Shortage and surplus of water in the socio-hydrological context

Abstract

Balancing the temporal variability of hydrological conditions in the long-and short-term is often essential for steady socio-economic conditions. However, this equilibrium is very fragile in many cases. Hydrological changes or socio-economic changes may destroy it in a short time. If we extend the bearing capacity of socio-hydrological systems we increase, in many cases, the harmful consequences of failures. Here, two case studies are discussed to illustrate these problems. The limited success at adapting water resources to increasing human requirements without consideration of the natural capacities will be discussed with the example of water use for irrigation in northeastern China. The demand for a new planning approach, which is based on a combination of monitoring, model-based impact assessments and spatial distributed planning, is demonstrated. The problems of water surplus, which becomes evident during floods, are discussed in a second case study. It is shown that flood protection depends strongly on expectations of flood characteristics. The gap between the social requirement for complete flood prevention and the remaining risk of flood damage becomes obvious. An increase of risk-awareness would be more sustainable than promises of flood protection, which are the basis for technical measures to affect floods and (or) to prevent flood damages.

A Systematic Review of Spatial-Temporal Scale Issues in Sociohydrology

“…Ferreira and Ghimire, 2012; Di Baldassarre et al, 2013Baldassarre et al, , 2014Baldassarre et al, , 2016Wilhelmi and Morss, 2013;Braden et al, 2014;O'Connell and O'Donnell, 2014;Schumann and Nijssen, 2014;Viglione et al, 2014;Chang and Huang, 2015;Chen et al, 2016;Grames et al, 2016;Hazarika et al, 2016;Ward and Winter, 2016;Camargo, 2017;Ciullo et al, 2017;Mostert, 2017;Yu et al, 2017;Horn and Elagib, 2018;Robinne et al, 2018;Shelton et al, 2018;Tellman et al, 2018;Abadie et al, 2019;Abebe et al, 2019aAbebe et al, ,b, 2020Barendrecht et al, 2019;Bojórquez-Tapia et al, 2019;Caprario and Finotti, 2019;Haer et al, 2019;Viero et al, 2019;Devkota, 2020;Dziubanski et al, 2020;Haeffner and Hellman, 2020;Hossain et al, 2020;Huang et al, 2020;Lee and Kang, 2020;Michaelis et al, 2020;Ridolfi et al, 2020a,b;Saia et al, 2020;Sarmento Buarque et al, 2020;Sawada and Hanazaki, 2020;Song et al, 2020;Zhao and Mo, 2020;…”

“…Farming and irrigation management Nüsser et al, 2012Nüsser et al, , 2019Bury et al, 2013;Ertsen et al, 2014;Liu et al, 2014;Pande and Ertsen, 2014;Schumann and Nijssen, 2014;Purdue and Berger, 2015;Den Besten et al, 2016;Giuliani et al, 2016;Jeong and Adamowski, 2016;Martin et al, 2016;Bouziotas and Ertsen, 2017;Han et al, 2017;Noël and Cai, 2017;Nüsser and Schmidt, 2017;Roobavannan et al, 2017;Sanderson et al, 2017;Srinivasan et al, 2017;Essenfelder et al, 2018;Gunda et al, 2018;Iwanaga et al, 2018;Kuil et al, 2018;O'Keeffe et al, 2018O'Keeffe et al, , 2020Ogilvie et al, 2019;Pouladi et al, 2019;Sun et al, 2019;Khalifa et al, 2020;Hanus, 2021;Lu et al, 202131 20% Groundwater Elshafei et al, 2015Hu et al, 2015;Bakarji et al, 2017;Han et al, 2017;Noël and Cai, 2017;Re et al, 2017;Srinivasan et al, 2017;Al-Amin et al, 2018;Hough et al, 2018;Iwanaga et al, 2018;O'Keeffe et al, 2018;…”

Local irrigation systems, regional hydrological problems and the demand for overarching solutions at the example of an irrigation system in the P.R. of China

“…Details for this step are presented in Nijssen (2013) and Schumann and Nijssen (2014). The local dimensions and extents are to be modelled based on the recharge and run-off model (SIWA) and the water allocation model (WBalMo).…”

Drought and Flood in the Anthropocene: Modelling Feedback Mechanisms

“…To overcome this lack of knowledge, there has been increasing interest in sociohydrology in the last few years (e.g. Sivapalan et al, 2012;Srinivasan et al, 2012;Di Baldassarre et al, 2013b;Montanari et al, 2013;Schumann and Nijssen, 2014;Viglione et al, 2014;Elshafey et al, 2014;van Emmerick et al, 2014;Bloeschl, 2015, Loucks, 2015;Troy et al, 2015;Gober and Weather, 2015; Pande and Savenije, 2016; Blair and Buytaert, 2016), which aims to develop fundamental science underpinning integrated water resources management (IWRM). Socio-hydrology builds on a long tradition of studies exploring the interplay of nature and society and the implications for sustainability, including political ecology, social-ecological systems, ecologic economics, complex system theories and research on planetary boundaries (Swyngedouw, 1999;Folke et al, 2005;Liu et al, 2007;Ostrom, 2009;Rockström et al, 2009;Kallis and Norgaard, 2010).…”