Preventing the repetition: Or, what Los Angeles' experience in water management can teach Atlanta about urban water disputes

Feldman, David L.

doi:10.1029/2008wr007605

Cited by 18 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Although the availability of water resources must feed back upon society, the manifestations of this feedback vary strikingly, depending on the wealth of societies (Vörösmarty et al, 2010), legal frameworks (Feldman, 2009), institutional involvement (Ostrom, 2009), global trade (Suweis et al, 2011;D'Odorico et al, 2010;Seekell et al, 2011), stewardship of local resources (Jewitt, 2002) and probably more. Feedbacks are weakened by technological interventions (Brown and Lall, 2006).…”

Section: Challenge 4: Social Factors Underlying Coupled Human-water Smentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Self-reference leads to very different trajectories of development for apparently similar physical/environmental situations. For example, Feldman (2009) analyzed the history of the development of water supply in Los Angeles and Atlanta, two large cities with a similar development history, with both having experienced significant water supply limitations. In the 1920s Los Angeles expanded its supply network, draining Owens Lake and deferring demand management until later in its development history.…”

Section: Challenge 4: Social Factors Underlying Coupled Human-water Smentioning

confidence: 99%

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Developing predictive insight into changing water systems: use-inspired hydrologic science for the Anthropocene

Thompson

Sivapalan

Harman

et al. 2013

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

129

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Abstract.Globally, many different kinds of water resources management issues call for policy-and infrastructure-based responses. Yet responsible decision-making about water resources management raises a fundamental challenge for hydrologists: making predictions about water resources on decadal-to century-long timescales. Obtaining insight into hydrologic futures over 100 yr timescales forces researchers to address internal and exogenous changes in the properties of hydrologic systems. To do this, new hydrologic research must identify, describe and model feedbacks between water and other changing, coupled environmental subsystems. These models must be constrained to yield useful insights, despite the many likely sources of uncertainty in their predictions. Chief among these uncertainties are the impacts of the increasing role of human intervention in the global water cycle -a defining challenge for hydrology in the Anthropocene. Here we present a research agenda that proposes a suite of strategies to address these challenges from the perspectives of hydrologic science research. The research agenda focuses on the development of co-evolutionary hydrologic modeling to explore coupling across systems, and to address the implications of this coupling on the long-time behavior of the coupled systems. Three research directions support the development of these models: hydrologic reconstruction, comparative hydrology and model-data learning. These strategies focus on understanding hydrologic processes and feedbacks over long timescales, across many locations, and through strategic coupling of observational and model data in specific systems. We highlight the value of use-inspired and team-based science that is motivated by real-world hydrologic problems but targets improvements in fundamental understanding to support decision-making and management. Fully realizing the potential of this approach will ultimately require detailed integration of social science and physical science understanding of water systems, and is a priority for the developing field of sociohydrology.

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Section: Challenge 4: Social Factors Underlying Coupled Human-water Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Challenge 4: Social Factors Underlying Coupled Human-water Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing predictive insight into changing water systems: use-inspired hydrologic science for the Anthropocene

Thompson

Sivapalan

Harman

et al. 2013

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

129

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Some localized, within-ASR areas that are known to have faced shortages in the past are not revealed as areas of shortage at the ASR scale. This is most likely for areas located in the upper reaches of an ASR, which places them upstream of the bulk of the available water supply in the ASR, as in the case of Atlanta (Feldman 2009;Georgakakos and others 2010).…”

Section: Caveatsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vulnerability of U.S. water supply to shortage: a technical document supporting the Forest Service 2010 RPA Assessment

