Domestic groundwater abstraction in Lagos, Nigeria: a disjuncture in the Science-Policy-Practice Interface?

The rapid development of groundwater systems as part of urban water supplies around the globe is raising critical questions regarding the sustainable management of this essential resource. Yet, in many major cities, the absence of an effective policy regime means that the practice of groundwater exploitation is driven by the actions of domestic households and drilling contractors. Understanding what shapes the decisions and practices of these actors, their understandings of the groundwater resource and the extent to which scientific knowledge shapes this understanding, is an area of critical importance that is currently under-researched. Using a mixed-methods methodology, the paper explores domestic practices of groundwater abstraction in Lagos, Nigeria. It finds that there is a disjuncture between the households who are actively shaping exploitation of the groundwater resource on a day-to-day basis and science and state actors. This disjuncture results in household decisions that are influenced by commonly held, but potentially outdated, perceptions of the groundwater resource rather than scientific evidence or policy instruments. The unseen nature of groundwater resources effectively renders the scale of changing groundwater conditions invisible to households and the state, adding to the challenge of influencing practice. Addressing this disjuncture requires not just more scientific knowledge, but also the active construction of interfaces with, and between, non-state actors through which knowledge can be confronted, discussed and shared

Resilience in groundwater supply systems: integrating resource based approaches with agency, behaviour and choice

Access to safe and reliable water supplies is a key goal for households and governments across most of Africa. Groundwater reserves can play a critical role in achieving this, yet risks of contamination and over-abstraction threaten to undermine the resilience of this supply. A rapidly rising trend for privately-developed wells and boreholes raises additional concerns about the vulnerability of water supplies to natural or man-made environmental shocks. The potential scale of the situation is particularly marked in Nigeria where the use of boreholes has increased exponentially since 1999 (from 10% of the population to 38% in 2015), with most other forms of water supply, notably piped tap water, falling. Developing effective groundwater management approaches that build the resilience of communities is challenging, not least given the range of different actors involved, their competing interests and demands, and variations in the hydrogeological environment. Insights from resilience studies in social science emphasise how the resilience of ecological resources to shocks and change is critically linked to the adaptive capacity of social systems and their agents. Choices made now have long-lasting effects, yet these choices are little understood. Understanding the choices made by consumers, drillers and policy actors requires a strong interdisciplinary dimension and argues for new perspectives as to how the resilience of communities and societies might be built. The project brings together a unique interdisciplinary collaboration between academics from the UK and Nigeria working in the fields of economic geography, psychology, hydrogeology and journalism studies

Individual water sourcing: understanding risks and resilience to groundwater resource abstraction in Nigeria

Across much of Africa, domestic water supplies are increasingly dependent on groundwater reserves. As the cost of accessing these reserves fall, expertise becomes more widely available and incomes rise there is a rising trend towards the private commissioning of boreholes and wells. This nascent shift towards a distributed and increasingly individualised water supply may have many implications for the resilience of communities to future environmental shocks, which are, as yet, under-explored. Drawing on the case of Nigeria and new interdisciplinary research, this paper addresses this gap, through a specific focus on understanding the behaviour and choices of individuals and other key stakeholders which underpin this trend. It also seeks to understand the possible implications of this for the resilience of associated social and ecological systems

Prospects for radical emissions reduction through behaviour and lifestyle change

Over the past two decades, scholars and practitioners across the social sciences, in policy and beyond have proposed, trialled and developed a wide range of theoretical and practical approaches designed to bring about changes in behaviours and lifestyles that contribute to climate change. With the exception of the establishment of a small number of iconic behaviours such as recycling, it has however proved extremely difficult to bring about meaningful transformations in personal greenhouse gas emissions at either the individual or societal level, with multiple reviews now pointing to the limited efficacy of current approaches. We argue that the majority of approaches designed to achieve mitigation have been constrained by the need to operate within prevailing social scientific, economic and political orthodoxies which have precluded the possibility of non-marginal change. In this paper we ask what a truly radical approach to reducing personal emissions would look like from social science perspectives which challenge the unstated assumptions severely limiting action to date, and which explore new alternatives for change. We emphasise the difficulties likely to impede the instituting of genuinely radical societal change regarding climate change mitigation, whilst proposing ways that the ground could be prepared for such a transformation to take place

Visual Climate Change Communication: From Iconography To Locally Framed 3D Visualization

Climate change is an urgent problem with implications registered not only globally, but also on national and local scales. It is a particularly challenging case of environmental communication because its main cause, greenhouse gas emissions, is invisible. The predominant approach of making climate change visible is the use of iconic, often affective, imagery. Literature on the iconography of climate change shows that global iconic motifs, such as polar bears, have contributed to a public perception of the problem as spatially and temporally remote. This paper proposes an alternative approach to global climate change icons by focusing on recognizable representations of local impacts within an interactive game environment. This approach was implemented and tested in a research project based on the municipality of Delta, British Columbia. A major outcome of the research is Future Delta, an interactive educational game featuring 3D visualizations and simulation tools for climate change adaptation and mitigation future scenarios. The empirical evaluation is based on quantitative pre/post-game play questionnaires with 18 students and 10 qualitative expert interviews. The findings support the assumption that interactive 3D imagery is effective in communicating climate change. The quantitative post-questionnaires particularly highlight a shift in support of more local responsibility

