Solving Water Crisis through Understanding of Hydrology and Human Systems: a Possible Target

Abstract:

While the majority of the Earth surface is still in pristine conditions, the totality of the hydrological systems that are relevant to humans are human impacted, with the only exception of small headwater catchments. In fact, the limited transferability of water in space and time implies that water withdrawals from natural resources take place where and when water is needed. Therefore, hydrological systems are impacted where and when humans are, thereby causing a direct perturbation of all water bodies that are relevant to society. The current trend of population dynamics and the current status of water systems are such that the above impact will be not sustainable in the near future, therefore causing a water emergency that will be extended to all intensively populated regions of the world, with relevant implications on migration fluxes, political status and social security. Therefore mitigation actions are urgently needed, whose planning needs to be based on improved interpretations of the above impact. Up to recent times, hydrologists mainly concentrated their research on catchments where the human perturbation is limited, to improve our understanding of pristine hydrology. There were good motivations for this focus: given the relevant uncertainty affecting hydrological modeling, and the even greater uncertainty involved in societal modeling, hydrologists made an effort to separate hydrological and human dynamics. Nowadays, the urgency of the above need to mitigate the global water crisis through improved water resources management calls for a research attempt to bridge water and social sciences. The relevant research question is how to build operational models in order to fully account for the interactions and feedbacks between water resources systems and society. Given that uncertainty estimation is necessary for the operational application of model results, one of the crucial issues is how to quantify uncertainty by means of suitable assumptions. This talk will provide an introduction to the problem and a personal perspective to move forward to set up improved operational models to assist societal planning to mitigate the global water crisis.