Capacity challenges in water quality monitoring: understanding the role of human development

Monitoring the qualitative status of freshwaters is an important goal of the international community, as stated in the Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs) indicator 6.3.2 on good ambient water quality. Monitoring data are, however, lacking in many countries, allegedly because of capacity challenges of less-developed countries. So far, however, the relationship between human development and capacity challenges for water quality monitoring have not been analysed systematically. This hinders the implementation of fine-tuned capacity development programmes for water quality monitoring. Against this background, this study takes a global perspective in analysing the link between human development and the capacity challenges countries face in their national water quality monitoring programmes. The analysis is based on the latest data on the human development index and an international online survey amongst experts from science and practice. Results provide evidence of a negative relationship between human development and the capacity challenges to meet SDG 6.3.2 monitoring requirements. This negative relationship increases along the course of the monitoring process, from defining the enabling environment, choosing parameters for the collection of field data, to the analytics and analysis of five commonly used parameters (DO, EC, pH, TP and TN). Our assessment can be used to help practitioners improve technical capacity development activities and to identify and target investment in capacity development for monitoring

Resilience and Vulnerability: Conceptual revolution(s) or only revolving around words? A collection of essays, working papers and think pieces from the period 2008-2018

This volume is a collection of thoughts and ideas around the concepts of resilience and vulnerability related to their application in the context of disaster risk. Each of the chapters can be classified as an essay, a working paper, or simply as a think piece. Irrespective of different contexts and themes they are united as they represent efforts to grasp the elusive concepts of vulnerability, resilience, exposure, risk in context of natural hazards or wilful destruction and the potential disasters these may cause. One further common feature of these pieces put together in this volume is that they were never really became known and acknowledged. Most of these writings, or versions thereof have never been published in printed media. They all originate from the period between 2008 and 2018. Some of these “early thoughts” might have been premature then. We speculate however, that in light of the present state of the international scientific discourse in the respective area and the ever flourishing conceptual debates around vulnerability and resilience some of the ideas found in these “hidden essays” may trigger second thoughts and hence could enliven the present debates. Thus next to be the historical documentation of what has been pondered on a decade ago, some scientific follow up may occur

Impact of climate change on water resources of upper Kharun catchment in Chhattisgarh, India

Study region: The Upper Kharun Catchment (UKC) is one of the most important, economically sound and highly populated watersheds of Chhattisgarh state in India. The inhabitants strongly depend on monsoon and are severely prone to water stress. Study focus: This research aims to assess the impact of climate change on water balance components. New hydrological insights for the region: The station-level bias-corrected PRECIS (Providing REgional Climates for Impact Studies) projections generally show increasing trends for annual rainfall and temperature. Hydrological simulations, performed by SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool), indicate over-proportional runoff-rainfall and under-proportional percolation-rainfall relationships. Simulated annual discharge for 2020s will decrease by 2.9% on average (with a decrease of 25.9% for q1 to an increase by 23.6% for q14); for 2050s an average increase by 12.4% (17.6% decrease for q1 to 39.4% increase for q0); for 2080s an average increase of 39.5% (16.3% increase for q1 to an increase of 63.7% for q0). Respective ranges on percolation: for 2020s an average decrease by 0.8% (12.8% decrease for q1 to an increase of 8.7% for q14); for 2050s an average increase by 2.5% (10.3% decrease for q1 to 15.4% increase for q0); for 2080s an average increase by 7.5% (0.3% decrease for q1 to 13.7% increase for q0). These over- and under-proportional relationships indicate future enhancement of floods and question sufficiency of groundwater recharge

The Role of Trust-building in Fostering Cooperation in the Eastern Nile Basin: A Case of Experimental Game Application

Escalating tension and a sense of mistrust currently prevail between downstream and upstream countries in the Nile Basin over Ethiopia's construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Striving for self-sufficiency in hydropower generation, Ethiopia has initiated a new series of upstream reservoir construction projects, with the GERD being the largest, and this may affect the water availability in downstream countries of Egypt and Sudan. This paper examines a set of compensation options to induce cooperation through trust-building, possibly minimizing uncertainties in water allocation decision-making and simplifying complex inter-relationships in the basin using laboratory game experiments. The game was developed and conducted using hydro-economic modeling of the basin with GAMS software, an expert survey with the SPSS program and Z-tree software to design and analyze the laboratory experiment. This paper presents the results of the laboratory game experiment where the Eastern Nile Basin scenario was modeled as a multi-round, adjusted trust game with non-binding deals among players. The results suggest that the "win for all" situation may be reached through a stable integrative, cooperative framework. Building the enabling environment, in particular, transparency, knowledge, trust, and confidence among riparian states is the first step in developing transboundary cooperation. Basin-wide cooperation requires a transparent environment including a variety of compensation options, institutional changes, and incentive-compatible considerations

Control, Adapt or Flee: How to Face Environmental Migration?

No abstract available

Water-related hazard and risk management

Water-related hazard events are extreme hydrological phenomena that cause loss of lives, injuries, damage to properties, socio-economic and environmental impacts. Damage can be reduced by using control and mitigation measures that can be classified as structural and non-structural measures. This chapter introduces several, even seldom considered hazards. Floods being swift and devasting events receive a special attention. Flood flow computation can be carried out by using hydrological and hydrodynamic models for flood prediction and flood forecasting, etc. Return periods of floods can be determined by probability analysis of extreme events such as maximum streamflow data from past records. The return periods are used as a bench mark in determining the extent of floods for planning and design purposes. Different levels of hazard are considered in estimating the risk level for planning and design of mitigation measures. Vulnerability of population and their assets depends on types of land use, their socio-economic values, exposure and environment. Damage due to extreme events depends on hazard magnitude and types of objects such as population, their assets and infrastructures threatened by these hazards. Risk maps can be drawn to show spatial variation of risk under different magnitudes of hazard and vulnerability. Risk control and adaptation as well as risk sharing are given ample emphasis in this chapter

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A Drop in the Ocean. On Writing Histories of Water Resources Management

This text builds on the shared focus of historians and engineers to understand how particular circumstances came to be. In their endeavours, engineers regularly turn attention to the past, many times with the explicit aim to build on the past. In this chapter, it is discussed why these water histories written by engineers are vulnerable to being less correct. Using a range of scholarship on water history and shared experiences within the International Water History Association, we discuss the core of any historical scholarship: a drive to demonstrate and understand the complexity of the past. As such, this chapter wants to warn against the engineering drive to use (water) history as a guide towards the future. Instead, we propose a perspective of history as a way of reading and understanding the complex paths we have travelled until now