Scenarios of Human Responses to Unprecedented Social‐Environmental Extreme Events

Abstract

In a rapidly changing world, what is today an unprecedented extreme may soon become the norm. As a result, extreme‐related disasters are expected to become more frequent and intense. This will have widespread socio‐economic consequences and affect the ability of different societal groups to recover from and adapt to rapidly changing environmental conditions. Therefore, there is the need to decipher the relation between genesis of unprecedented events, accumulation and distribution of risk, and recovery trajectories across different societal groups. Here, we develop an analytical approach to unravel the complexity of future extremes and multiscalar societal responses—from households to national governments and from immediate impacts to longer term recovery. This requires creating new forms of knowledge that integrate analyses of the past—that is, structural causes and political processes of risk accumulation and differentiated recovery trajectories—with plausible scenarios of future environmental extremes grounded in the event‐specific literature. We specifically seek to combine the physical characteristics of the extremes with examinations of how culture, politics, power, and policy visions shape societal responses to unprecedented events, and interpret the events as social‐environmental extremes. This new approach, at the nexus between social and natural sciences, has the concrete advantage of providing an impact‐focused vision of future social‐environmental risks, beyond what is achievable within conventional disciplinary boundaries. In this paper, we focus on extreme flooding events and the societal responses they elicit. However, our approach is flexible and applicable to a wide range of extreme events. We see it as the first building block of a new field of research, allowing for novel and integrated theoretical explanations and forecasting of social‐environmental extremes.

Flood Risk and River Conservation: Mapping Citizen Perception to Support Sustainable River Management

“…At least in part, this is because data on perception are relational, hence not quantifiable (Arias-Arévalo et al, 2017;Mould et al, 2020). Moreover, participatory processes are often challenged by differences in perceptions between different stakeholder groups (Santoro et al, 2019), as well as lack of interest, problem ownership and awareness (Lang et al, 2012;Wehn et al, 2015), highlighting conflicting values (Afshar et al, 2016;Rusca et al, 2021). To tackle these challenges, it is important to involve stakeholders early on in the research process and frame a common problem that addresses their needs (Lang et al, 2012).…”

“…Although sustainable river management requires understanding the connections between citizens and nature, the relationship between rivers and local populations is still at the margins of river management (Dilling and Lemos, 2011). Because perceptions of risks are based on personal knowledge and values, perceptions are often diverse and difficult to include in management decisions (Afshar et al, 2016;Rusca et al, 2021). There is a lack of studies on how citizens perceive the river and related risks, and how citizen perception matches evidence-based data.…”

Drought and society: Scientific progress, blind spots, and future prospects

“…Throughout this review, we have shown that interdisciplinary engagements with critical social sciences have proved helpful in explaining the manners in which drought risk is socially constructed and distributed. In fact, critical social science theories are able to relate distinctive power dynamics with the uneven distribution of drought risk alongside retracing the prominent roles that most powerful actors and ideas play in reshaping development trajectories and as a result, anthropogenic drought (Lövbrand et al, 2015 ; Rusca et al, 2021 ; Zwarteveen et al, 2017 ). In addition to this, critical social sciences offer multiple ways of knowing and represent a valid alternative to positivist traditions of knowledge (Haraway, 1988 ).…”

Integrating Multiple Research Methods to Unravel the Complexity of Human‐Water Systems

“…Thus, mixed research methods can contribute to test alternative hypotheses about the human‐water interactions generating sociohydrological phenomena. Moreover, they can help reveal whether hydrological risk dynamics observed in a specific place in the past might also happen elsewhere in the future, which is an essential step to develop policy‐relevant science (Rusca et al., 2021). To this end, new opportunities are currently offered by the ongoing proliferation of global datasets and worldwide archives allowing studies to go beyond the observation and modeling of specific case studies (Lindersson et al., 2020; Mård et al., 2018; Mazzoleni et al., 2020).…”