Foti¹,

Ramı́rez²,

Brown³

2012

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Abstract:Comparison of projected future water demand and supply across the conterminous United States indicates that, due to improving efficiency in water use, expected increases in population and economic activity do not by themselves pose a serious threat of large-scale water shortages. However, climate change can increase water demand and decrease water supply to the extent that, barring major adaptation efforts, substantial future water shortages are likely, especially in the larger Southwest. Because further global temperature increases are probably unavoidable, adaptation will be essential in the areas of greatest increase in projected probability of shortage. Keywords SummaryThe likelihood of future water shortages depends on how water supply compares with demands for water use. Comparison of supply and demand within a probabilistic framework yields an estimate of the probability of shortage and thus a measure of the vulnerability of the water supply system. This comparison was performed for current conditions and for several possible future conditions reflecting alternative socio-economic scenarios and climatic projections. Examining alternative futures provides a measure of the extent to which serious future risks of water shortage must be anticipated.Water supply was quantified by first estimating freshwater input as precipitation minus evapotranspiration for each point in a grid covering the study area. These water inputs were then allocated to major river basins and made available to meet basic in-stream flow requirements, satisfy off-stream demands including those from downstream basins or those reached by trans-basin diversions, and add to reservoir storage. Off-stream demands were estimated as threshold quantities of desired water use based on extending past trends in water use under the assumption that water supply would be no more constraining to future water withdrawals than in the recent past. Modeling water supply and demand in this way does not provide a forecast of future shortage levels. Rather, it provides a projection of the degree to which water shortages would occur in the absence of adaptation measures to either increase supply or decrease demand.On a per capita basis, aggregate water withdrawal in the United States has been dropping since at least 1985. This reduction has occurred largely because of changes in the irrigation, thermoelectric, and industrial water use sectors. In the West, agricultural acreage has been decreasing and water withdrawal efficiency has been improving. Water withdrawal per kilowatt hour produced at thermoelectric plants has been steadily dropping as production has moved to more water-efficient plant types. And industrial water use has been dropping as industrial capacity has moved overseas and water recycling has become more common at remaining plants.Despite the reductions in per-capita water withdrawal, total U.S. withdrawal rose from 1985 to 2000, largely in response to population growth of roughly 2.7 million persons per year. However, the most recent ...

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“…This raises the issue of path dependence and the extent to which such increases in reservoir storage are feasible in the current socio-political climate. Even if full metering and a rational tariff policy were followed, emerging social movements in the 1980s over resettlement and environmental concerns of dam-building may have limited Chennai's options as some studies have shown (Feldman, 2009). Third, the effects of weak management and inability to expand reservoir capacity do not manifest right away.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reimagining the past – use of counterfactual trajectories in socio-hydrological modelling: the case of Chennai, India

Srinivasan

2015

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. The developing world is rapidly urbanizing. One of the challenges associated with this growth will be to supply water to growing cities of the developing world. Traditional planning tools fare poorly over 30-50 year time horizons because these systems are changing so rapidly. Models that hold land use, economic patterns, governance systems or technology static over a long planning horizon could result in inaccurate predictions leading to sub-optimal or paradoxical outcomes. Most models fail to account for adaptive responses by humans that in turn influence water resource availability, resulting in coevolution of the human-water system. Is a particular trajectory inevitable given a city's natural resource endowment, is the trajectory purely driven by policy or are there tipping points in the evolution of a city's growth that shift it from one trajectory onto another?Socio-hydrology has been defined as a new science of water and people that will explicitly account for such bidirectional feedbacks. However, a particular challenge in incorporating such feedbacks is imagining technological, social and political futures that could fundamentally alter future water demand, allocation and use. This paper offers an alternative approach -the use of counterfactual trajectories -that allows policy insights to be gleaned without having to predict social futures. The approach allows us to "reimagine the past"; to observe how outcomes would differ if different decisions had been made.The paper presents a "socio-hydrological" model that simulates the feedbacks between the human, engineered and hydrological systems in Chennai, India over a 40-year period. The model offers several interesting insights. First, the study demonstrates that urban household water security goes beyond piped water supply. When piped supply fails, users turn to their own wells. If the wells dry up, consumers purchase expensive tanker water or curtail water use and thus become water insecure. Second, unsurprisingly, different initial conditions result in different trajectories. But initial advantages in piped infrastructure are eroded if the utility is unable to expand the piped system to keep up with growth. Both infrastructure and sound management decisions are necessary to ensure household water security although the impacts of mismanagement may not manifest until much later when the population has grown and a multi-year drought strikes. Third, natural resource endowments can limit the benefits of good policy and infrastructure. Cities can boost recharge through artificial recharge schemes. However, cities underlain by productive aquifers can better rely on groundwater as a buffer against drought, compared to cities with unproductive aquifers.

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Preventing the repetition: Or, what Los Angeles' experience in water management can teach Atlanta about urban water disputes

Cited by 18 publications

References 26 publications

Developing predictive insight into changing water systems: use-inspired hydrologic science for the Anthropocene

Developing predictive insight into changing water systems: use-inspired hydrologic science for the Anthropocene

Vulnerability of U.S. water supply to shortage: a technical document supporting the Forest Service 2010 RPA Assessment

Reimagining the past – use of counterfactual trajectories in socio-hydrological modelling: the case of Chennai, India

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