Claudia Pahl-Wostl – författare

The complexity of current water resource management poses many challenges. Water managers need to solve a range of interrelated water dilemmas, such as balancing water quantity and quality, flooding, drought, maintaining biodiversity and ecological functions and services, in a context where human beliefs, actions and values play a central role. Furthermore, the growing uncertainties of global climate change and the long term implications of management actions make the problems even more difficult.

This book explains the benefits, outcomes and lessons learned from adaptive water management (AWM). In essence AWM is a way of responding to uncertainty by designing policy measures which are provisional and incremental, subject to subsequent modification in response to environmental change and other variables. Included are illustrative case studies from seven river basins from across Europe, West Asia and Africa: the Elbe, Rhine, Guadiana, Tisza, Orange, Nile and Amudarya. These exemplify the key challenges of adaptive water management, especially when rivers cross national boundaries, creating additional problems of governance.

The complexity of current water resource management poses many challenges. Water managers need to solve a range of interrelated water dilemmas, such as balancing water quantity and quality, flooding, drought, maintaining biodiversity and ecological functions and services, in a context where human beliefs, actions and values play a central role. Furthermore, the growing uncertainties of global climate change and the long term implications of management actions make the problems even more difficult.

This book explains the benefits, outcomes and lessons learned from adaptive water management (AWM). In essence AWM is a way of responding to uncertainty by designing policy measures which are provisional and incremental, subject to subsequent modification in response to environmental change and other variables. Included are illustrative case studies from seven river basins from across Europe, West Asia and Africa: the Elbe, Rhine, Guadiana, Tisza, Orange, Nile and Amudarya. These exemplify the key challenges of adaptive water management, especially when rivers cross national boundaries, creating additional problems of governance.

The international contributors explore the various perspectives on water security to show that it has multiple meanings that cannot easily be reconciled. Topics discussed include: challenges from human security to consumerism, how trade policies can help to achieve water security in a transboundary setting, the potential of risk-based governance arrangements and the ecology of water security.

Scholars and postgraduate students in the social sciences working on water-related issues will find this book to be of substantial interest. It will strongly appeal to policymakers and practitioners looking at the strengths and limitations of water security.

Contributors: L. Addams, J. Allouche, L.Auguste, K. Bakker, M.H.N. Bakker, M. Ballesteros, A. Bhaduri, J. Bogardi, H.G. Brauch, S.E. Bunn, I. Burgher, N. Cenacchi, K.I. Conti, C. Cook, A.C. de la Cruz, J.W. Dellapenna, L. De Stefano, P. Droogers, S. Elsawah, I. Fischhendler, A. Garrido, S. Gruber, J. Gupta, N. Hernández-Mora, P. Huntjens, A.J. Jakeman, K. Knüppe, N. Kukuri , F.P. Lansigan, K. Lexén, J. Liu, E. López-Gunn, F. Ludwig, J.H. Matthews, L. Mehta, R. Meissner, F. Meza, D. Nathan, A. Nicol, P. Obani, Ú. Oswald Spring, C. Pahl-Wostl, M.J. Patrick, C. Ringler, D. Rodriguez, C.A. Scott, S. Srivastava, B. Stewart-Koster, T.B. Sulser, R. Treguer, M. van den Heuvel, H. van Schaik, B.A. Willaarts, J. Xia, H. Yang, T. Zhu

Sustainable water management is a key environmental challenge of the 21st century. Developing and implementing innovative management approaches and how to cope with the increasing complexity and uncertainties was the theme of the first International Conference on Adaptive and Integrated Water Management, held in November 2007 in Basel, Switzerland. The conference volume includes selected contributions on conceptual and methodological innovations and empirical insights from case studies on important themes such as multi-level governance, change management, vulnerability assessment, environmental flows, uncertainty analysis and the impacts of climate change. The book addresses a wide interdisciplinary audience of scientists and professionals from academia, industry, and involved in policy making.