, which has been able to show statistically significant trends in land-use impacts on flow characteristics such as runoff ratio, baseflow index, and slope of the flow duration curve. Thanks to rigorous technical support, the generated data are generally of high scientific quality and reliability. The involvement of stakeholders with a policy background, such as NGOs and government agencies, is key to dissemination and operational uptake of the scientific results. As such, iMHEA can be considered a success story, which has created a step change in scientific evidence for land use planning in the Andes. However, several challenges remain. One is the experimental design, which is not yet able to accommodate all the specific interests and challenges that iMHEA members are faced with. Longevity and long-term financial sustainability also remains a major challenge. Lastly, improvements are needed to process and dissimenate the results to specific stakeholders, and especially local communities and governments.</p>
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