Rivers in the Anthropocene: Mapping Human Water Security

Abstract:

Fresh water underpins countless benefits to society and is pivotal to the success of the food and energy sectors, industry and commerce, and the expanding urban domain. It provides essential cultural, recreational, and aesthetic values and also plays a critical role in the maintenance of ecosystem services and biodiversity. Recent analyses of water systems across the planet, summarized using high resolution, geospatial indicator maps of rivers, demonstrate that a wide array of stressors combine to produce a pattern of worldwide threat to much of the freshwater resource base that sustains human water supply and aquatic biodiversity. A pervasive, globally-significant pattern of management is evident in the contemporary setting, through which impairment accumulates as a function of wealth, but is then remedied by costly, after-the-fact technological investments. This strategy of treating symptoms while leaving unabated the underlying causes is practiced widely across rich countries, but it strands poor nations and much of the world's aquatic lifeforms at high levels of vulnerability. The seeds of such an approach to water management are hardly new and are evident throughout human history. This talk will explore the implications of these global realities and will focus on the role of 21^st century engineering as in both contributing to the growing water crisis and stimulating innovation for more effective stewardship of our water resource systems. It will also present a first global synthesis of the geography of freshwater provisioning source areas, evaluating jointly the quantity and condition of freshwater produced from these areas, and the downstream populations served by these resources. A geospatial indicator is derived, the freshwater provisioning index for humans (FPI_h), which constitutes an objective measure of the state of the resource base and its role in supporting human water security.