Securing the Environmental Water Requirements of Seasonally Ponding Wetlands: Partnering Science and Management Through Benefit Sharing (original) (raw)
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2016
Chapter 3. Water and agricultural policies in Europe, an unresolved governance gap………..96 3.1 Regional institutional framework………………………….….………………………………….………………98 3.2 Methods …………………….………………………………….………………………………………………………….100 3.3 Results and discussion……………….………………………………….…………………………………………..104 Conclusions…………..….………………………………….………………………………………………………………….243 Chapter 4. Assessing the first cycle of the Water Framework Directive……………………………..112 4.1 Methods ………..….………………………………….………………………………………………………………….112 4.2 Results ……………..….………………………………….………………………………………………………………..115 4.3 Discussion: a semiotic cycle of the WFD in the Andarax …………………………………………….126 Conclusions………………………….………………………………….……………………………………………………...128 PART III: The Tucson basin…………………………………………………………………………………………………….129 Introduction to case study…………..….………………………………….……………………………………………..130 Chapter 5. Water use and sustainability in the Tucson basin: Implications of a spatially neutral groundwater management ……………….….………………………………….………………….………138 4.1 Methods……………….………………………………….……………………………………………………………….139 4.2 Results ………………….………………………………….……………………………………………………………….145 4.3 Discussion: Growth, sustainability and spatially neutral groundwater management…156 Conclusions …………………….………………………………….…………………………………………………………..158 PART IV: Conclusions…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….159 Summary of conceptual and methodological contributions ………………………………………………160 Conclusions about challenges in water governance in case-studies …………………………………..162 Reflections on the inter and transdisciplinary experiences in this research process……………168 Outlook for future research………………………………….………………………………….………………………..169 Conclusiones…………………….….………………………………….…………………………………………………………..172 Resumen de contribuciones conceptuales y metodológicas ……………………………………………..172 Conclusiones sobre los retos en la gobernanza del agua en los casos de estudio ……………..175 As water flows through the water cycle, it links different systems with different operational scales and analytical dimensions (ecological, hydrological, economic, technological, institutional, cultural, etc.) that have usually remained within separated disciplinary domains. Water management involves all these dimensions and thus its assessment requires integrated analytical methodologies capable of escaping disciplinary reductionism and addressing the multi-dimensional impacts and tradeoffs associated with management decisions (Madrid et al. 2013). In relation to this, a plethora of analytical frameworks for social-ecological systems (SES) has emerged during the last decade with different aims and scopes (Binder et al. 2013). The Water Metabolism of Socio-Ecosystems (WMSES) is one of these frameworks and has been specifically proposed for the quantitative integrated assessment of sustainability (Madrid 2014, Madrid and Giampietro 2015). Building on the Multi-Scale Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Box 1.
Wetlands, 2019
Maintenance of the natural flow regime is essential for continued wetland integrity; however, the flow regime is greatly influenced by both natural and anthropogenic forces. Wetlands may be particularly susceptible to altered flow regimes as they are directly impacted by water flows at a variety of time scales. In Puerto Rico, contemporary water management is decreasing freshwater recharge to wetlands and contributes to the salinization of important coastal wetlands as sea levels rise. Further, downscaled climate models predict an increase in drought frequency, intensity, and duration by mid-century. Conflicts over water allocation seem imminent between human and ecological needs. Current minimum flow policies are insufficient given the complexities of ecosystem processes and the changes in precipitation patterns and sea level rise that are expected in the future. Improved flow policies need to be established that reflect the functional relationships between specific representative ecological resources and components of the natural flow regime across all relevant time scales. Similarly, flow policies need to be developed within a landscape scale to implicitly address the socio-ecological trade-offs as well as the complexities of water management. Multidisciplinary collaborations will be essential for increasing our resiliency to anticipated future changes.
