Debates—Perspectives on socio‐hydrology: Capturing feedbacks between physical and social processes

Abstract

In flood risk assessment, there remains a lack of analytical frameworks capturing the dynamics emerging from two-way feedbacks between physical and social processes, such as adaptation and levee effect. The former, ''adaptation effect'', relates to the observation that the occurrence of more frequent flooding is often associated with decreasing vulnerability. The latter, ''levee effect'', relates to the observation that the non-occurrence of frequent flooding (possibly caused by flood protection structures, e.g. levees) is often associated to increasing vulnerability. As current analytical frameworks do not capture these dynamics, projections of future flood risk are not realistic. In this paper, we develop a new approach whereby the mutual interactions and continuous feedbacks between floods and societies are explicitly accounted for. Moreover, we show an application of this approach by using a socio-hydrological model to simulate the behavior of two main prototypes of societies: green societies, which cope with flooding by resettling out of flood-prone areas; and technological societies, which deal with flooding also by building levees or dikes. This application shows that the proposed approach is able to capture and explain the aforementioned dynamics (i.e. adaptation and levee effect) and therefore contribute to a better understanding of changes in flood risk, within an iterative process of theory development and empirical research.

Socio-hydrological perspectives of the co-evolution of humans and groundwater in Cangzhou, North China Plain

“…Kandasamy et al (2014) first characterized the concept of the pendulum swing by tracing the 100-year history of the competition for water between agricultural development and environmental health in the Murrumbidgee River basin. Similar dynamics were also found in the humanwater system in the arid Tarim River basin (Liu et al, 2014) and in human-flood interactions (Baldassarre et al, 2015). A pendulum swing can be divided into four typical stages: (1) the initial exploitation stage, which is focused exclusively on economic development; (2) the onset environmental degradation stage, which is accompanied by the introduction of remedial infrastructure; (3) the widespread environmental degradation stage, which leads to the necessity of mitigation measures; and (4) the recovery stage, at which ultimate solutions are implemented.…”

“…(a) Relationship between annual groundwater withdrawal and the population and GDP; (b) co-evolution of the total groundwater withdrawal against the annual grain production before and after 2002. 1998); that is, the societies can be seen as green (the other type is technological) (Baldassarre et al, 2015).…”

Moving sociohydrology forward: a synthesis across studies

“…These models allow for asking questions about the coupled system's behavior that cannot be asked of historical data, given that a region's history followed one fixed trajectory. For example, Di Baldassarre et al (2015) explored the effect of choosing infrastructure or adapting to floods on flood damages. As Loucks (2015) points out, "human behavior can be surprising, and we would like to be forewarned about and prepare for such possible surprises.…”

Robust-yet-fragile nature of partly engineered social-ecological systems: a case study of coastal Bangladesh

“…In the literature, numerous studies have investigated various social or ecological aspects of coastal Bangladesh in a different light. For example, several studies investigated some aspects of livelihood issues, such as collective management of shared water resources (Afroz et al 2016), flood protection and rural-urban migration (Choudhury et al 2004, Di Baldassarre et al 2015, climate change impacts on agriculture (Huq et al 2015, Lázár et al 2015, and the rise of more intensive forms of aquaculture (Swapan and Gavin 2011). These studies tend to center on household-level vulnerabilities and responses to cope with emerging challenges.…”