Athenaeus the Navigator

Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 2008. Published version reproduced with the permission of the publisher.This study concerns navigation in a geographical sense and in the sense of the reader finding a way through a complex text with the help of points of reference. Recent studies in Athenaeus have suggested that he was a more sophisticated writer than the second-hand compiler of Hellenistic comment on classical Greek authors, which has been a dominant view. Building on these studies, this article argues that Athenaeus' approach to his history of ancient dining draws on traditional poetic links between the symposium and the sea, and expands such metaphors with a major interest in place and provenance, which also belongs to the literature of the symposium. Provenance at the same time evokes a theme of imperial thought, that Rome can attract to herself all the good things of the earth that are now under her sway. Good things include foods and the literary heritage of Greece now housed in imperial libraries. Athenaeus deploys themes of navigation ambiguously, to celebrate diversity and to warn against the dangers of luxury. Notorious examples of luxury are presented – the Sybarites and Capuans, for example – but there seem to be oblique warnings to Rome as well. Much clearer censure is reserved for the gastronomic poem of Archestratus of Gela, which surveys the best cities in which to eat certain fish. The Deipnosophists deplore the immorality of the poet and his radical rewriting of their key authors Homer and Plato, while at the same time quoting him extensively for the range of his reference to geography and fish. This commentary on Archestratus is a good example of the Deipnosophists' guidance to the reader, Roman or otherwise, who wishes to ‘navigate’ the complicated history of the Greek deipnon and symposium

Artificial reefs: from ecological processes to fishing enhancement tools

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Education for Environmental Citizenship and Responsible Environmental Behaviour

The notion of Environmental Citizenship embodies behaviour – an actively involved citizen who exercises his/her environmental rights and obligations in the private and public spheres. Education for Environmental Citizenship implies behavioural change; its goal is to facilitate an individual’s intellectual growth (cognitive domain) and emotional capacity (affective domain) that may lead to a critical and actively engaged individual. Human behaviour is overwhelmingly sophisticated, and what shapes pro-environmental behaviour is complex and context specific. Furthermore, empirical research indicates a discrepancy between possessing environmental knowledge and environmentally supportive attitudes and behaving pro-environmentally. The point of departure of this chapter is that the social and psychological study of behaviour has much to inform the study of environmental behaviour and, deriving from this, to inform regarding the type of education towards behaviour/action in the goal of sustainable socioecological transformation. The chapter focuses on internal (psychosocial) factors. It presents selected models regarding factors influencing behavioural decisions that are acknowledged as influential theoretical frameworks for investigating pro-environmental behaviour, as well as various theories that inform these models. These are categorised into knowledge-based models; attitude-, value- and norm-oriented models; skills, self-efficacy and situational factors; and new approaches to environmental behaviour models. The chapter concludes with suggestions for Education for Environmental Citizenship deriving from the various models

Understanding risks and resilience of private boreholes in Lagos, Nigeria

Water security is one of the most pressing risks facing the world. In urban areas, rapidly growing population coupled with rising incomes, falling costs, and often an absent or unreliable public water supply, mean that increasing numbers of households are choosing to install private boreholes to meet their domestic water needs. This trend is particularly prevalent in emerging global mega-cities such as Lagos, Nigeria. Through a series of internet, household, and water point surveys, this multidisciplinary study begins to address the question: does the proliferation of private boreholes strengthen or weaken the resilience of Lagos and its residents to future environmental shocks? A broad internet survey shows that 68% of 500 respondents make use of private boreholes on a daily basis, either as their primary water source or used conjunctively with other sources. Attitudes to groundwater are overwhelmingly positive, with a majority considering this a reliable source in terms of quality and quantity, and agreeing that access to a private borehole increases households’ water security, helping families to cope with possible water shortages in future. The majority of borehole owners perceive no risks associated with long-term groundwater availability, with 89% agreeing that water is abundant and 86% holding the view that borehole owners should be able to abstract as much water as they like. The results of a focused water-point and household survey, carried out at 40 private groundwater sources across Lagos, agree with these findings. Of those surveyed, the majority derive their domestic water from privately owned hand-dug wells and boreholes, and sachet water. Water point users have positive perceptions of the water quality from these sources, with 90% of boreholes and 80% of hand-dug wells thought to provide good quality water. However, water quality analyses show that individual’s perceptions do not always reflect reality. One third of boreholes and over 80% of shallow wells surveyed display unsafe levels of E. Coli. Of those sources perceived as good quality, almost 40% are classed as unsafe for drinking, according to measured levels of E. Coli. The collective enthusiasm for unlimited and expanding groundwater extraction in the city of Lagos coupled with a demonstrated lack of groundwater governance and regulation, while increasing individuals’ resilience to issues of water shortage in the present, may decrease the resilience of the wider community in the long-term. Understanding the role of agency and communicating the potential risks associated with uncontrolled groundwater development, across a range of actors and agencies, may be critical to avoid future conflict between individual and societal resilience to environmental shocks