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Water as a Social Process
Lilian Alessa, Ph.D.,P.Reg.Biol.
Resilience and Adaptive Management Group, Water and Environmental Research Center, University of
Alaska; Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity, Arizona State University
Water
• Entering the “Century of Water”
• Growing efforts toward understanding biophysical water systems.
• Transitions from common pool resource to trade commodity.
• Uncoupling from culture.
• Cannot be substituted.
• Not suited to economic models.
The Human Hydrological System• Meeting basic needs. • Securing food and/or resource supply. • Protecting ecosystems. • Sharing water resources. • Optimizing resources and managing risks. • Valuing and governing water wisely and collectively.• Community health and well-being.• Understanding emergent phenomena.
Trends in Water Resources
Also see White, Hinzman, Alessa and 19 others, JGR Biogeosciences, 2007
• Extensive changes observed and expected in water resources, in Arctic many are due to permafrost.
FishR_SP
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How Could We Possibly Fail?
• Scale
• Messy Social Ecological Systems
• Underestimation of Social Dynamics
• Hubris: we will engineer a solution
An Example of Scale: Cumulative Effects
• Arctic: rapid development, multiple scales, key issues: water, energy and social dynamics (e.g., protecting diverse cultures).
• Key resources rely on rivers and wetlands.• Small changes add up at different rates.
ArcticRIMS_UNH
Arctic Rivers and Global Change
Dealing with Future Change is a Social Process
Growing evidence that technological interventions Growing evidence that technological interventions alone are not effective.alone are not effective.
1. UN Commission on Sustainable Development (1995).
2. Our understanding of the social dynamics in social ecological systems is poor.
3. This may represent our greatest vulnerability to effectively coping with change.
Desire,Means
Technology
Perceptions,Values
Exposure
NetworksLearning
Vulnerable Resilient
Resources
Disasters/Conflicts
Policies
What Gives?
• Water is the critical issue worldwide. • Currently we don’t have a good understanding
of the human hydrological complex system.• Several emergent tools and theories now
allow us to better this understanding.• Few models examine cumulative processes
from the bottom up and even fewer incorporate critical social data.
Big Questions
• What are the features of the human hydrological system at different scales?
• Why do societies suffer or thrive on the basis of their water resources?
• How can we learn to avoid this fate?• How do we develop a systems-based
science of understanding the H2S?
• We can model social dynamics.
• We can develop a systematic framework for understanding the Human Hydrological System (that does not rely on economics).
• We can finally learn that many decisions are made on the basis of perceptions, not data.
• Education alone does not work.
With No Easy Answers
Agents as a Social System
• Agents have connections to each other, and form a system which operates in an environment with feedbacks (culture…)
• Agents behave autonomously thus they each have their own parameters (data) and behaviors
• Systems change continuously as a feedback between agents, their biophysical systems and the technology they create and utilize.
Agent Based Models• Specify the rules of behavior of individuals (agents) as
well as rules of interaction• Simulate many agents using a computer model• Explore the consequences of the agent-level rules on the
population as a whole• “Simple” models to produce complex behaviors.• Not useful for decision making without an understanding
of social features.
Historic Use of LandscapesHistoric Use of Landscapes
Resource Use ZonesResource Use Zones
Alessa et al. GEC 2007
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Water use
In: Alessa et al. Global Environmental Change, 2007
Evolution of Water Use on the Seward Peninsula
Temporal Evolution in Water Use
Alessa et al. Submitted
• Presence of MWS influences agents’ perceptions of natural water quantities (sampling diversity?).
• Agents develop a preference for the MWS depending on exposure.
Responses to Degradation of Water Resources
Alessa et al. Submitted
• Natural water supplies are degraded by 10%.
• Agents who have interacted with natural water supplies detect degradation most accurately.
• Agents who have used MWS the longest detect change the least.
• Over time, fewer agents using MWS detect or remember degradation.
Response to MWS• MWS cost increased such that CM>CN.• Agents who have used MWS the longest are slow to switch to
a natural source despite cost.• Agents who retain several alternate strategies for acquiring
water are faster to switch from MWS when cost increases.
Alessa et al. Submitted
Distancing: A Conceptual Model
Alessa et al. Submitted
• All environmental issues are human issues.
• Technology is not exogenous (i.e., the Social Ecological Systems concept is not entirely useful as is).
• Social constructs of resource supply are real and drive landscape patterns of use and consequences.
Implications
An Integrated Water Roadmap for The Nation’s Human Hydrological System currently does not exist.
A Call to the Community
• Develop an initial roadmap: articulate classes of micro-level interactions and macro-level dynamics.
• Start simple but stay systematic.
• Identify and archive water narratives.
• Integrate social data collection into observatories using passive and active distributed sensors.
• Develop a cohesive community of practice.
Acknowledgements
• The RAM Group at the University of Alaska.• The National Science Foundation.• Northwestern University IGERT in Complex Systems.• My patient colleagues at the Center for Social Dynamics and
Complexity, Arizona State University.• Fabrice Renaud, Head, Environmental Assessment and
Resource Vulnerability Section, United Nations University.• Volker Grimm, Director, Center for Environmental Research,
Leipzig-Halle, Germany.
