Towards understanding the dynamic behaviour of floodplains as human-water systems

Abstract

Abstract. This paper offers a conceptual approach to explore the complex dynamics of floodplains as fully coupled human-water systems. A number of hydrologists have recently investigated the impact of human activities (such as flood control measures, land-use changes, and settlement patterns) on the frequency and severity of floods. Meanwhile, social scientists have shown how interactions between society and waters in deltas and floodplain areas, including the frequency and severity of floods, have an impact on the ways in which social relations unfold (in terms of governance processes, policies, and institutions) and societies are organised (spatially, politically, and socially). However, we argue that the interactions and associated feedback mechanisms between hydrological and social processes remain largely unexplored and poorly understood. Thus, there is a need to better understand how the institutions and governance processes interact with hydrological processes in deltas and floodplains to influence the frequency and severity of floods, while (in turn) hydrological processes co-constitute the social realm and make a difference for how social relations unfold to shape governance processes and institutions. Our research goal, therefore, is not in identifying one or the other side of the cycle (hydrological or social), but in explaining the relationship between them: how, when, where, and why they interact, and to what result for both social relations and hydrological processes? We argue that long time series of hydrological and social data, along with remote sensing data, can be used to observe floodplain dynamics from unconventional approaches, and understand the complex interactions between water and human systems taking place in floodplain areas, across scales and levels of human impacts, and within different hydro-climatic conditions, socio-cultural settings, and modes of governance.

Progress in socio‐hydrology: a meta‐analysis of challenges and opportunities

“…Di Baldassarre et al 61 discussed the coupled nature, i.e., the two-way feedbacks, of humans and floods in flood prone societies (e.g., cities). Di Baldassarre et al 37 introduced a parsimonious coupled set of differential equations representing dominant sociohydrological variables such as economy, technology, and levee height to model the system dynamics of a flood prone society.…”

“…72 The values and norms of a society in respect of water resources and the environment may even change as a sociohydrological system becomes more vulnerable, posing a threat to sustainable use of water and land resources for human well-being. 53,61,72 Unintended negative consequences may become part of the social consciousness, sensitizing communities to further degradation. The behavioral response of communities, e.g., in the form of environmental activism (i.e., green movement), then helps to translate changes in water and land use practices into political and legislative actions.…”

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

“…An example is the case of New Orleans, where the process of building and raising levees has led to a shift from frequent, small flooding to rare, but catastrophic disasters [Kates et al, 2006]. More examples of levee effect have been described by the literature [Kates et al, 2006;de Moel et al, 2011;Ludy and Kondolf, 2012;IPCC 2012;Bohensky and Leitch, 2014;Di Baldassarre et al, 2013a] and are summarized in Figure 1.…”

Towards a sociogeomorphology of rivers

“…Anthropogeomorphologists then work to measure, document (Graf, 1996) and account for human impact and to conserve, protect and repair landforms from damage (Szabo et al, 2010). There have been several influential and useful analyses of the overall intensity of landform and process modification by human activity illustrating this approach (Hooke, 1994(Hooke, , 1999Douglas and Lawson, 2001;Haff, 2003Haff, , 2010Haff, , 2012Price at al., 2011;Overeem et al, 2013) including analysis of the "anthropic force" (Haff, 2002) in broad framings of landscape dynamics.…”

“…James and Marcus, 2006) have proposed that anthropo-geomorphology might explicitly include elements of socio-cultural analysis, I use the term here to argue for a distinctive mode of enquiry that explicitly approaches rivers as socio-natures and adopts some of the methods and philosophies related to that idea. My use of the term sociogeomorphology is partly connected with recent developments in socio-hydrology (Hartmann, 2011;Sivapalan et al, 2011;Di Baldassarre et al, 2013;Ertsen et al, 2014;Lane 2014). However, some distinctly different approaches have already emerged in that field (Lane, 2014).…”