Rosie Day - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Rosie Day

Hydrological Sciences Journal

&lt;p&gt;The Limpopo river basin (LRB) is water-stressed and highly susceptible t... more &lt;p&gt;The Limpopo river basin (LRB) is water-stressed and highly susceptible to floods and droughts. The impacts of floods and droughts on water availability and quality is increasing as a result of their increase in magnitude and frequency. The LRB encompasses a large diversity of physical and socio-economical characteristics spread across four Southern Africa countries (Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe). This dictates highly heterogeneous physical and human responses, coping mechanisms, and policy frameworks from local to transboundary scales.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Understanding the multidimensional connections that exist between and within flood and drought events and cycles, between various regions across the basin, between physical and social impacts, and between users and decision-makers, is critical to sustainable water resources management and long-term resilience to hydrological extremes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Connect4 Water Resilience project has brought together an international multidisciplinary team of hydrologists and social scientists from academia, policy, and practice to investigate the drivers and impacts of floods and droughts, and to promote solutions towards adaptation. In our research we deployed hydrological and geological investigations alongside community and governance interviews and workshops across the LRB to jointly feed in the application of a large-scale transboundary hydrological model of the LRB. Model assessment and future management scenario definition and analysis were implemented collaboratively with stakeholders across the basin, through iterative workshops at local, national, and transboundary scales.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Results so far revealed: (1) the high complementarity of physical (hydrological and sedimentological) and social (community narrative) data to reconstruct spatiotemporal dynamics and impacts of events, which has been crucial to model application in the basin affected by highly fragmented monitoring; (2) the observed increase in floods and droughts magnitude and frequency is not responsible for significant changes in groundwater recharge, suggesting that the general observed groundwater level decline is to be related to increasing abstraction, which in turn amplifies droughts; (3) flood severity and impacts are higher after droughts regardless of rainfall magnitude; (4) mitigation, through anticipatory action and preparation for floods and droughts at policy, user and community level is uneven and inadequately resourced, with generally some forms of preparation to droughts but little for floods; (5) the uptake of forecast and management recommendations from governments is patchy, while extension officers are playing a key role for communication and NGOs for training; (6) local stakeholder expertise and experience brought in during stakeholder workshops were critical to groundwater model conceptualisation, and management scenario definition and analysis; (7) preferred scenarios of management strategies, as collaboratively defined with stakeholders, were highly variable across the LRB countries and sub-regions, including preference for local water management (e.g. temporary flood water storage for subsequent droughts) in upstream upland regions vs large scale strategies (e.g. storage in dams) in downstream floodplain regions; however, hydrological model outputs showed that local/regional strategies have basin-scale (transboundary) impacts emphasizing the importance of transboundary cooperation and management of water resources and extreme events.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Research outcomes are being translated into tailored guidance for policy and practice including feeding in ongoing early warning system development and sustainable water resource management.&lt;/p&gt;

Advances in Geoethics and Groundwater Management : Theory and Practice for a Sustainable Development, 2021

Future climate projections show a strengthening of the hydrological cycle with more drou... more Future climate projections show a strengthening of the hydrological cycle with more droughts and floods expected in many regions of the world. This means a higher likelihood of cascading drought-to-flood disasters such as the Millennium Drought – Brisbane flooding in Australia or the California drought – Oroville spillway collapse in the US. Droughts allow ample time for impacts and adaptation, which influence hazard, exposure, and vulnerability of a subsequent flood. When we treat the flood risk as independent from the drought this might lead to large underestimations of future risk.Here, we present the PerfectSTORM project (‘STOrylines of futuRe extreMes’). In this project we will study drought-to-flood events to provide the understanding needed to prevent major disasters in the future. We will use a mixed-methods approach based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative storylines of past and future drought-to-flood risk in case studies and extrapolation of this rich case study information to the global scale. Qualitative storylines will be collected with narrative interviews and mental simulation workshops and will be analysed to develop timelines and causal loop diagrams. Quantitative storylines will be developed from timeseries of hydrological and social data that will be analysed to distinguish interrelated drivers and modelled with system dynamics modelling. These storylines will then be combined in an iterative way using innovative data visualisation as a basis for co-creating management solutions.To generalise our case study understanding, a range of global datasets will be analysed to find global types and hotspots of drought-to-flood events. This information will be combined with the system dynamics model developed in the case studies and a global multi-dimensional possibility space will be developed. This will allow us to explore positive pathways for future management of drought-to-flood events in different parts of the world. The PerfectSTORM project will provide in-depth understanding of the hydrosocial feedbacks and dynamic vulnerability of cascading hazards.

Future Cities and Environment, 2018

BMJ Open

IntroductionDespite a decade of policy actions, Ulaanbaatar’s residents continue to be exposed to... more IntroductionDespite a decade of policy actions, Ulaanbaatar’s residents continue to be exposed to extreme levels of air pollution, a major public health concern, especially for vulnerable populations such as pregnant women and children. In May 2019, the Mongolian government implemented a raw coal ban (RCB), prohibiting distribution and use of raw coal in households and small businesses in Ulaanbaatar. Here, we present the protocol for an interrupted time series (ITS; a strong quasi-experimental study design for public health interventions) that aims to assess the effectiveness of this coal ban policy on environmental (air quality) and health (maternal and child) outcomes.Methods and analysisRoutinely collected data on pregnancy and child respiratory health outcomes between 2016 and 2022 in Ulaanbaatar will be collected retrospectively from the four main hospitals providing maternal and/or paediatric care as well as the National Statistics Office. Hospital admissions data for childho...