International Journal of River Basin Management, 2014
Environmental flows programmes can be controversial, given that they transfer water from consumptive to environmental uses. It is, therefore, imperative that their performance is assessed against their anticipated ecological benefits. However, environmental flows present both technical and institutional challenges that cannot be addressed by traditional approaches to monitoring and evaluation. We present a framework that is currently being employed to evaluate the effectiveness of environmental flows in Victoria, Australia. The framework encourages a shift from expert-based models of ecological response to flow variation to those developed using the so-called 'evidence-based' methods that have become commonplace in medicine. The framework relies on close collaboration between scientists and managers for the design of monitoring programmes, collection and collation of data, and analysis and interpretation of results. Results will inform adaptive management of environmental flows in Victoria and improve basic understanding of the ecological impacts of changes in flow regime. Our experience suggests that the technical and institutional challenges for monitoring and evaluating environmental flows can be mostly overcome by close and continuing collaboration between managers and researchers. We are unaware of any equivalent programmes anywhere in the world and believe that our framework is transferable to any other large-scale environmental flows monitoring programme.
Ecosystems and sustainable development II., 1999
The Doñana National Park (Guadalquivir estuary, SW Spain) is a major wintering and stop over area for migratory birds. However, the Park suffers from increasing degradation caused by its position in a heavily used area and the concurrent inadequacy of the Park's management practices. The water use structure and its associated decision-making network of the Guadalquivir watershed are analysed. Current fragmentation in water use and management underlies the degradation process. The origins and consequences ...
2000
Wetlands all over the world have been lost or are threatened in spite of various international agreements and national policies. This is caused by: (1) the public nature of many wetlands products and services; (2) user externalities imposed on other stakeholders; and (3) policy intervention failures that are due to a lack of consistency among government policies in different areas (economics, environment, nature protection, physical planning, etc.). All three causes are related to information failures which in turn can be linked to the complexity and 'invisibility' of spatial relationships among groundwater, surface water and wetland vegetation. Integrated wetland research combining social and natural sciences can help in part to solve the information failure to achieve the required consistency across various government policies. An integrated wetland research framework suggests that a combination of economic valuation, integrated modelling, stakeholder analysis, and multi-criteria evaluation can provide complementary insights into sustainable and welfare-optimising wetland management and policy. Subsequently, each of the various
Ecological-economic analysis of wetlands: scientific integration for management and policy
Ecological Economics, 2000
Wetlands all over the world have been lost or are threatened in spite of various international agreements and national policies. This is caused by: (1) the public nature of many wetlands products and services; (2) user externalities imposed on other stakeholders; and (3) policy intervention failures that are due to a lack of consistency among government policies in different areas (economics, environment, nature protection, physical planning, etc.). All three causes are related to information failures which in turn can be linked to the complexity and 'invisibility' of spatial relationships among groundwater, surface water and wetland vegetation. Integrated wetland research combining social and natural sciences can help in part to solve the information failure to achieve the required consistency across various government policies. An integrated wetland research framework suggests that a combination of economic valuation, integrated modelling, stakeholder analysis, and multi-criteria evaluation can provide complementary insights into sustainable and welfare-optimising wetland management and policy. Subsequently, each of the various : S 0 9 2 1 -8 0 0 9 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 1 6 4 -6 R. K. Turner et al. / Ecological Economics 35 (2000) 7-23 8 components of such integrated wetland research is reviewed and related to wetland management policy.
Ecology and Society, 2012
Traditional policies for water resources management and wetland conservation are often based on command-andcontrol approaches. The latter tend to drive the human-wetland-water system into pathological states, characterized by more vulnerable ecosystems and rigid institutions for governance. The overcoming of these states may rest in the development of flexible and adaptive institutional regimes that rely on adaptive governance and management. Because past factors might constrain the implementation of more flexible adaptive approaches to management, it is important to understand the historical mechanisms underlying the genesis of institutional rigidity. We first present the results of a historical analysis of Doñana, which can be characterized as a pathological water socio-ecosystem governed through rigid institutional regimes for water resources management and wetland conservation. In a second step, we analyze the advances achieved during a recent, large-scale restoration program for the Doñana wetlands, which adhered explicitly to the tenets of adaptive management. Our analysis indicated that the historical persistence of command-and-control approaches has been a path-dependent process that led to the emergence of a rigid institutional regime and caused it to enter a rigidity trap. However, the achievements of the restoration program suggest that a more flexible and adaptive regime could be developed through the introduction of adaptive management at the operational levels, using specifically tailored action research programs. To conclude, we speculate that the research strategy outlined could be extended to comply with, or complement, the requirements of the EU's Water Framework Directive in other European water socio-ecosystems.