Socio‐hydrology: Use‐inspired water sustainability science for the Anthropocene

By Murugesu Sivapalan, M. Konar, Veena Srinivasan, A. Chhatre, Amber Wutich, Christopher A. Scott, J. Wescoat, I. Rodríguez‐Iturbe. 2014

317 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Water is at the core of the most difficult sustainability challenges facing humans in the modern era, involving feedbacks across multiple scales, sectors, and agents. We suggest that a transformative new discipline is necessary to address many and varied water‐related challenges in the Anthropocene. Specifically, we propose socio‐hydrology as a use‐inspired scientific discipline to focus on understanding, interpretation, and scenario development of the flows and stocks in the human‐modified water cycle across time and space scales. A key aspect of socio‐hydrology is explicit inclusion of two‐way feedbacks between human and water systems, which differentiates socio‐hydrology from other inter‐disciplinary disciplines dealing with water. We illustrate the potential of socio‐hydrology through three examples of water sustainability problems, defined as paradoxes, which can only be fully resolved within a new socio‐hydrologic framework that encompasses such two‐way coupling between human and water systems.

Subfields: Ocean Engineering, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac1805d62d0dfd3267f79877bd47d1a8ff1d9b09

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ocean Engineering

1. Yoshihide Wada
2. Marc F. P. Bierkens
3. L. Bremer
4. A. Elshall

In Water Science and Technology

1. Marc F. P. Bierkens
2. Yoshihide Wada
3. A. Elshall

Citations in the corpus

• Groundwater sustainability: a review of the interactions between science and policy (2020, background): “…research suggests that the concept of sustainability is becoming more applied in groundwater management (Chaminé and Chamine 2015), and that groundwater is increasingly being recognized as a key aspect of sustainability challenges facing humans in the Anthropocene (Sivapalan et al 2014).”
• Non-renewable groundwater use and groundwater depletion: a review (2019, background): “In irrigation, this so-called ‘rebound effect’ (Sivapalan et al 2014) is generally explained by the fact that saving more water will increase agricultural production (and thus consumptive water use through transpiration).”