Southern Africa faces both severe droughts and strong floods. Communities describe how they are i... more Southern Africa faces both severe droughts and strong floods. Communities describe how they are impacted by both extremes, but do not regard them as connected. They prepare for droughts by implementing water-saving measures and crop changes, but report doing little to prepare for floods. Governance actors instead try to manage both extremes, for example by installing dams that can capture floodwater to increase water availability during dry seasons. In the Connect4WR project, we combined community and governance interviews and workshops with scenario modelling to explore more nature-based solutions focusing on subsurface storage and infiltration. The governance actors in the four countries of the Limpopo (Botswana, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Mozambique) were keen to explore effects of afforestation, sand dams, managed aquifer recharge, and rainwater harvesting. The coupled surface-water-groundwater model we set up, showed that these measures can successfully reduce both droughts and...

Journal of Human Development and Capabilities

&lt;p&gt;Droughts are long-lasting and have a range of cascading impacts on socie... more &lt;p&gt;Droughts are long-lasting and have a range of cascading impacts on society. These impacts and their responses can influence the further development of the drought itself, but also continue into the period after the drought ended. Especially if society is hit by a next hydrological extreme event, heavy rainfall resulting in flooding, the effects of this may be increased or decreased by the preceding drought and its impacts and responses. We here present a review and a global assessment of cases of these events, based on scientific literature, NGO and governmental reports, and newspaper articles, to study the diversity of how drought affects flood risk. We find that the balance between the positive and negative effects of extreme rainfall after a long dry period is mostly dependent on the underlying vulnerability and the effect of specific responses, and is different for different countries, and for different sectors and groups in society. Based on our initial analysis of the collection of case studies, we see some emerging patterns. For example, in Europe, the USA and Australia, the highly managed water system with hard infrastructure and early-warning systems makes that in most cases the rainfall after drought are managed and adverse effects mitigated, but also lock-ins exist that can make feedbacks of either inaction or maladaptation result in increased economic losses. In Africa and Latin-America, with a fragile governance system, less hard infrastructure, and a more exposed population, extreme rainfall after drought brings relief and replenishment of water resources, but also increased impacts, conflict and displacement. Here, we hypothesise that impacts are unequally distributed in society, because of issues of power, access to land and water resources, inadequate soft infrastructures, etc. We will test this hypothesis with an in-depth qualitative study of local stakeholder knowledge of these human-water processes in selected case studies. The typology of drought-to-flood events that we developed can serve as a starting point for further research on the complexity of these cascading events.&lt;/p&gt;

Energy Research & Social Science, 2022

Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 2021

Abstract Energy poverty is a multidimensional issue and the capability approach is fruitful to sh... more Abstract Energy poverty is a multidimensional issue and the capability approach is fruitful to show how energy-poor households are restricted in many aspects of well-being. With reference to Nussbaum’s Central Capabilities, and based on qualitative interviews, this contribution aims to illustrate how energy-poor people are limited in five capabilities in their daily life and how these restricted capabilities sometimes reinforce each other in vicious circles. The capabilities analysed are related to material property (“Control over one’s material environment”), recreational activities (“Play”), culture (“Senses, imagination and thoughts”), expression and management of emotions (“Emotions”), and to health and adequate nutrition (“Bodily Health”). These five capabilities are chosen for this contribution and analysed in this order because a recent quantitative study for Belgium has shown that the differences in their deployment are the highest between energy-poor households and energy-rich ones. Data for the present contribution are drawn from 60 in-depth interviews with persons in energy poverty that were carried out in 2014–2017 in the three Regions of Belgium.

Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment, 2018

Transformative interdisciplinary methods and tools are required to address crucial water-related ... more Transformative interdisciplinary methods and tools are required to address crucial water-related challenges facing societies in the current era of the Anthropocene. In a community-based study in the Limpopo basin of South Africa, physical and social science methods were brought together to run interdisciplinary workshops aimed at enhancing preparedness for possible future drought. To generate storylines for the workshops, relevant scenarios were modelled using a catchment-scale hydrological model, SHETRAN. Set up using freely available data, local knowledge, and narrative-based group interviews on past experiences of drought, the model acted as a locally-relevant tool for prompting discussions about potential future drought impacts, responses and preparedness, and to stimulate the production of community future narratives. In this paper, we discuss the elements involved in the modelling process: the building of the model through an interdisciplinary approach; setting up the model wi...

Energy Research & Social Science, 2016

Access to affordable energy is a core dimension of energy justice, with recent work examining the... more Access to affordable energy is a core dimension of energy justice, with recent work examining the relation between energy use and well-being in these terms. However, a key question that emerges is why specific energy uses matter to the degree that they can be seen as a form of necessity within a given cultural context. We draw on a longitudinal set of participatory processes focused on defining a minimally-decent living standard in the UK, to consider critically what this evidence can contribute to energy justice thinking. Our secondary analysis shows that energy uses deemed to be necessities are diverse and plural, enabling access to multiple valued energy services, and that their profile has to some degree shifted from 2008 to 2014. We also demonstrate the multidimensional reasoning that has underpinned these outcomes ranging across questions of health, social participation, development and practical living. Whilst public deliberations about necessities can be taken as legitimate grounding for defining minimum standards and therefore the scope of 'doing justice' in terms of fuel poverty policy, they can also be revealing of the escalation of norms of energy dependency in a society that on climate justice grounds must radically reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions. (2014: 46) propose as one of their principles of energy justice, 'the affirmative principle', stating that 'if any of the basic goods to which every person is justly entitled can only be secured by means of energy services, then in that case there is a derivative right to the energy service'. They base this principle on a set of assumptions drawn out of bringing energy as an 'instrumental good' into articulation with a range of normative thinking, but particularly the capability approach (Sen, 2009).