Suchergebnisse

Since the 1990s, Indian farmers, supported by the government, have partially shifted from surface-water to groundwater irrigation in response to the uncertainty in surface-water availability. Water-management authorities only slowly began to consider sustainable use of groundwater resources as a prime concern. Now, a reliable integration of groundwater resources for water-allocation planning is needed to prevent aquifer overexploitation. Within the 11,000-km2 Musi River sub-basin (South India), human interventions have dramatically impacted the hard-rock aquifers, with a water-table drop of 0.18m/a over the period 1989-2004. A fully distributed numerical groundwater model was successfully implemented at catchment scale. The model allowed two distinct conceptualizations of groundwater availability to be quantified: one that was linked to easily quantified fluxes, and one that was more expressive of long-term sustainability by taking account of all sources and sinks. Simulations showed that the latter implied 13% less available groundwater for exploitation than did the former. In turn, this has major implications for the existing waterallocation modelling framework used to guide decision makers and water-resources managers worldwide.

International audience ; Socio-hydrology advanced the field of hydrology by considering humans and their activities as part of the water cycle, rather than as external drivers. Models are used to infer reproducible trends in human interactions with water resources. However, defining and handling water problems in this way may restrict the scope of such modeling approaches. We propose an interdisciplinary socio-hydrological approach to overcome this limit and complement modeling approaches. It starts from concrete field-based situations, combines disciplinary as well as local knowledge on water-society relationships, with the aim of broadening the hydrocentric analysis and modeling of water systems. The paper argues that an analysis of social dynamics linked to water is highly complementary to traditional hydrological tools but requires a negotiated and contextualized interdisciplinary approach to the representation and analysis of socio-hydro systems. This reflection emerged from experience gained in the field where a water-budget modeling framework failed to adequately incorporate the multiplicity of (nonhydrological) factors that determine the volumes of withdrawals for irrigation. The pathway subsequently explored was to move away from the hydrologic view of the phenomena and, in collaboration with social scientists, to produce a shared conceptualization of a coupled human-water system through a negotiated approach. This approach changed the way hydrological research issues were addressed and limited the number of strong assumptions needed for simplification in modeling. The proposed socio-hydrological approach led to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind local water-related problems and to debates on the interactions between social and political decisions and the dynamics of these problems.

International audience ; Socio-hydrology advanced the field of hydrology by considering humans and their activities as part of the water cycle, rather than as external drivers. Models are used to infer reproducible trends in human interactions with water resources. However, defining and handling water problems in this way may restrict the scope of such modeling approaches. We propose an interdisciplinary socio-hydrological approach to overcome this limit and complement modeling approaches. It starts from concrete field-based situations, combines disciplinary as well as local knowledge on water-society relationships, with the aim of broadening the hydrocentric analysis and modeling of water systems. The paper argues that an analysis of social dynamics linked to water is highly complementary to traditional hydrological tools but requires a negotiated and contextualized interdisciplinary approach to the representation and analysis of socio-hydro systems. This reflection emerged from experience gained in the field where a water-budget modeling framework failed to adequately incorporate the multiplicity of (nonhydrological) factors that determine the volumes of withdrawals for irrigation. The pathway subsequently explored was to move away from the hydrologic view of the phenomena and, in collaboration with social scientists, to produce a shared conceptualization of a coupled human-water system through a negotiated approach. This approach changed the way hydrological research issues were addressed and limited the number of strong assumptions needed for simplification in modeling. The proposed socio-hydrological approach led to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind local water-related problems and to debates on the interactions between social and political decisions and the dynamics of these problems.

International audience ; Socio-hydrology advanced the field of hydrology by considering humans and their activities as part of the water cycle, rather than as external drivers. Models are used to infer reproducible trends in human interactions with water resources. However, defining and handling water problems in this way may restrict the scope of such modeling approaches. We propose an interdisciplinary socio-hydrological approach to overcome this limit and complement modeling approaches. It starts from concrete field-based situations, combines disciplinary as well as local knowledge on water-society relationships, with the aim of broadening the hydrocentric analysis and modeling of water systems. The paper argues that an analysis of social dynamics linked to water is highly complementary to traditional hydrological tools but requires a negotiated and contextualized interdisciplinary approach to the representation and analysis of socio-hydro systems. This reflection emerged from experience gained in the field where a water-budget modeling framework failed to adequately incorporate the multiplicity of (nonhydrological) factors that determine the volumes of withdrawals for irrigation. The pathway subsequently explored was to move away from the hydrologic view of the phenomena and, in collaboration with social scientists, to produce a shared conceptualization of a coupled human-water system through a negotiated approach. This approach changed the way hydrological research issues were addressed and limited the number of strong assumptions needed for simplification in modeling. The proposed socio-hydrological approach led to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind local water-related problems and to debates on the interactions between social and political decisions and the dynamics of these problems.