The unfolding water drama in the Anthropocene: towards a resilience‐based perspective on water for global sustainability

Abstract

The human influence on the global hydrological cycle is now the dominant force behind changes in water resources across the world and in regulating the resilience of the Earth system. The rise in human pressures on global freshwater resources is in par with other anthropogenic changes in the Earth system (from climate to ecosystem change), which has prompted science to suggest that humanity has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. This paper focuses on the critical role of water for resilience of social-ecological systems across scales, by avoiding major regime shifts away from stable environmental conditions, and in safeguarding life-support systems for human wellbeing. It highlights the dramatic increase of water crowding: near-future challenges for global water security and expansion of food production in competition with carbon sequestration and biofuel production. It addresses the human alterations of rainfall stability, due to both land-use changes and climate change, the ongoing overuse of blue water, reflected in river depletion, expanding river basin closure, groundwater overexploitation and water pollution risks. The rising water turbulence in the Anthropocene changes the water research and policy agenda, from a waterresource efficiency to a water resilience focus. This includes integrated land and water stewardship to sustain wetness-dependent ecological functions at the landscape scale and a stronger emphasis on green water management for ecosystem services. A new paradigm of water governance emerges, encouraging land-use practices that explicitly take account of the multifunctional roles of water, with adequate attention to planetary freshwater boundaries and cross-scale interactions.

Biophysical and economic limits to negative CO2 emissions

“…Expressing additional water use as a proportion of runoff in a region would provide a more accurate picture of the threat to water resources at a given location -but this is not feasible without a spatially disaggregated analysis. Nevertheless, with human pressures on freshwater increasing 80,84 , water use could act as a significant limitation to implementation of high-water-demand NETs such as BECCS.…”

Resilience (Republished)

“…In the globally intertwined social-ecological system everyone is in everyone else's backyard, and cities both shape and are dependent on huge areas across the planet of ecosystems support (e.g., Folke et al 1997, Grimm et al 2008) for water, food, and other ecosystem services (e.g., Bennett et al 2014, Rist et al 2014, Rockström et al 2014b). It will be in the selfinterest of urban dwellers in the Anthropocene to create incentives for stewardship of their supporting ecosystems, or socialecological systems often far away from city borders that secure the basis of city life.…”

Climate Change: Implications for the Assumptions, Goals and Methods of Urban Environmental Planning

“…It also points out limitations in the way that the concept of sustainable development has been applied in U.S. urban environments, because of its conceptual dependency on the idea of sustaining pre-development processes (Hobbs et al, 2014;Palmer & Ruhl, 2015). The concepts of a "reference condition" and a "native species" both need significant re-consideration, along with the assumption that the scale of processes that underlie both biodiversity patterns and cultural landscapes, such as hydrologic flows, will continue to resemble the patterns of the last 1,000-3,000 years (Rockström et al, 2014). To the extent that the concept of sustainable development in North American urban regions became synonymous with the goals of sustaining native species and pre-development hydrologic processes, the concept is not robust in an era of rapid climate change.…”