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Out of Water: Design Solutions for Arid Regions
Out of Water: Design Solutions for Arid Climates confronts the increasingly pressing issue of water scarcity and unravels the associated environmental, technological, and social complexities. Although access to water resources is an issue of global concern, arid climates are where necessity begets inventions that may serve as examples for action or prevention across a multitude of climate zones. The collection of essays and case studies presents a range of perspectives from design, science, engineering, and social science. They also present historical, contemporary and projective case studies across a wide range of geographies. The book’s intent is to firstly, broaden the discourse on sustainable cities that is currently taking place in the fields of landscape, architecture and urban design, to speculate upon the relation between water technology and design, and to reassert the designer’s role in imagining new societies, new communities, and new ways of defining water, both culturally and physically.
Ecosphere 4:art22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/ES12-00269.1, 2013
Link: http://www.esajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1890/ES12-00269.1 . We present here and in the companion papers an analysis of sustainability in the Middle Rio Grande region of the U.S.-Mexico border and propose an interdisciplinary research agenda focused on the coupled human and natural dimensions of water resources sustainability in the face of climate and social change in an international border region. Key threats to water sustainability in the Middle Rio Grande River region include: (1) increasing salinization of surface and ground water, (2) increasing water demand from a growing population in the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez area on top of an already high base demand from irrigated agriculture, (3) water quality impacts from agricultural, municipal, and industrial discharges to the river, (4) changing regional climate that portends increased frequency and intensity of droughts interspersed with more intensive rainfall and flooding events, and (5) disparate water planning and management systems between different states in the U.S. and between the U.S. and Mexico. In addition to these challenges, there is an increasing demand from a significant regional population who is (and has been historically) underserved in terms of access to affordable potable water. To address these challenges to water resources sustainability, we have focused on: (1) the determinants of resilience and transformability in an ecological/social setting on an international border and how they can be measured and predicted; and (2) the drivers of change … what are they (climate, social, etc.) and how are they impacting the coupled human and natural dimensions of water sustainability on the border? To tackle these challenges, we propose a research agenda based on a complex systems approach that focuses on the linkages and feedbacks of the natural, built/managed, and social dimensions of the surface and groundwater budget of the region. The approach that we propose incorporates elements of systems analysis, complexity science, and the use of modeling tools such as scenario planning and back-casting to link the quantitative with the qualitative. This approach is unique for our region, as are our bi-national focus and our conceptualization of “water capital”. In particular, the concept of water capital provides the basis for a new interdisciplinary paradigm that integrates social, economic, and natural sectors within a systems framework in order to understand and characterize water resources sustainability. This proposed approach would not only provide a framework for water sustainability decision making for our bi-national region at the local, state, and federal levels, but could serve as a model for similar border regions and/or international rivers in arid and semi-arid regions in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Shifting climate, reshaping urban landscapes: Designing for drought in the Campine landscape
Journal of Landscape Architecture, 2016
Urban outdoor water conservation and efficiency offer high potential for demand-side management, but irrigation, greenness, and climate interlinks must be better understood to design optimal policies. To identify paired transitions during drought, we matched parcel-level water use data from smart, dedicated irrigation meters with high-spatial resolution, multispectral aerial imagery. We examined changes across 72 non-residential parcels using potable or recycled water for large landscape irrigation over four biennial summers (2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016) that encompassed a historic drought in California. We found that despite little change in irrigation levels during the first few years of the drought, parcel greenness deteriorated. Between summers 2010 and 2014, average parcel greenness decreased −61% for potable water irrigators and −56% for recycled water irrigators, providing evidence that vegetation could not reach its vigor from wetter, cooler years as the drought intensified with abnormally high temperatures. Between summers 2014-2016 as drought severity lessened, irrigation rates decreased significantly in line with high drought saliency, but greenness rebounded ubiquitously, on average +110% for potable water irrigators and +62% for recycled water irrigators, demonstrating climate-driven vegetation recovery as evaporation and plant evapotranspiration rates decreased. Transitions were similar for customers with both potable and recycled water; vegetation changes were dominated by the overarching climatic regime. As irrigation cannot always overcome drought conditions, which will become more severe under climate change, to maintain vegetation health, utilities and urban planners should consider the tradeoffs between providing green spaces and water scarcity. This includes evaluating the roles of climate-appropriate landscaping and adaptive reallocation of potable and recycled water resources to enhance water security. By addressing emerging themes in urban water management through analysis of data from forthcoming water metering and aerial imagery technologies, this research provides a unique perspective on water use, greenness, and drought linkages.
2017
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Operationalising resilience to drought: Multi-layered safety for flooding applied to droughts
Journal of Hydrology, 2014
Keywords: Efficiency Flood safety Multi-layered safety Resilience Redundancy Water security s u m m a r y This paper sets out a way of thinking about how to prepare for and respond to droughts in a holistic way using a framework developed for managing floods. It shows how the multi-layered safety (MLS) approach for flood resilience can be utilised in the context of drought in a way that three layers of intervention can be distinguished for operationalising drought resilience: (1) protection against water shortage through augmentation and diversification of water supplies; (2) prevention of damage in case of water shortage through increased efficiency of water use and timely asset maintenance; (3) preparedness for future water shortages through mechanisms to reduce the use of water and adopt innovative water technologies. Application of MLS to the cities of Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney shows that recent water reforms in these cities were primarily focused on protection measures that aim to reduce the hazard source or exposure to insufficient water supplies. Prevention and preparedness measures could be considered in defining interventions that aim to further increase the drought resilience of these cities. Although further research is needed, the application suggests that MLS can be applied to the context of drought risk management. The MLS framework can be used to classify the suite of plans deployed by a city to manage future drought risks and can be considered a planning tool to identify opportunities for increasing the level of redundancy and hence resilience of the drought risk management system.