Bee mietii rak rkabni nis (The people know how to seed water): A Zapotec experience in adapting to water scarcity and drought

Abstract

We are facing a global water crisis exacerbated by hydro-climatic extremes related to climate change. Water scarcity is expected to increasingly affect indigenous and marginalized populations. Supporting the sovereignty of indigenous and rural populations to create water secure futures through placebased knowledge, local management, and Community-based Adaptation (CBA) measures may help tackle this crisis. Zapotec communities in Oaxaca, Mexico have self-organized for collective action to use Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) to address water scarcity, resulting in a perceived increase of groundwater availability. Treating groundwater as a common-pool resource (CPR) within a sociohydrological system, the objectives of this paper are two-fold: (1) to explore how MAR may be implemented as a CBA measure, and (2) to understand what factors triggered and/or enabled the widespread implementation of MAR by Zapotec indigenous communities in the Valles Centrales of Oaxaca, Mexico. In doing so, we aim to get a better understanding of local processes while also furthering theories that relate to CBA, CPR, and sociohydrology. This paper was born from the desire of the Zapotec community members to share their experience and lessons learned so other droughtvulnerable communities might benefit.

To which extent are socio-hydrology studies truly integrative? The case of natural hazards and disaster research

“…Of the 44 articles, only 2.2 % used "Individual or Household" as the spatial scale for physical systems and 8.9 % used "Group or Community". Besides this, 15.6 % of the studies relied on other spatial units: engineering structures, such as dams (Wallington and Cai, 2020) or polders (Sung et al, 2018;Yu et al, 2017), physical delimitations like groundwater (Basel et al, 2020), and floodplains (Ferdous et al, 2018(Ferdous et al, , 2020Han et al, 2020;Wang et al, Figure 4. Spatial scales used to characterize the physical and social systems in socio-hydrology studies.…”

“…Di Ciullo et al, 2017;Viglione et al, 2014). For droughts, 60 % of the studies applied a "Hydrological" component (Basel et al, 2020;Kuil et al, 2016Kuil et al, , 2019. Several articles (38.6 %) used other physical components, such as tide level (Sung et al, 2018;Yu et al, 2017) or hazard (Ferdous et al, 2018(Ferdous et al, , 2020Leong, 2018;Mondino et al, 2020a, b).…”

“…Koutiva et al (2020) used the results of questionnaires and workshops to design a model. One article (Basel et al, 2020) was even co-written by local leaders in collaboration with researchers.…”

“…Some articles were removed during the screening stage because, even though the authors stated that they had conducted a socio-hydrological study, no social aspects were actually considered. As Basel et al (2020) have pointed out, socio-hydrology is still developing knowledge of the variables that drives the coupled system. As such, concepts and interpretations of which social components should be considered remains contested.…”

Preparation of Infiltration Well Development Planning in Kadiri University Area

“…Droughts in some locations can be overcome with the existence of infiltration wells [6]. It can also protect a healthy environmental ecology, such as clean air, healthy trees, and enough water for animals, among other things [7] [8].…”