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| 2. |
- Oriangi, George, et al.
(författare)
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Household resilience to climate change hazards in Uganda
- 2020
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Ingår i: International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management. - : EMERALD GROUP PUBLISHING LTD. - 1756-8692 .- 1756-8706. ; 12:1, s. 59-73
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Purpose As climate change shocks and stresses increasingly affect urban areas in developing countries, resilience is imperative for the purposes of preparation, recovery and adaptation. This study aims to investigate demographic characteristics and social networks that influence the household capacity to prepare, recover and adapt when faced with prolonged droughts or erratic rainfall events in Mbale municipality in Eastern Uganda. Design/methodology/approach A cross-sectional research design was used to elicit subjective opinions. Previous studies indicate the importance of subjective approaches for measuring social resilience but their use has not been well explored in the context of quantifying urban resilience to climate change shocks and stresses. This study uses 389 structured household interviews to capture demographic characteristics, social networks and resilience capacities. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used for analysis. Findings The ability of low-income households to meet their daily expenditure needs, household size, and networks with relatives and non government organizations (NGOs) were significant determinants of preparedness, recovery and adaptation to prolonged droughts or erratic rainfall events. Originality/value Even the low-income households are substantially more likely to prepare for and recover from prolonged droughts or erratic rainfall events if they can meet their daily expenditure needs. This finding is noteworthy because the poorest in society are generally the most vulnerable to hazards.
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| 3. |
- Jaramillo, Fernando, et al.
(författare)
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Priorities and Interactions of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with Focus on Wetlands
- 2019
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Ingår i: Water. - : MDPI. - 2073-4441. ; 11:3
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Wetlands are often vital physical and social components of a country’s natural capital, as well as providers of ecosystem services to local and national communities. We performed a network analysis to prioritize Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets for sustainable development in iconic wetlands and wetlandscapes around the world. The analysis was based on the information and perceptions on 45 wetlandscapes worldwide by 49 wetland researchers of the Global Wetland Ecohydrological Network (GWEN). We identified three 2030 Agenda targets of high priority across the wetlandscapes needed to achieve sustainable development: Target 6.3—“Improve water quality”; 2.4—“Sustainable food production”; and 12.2—“Sustainable management of resources”. Moreover, we found specific feedback mechanisms and synergies between SDG targets in the context of wetlands. The most consistent reinforcing interactions were the influence of Target 12.2 on 8.4—“Efficient resource consumption”; and that of Target 6.3 on 12.2. The wetlandscapes could be differentiated in four bundles of distinctive priority SDG-targets: “Basic human needs”, “Sustainable tourism”, “Environmental impact in urban wetlands”, and “Improving and conserving environment”. In general, we find that the SDG groups, targets, and interactions stress that maintaining good water quality and a “wise use” of wetlandscapes are vital to attaining sustainable development within these sensitive ecosystems.
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| 4. |
- Breinl, Korbinian, et al.
(författare)
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Extreme dry and wet spells face changes in their duration and timing
- 2020
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Ingår i: Environmental Research Letters. - : IOP Publishing. - 1748-9326. ; 15:7
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Dry spells are sequences of days without precipitation. They can have negative implications for societies, including water security and agriculture. For example, changes in their duration and within-year timing can pose a threat to food production and wildfire risk. Conversely, wet spells are sequences of days with precipitation above a certain threshold, and changes in their duration and within-year timing can impact agriculture, flooding or the prevalence of water-related vector-borne diseases. Here we assess changes in the duration and within-year timing of extreme dry and wet spells over 60 years (1958-2017) using a consistent global land surface precipitation dataset of 5093 rain gauge locations. The dataset allowed for detailed spatial analyses of the United States, Europe and Australia. While many locations exhibit statistically significant changes in the duration of extreme dry and wet spells, the changes in the within-year timing are less often significant. Our results show consistencies with observations and projections from state-of-the-art climate and water resources research. In addition, we provide new insights regarding trends in the timing of extreme dry and wet spells, an aspect being equally important for possible future implications of extremes in a changing climate, which has not yet received the same level of attention and is characterized by larger uncertainty.
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| 5. |
- Yu, David J., et al.
(författare)
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On capturing human agency and methodological interdisciplinarity in socio-hydrology research
- 2022
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Ingår i: Hydrological Sciences Journal. - : Taylor & Francis. - 0262-6667 .- 2150-3435. ; 67:13, s. 1905-1916
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Socio-hydrology has expanded and been effective in exposing the hydrological community to ideas and approaches from other scientific disciplines, and social sciences in particular. Yet it still has much to explore regarding how to capture human agency and how to combine different methods and disciplinary views from both the hydrological and the social sciences to develop knowledge. A useful starting ground is noting that the complexity of human–water relations is due to interactions not only across spatial and temporal scales but also across different organizational levels of social systems. This calls for consideration of another analytical scale, the human organizational scale, and interdisciplinarity in study methods. Based on the papers published in this journal’s Special Issue Advancing Socio-hydrology over 2019–2022, this paper illuminates how the understanding of coupled human–water systems can be strengthened by capturing the multi-level nature of human decision making and by applying an interdisciplinary multi-method approach.
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| 6. |
- Biella, Riccardo, et al.
(författare)
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Thinking systemically about climate services: Using archetypes to reveal maladaptation
- 2024
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Ingår i: Climate Services. - : Elsevier BV. - 2405-8807. ; 34
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Developing and implementing climate adaptation measures in complex socio-ecological systems can lead to unintended consequences, especially when those systems are undergoing rapid hydro-climatic and socio-economic change. In these dynamic contexts, a systemic approach can make the difference between adaptive and maladaptive outcomes. This paper focuses on the use of climate services, often touted as no-regret solutions, and their potential to generate maladaptation. We explored the interactions between climate services and adaptation/maladaptation across five case studies affected by different types of natural hazards and characterized by a range of hydro-climatic and socio-economic conditions. Using system archetypes, we show how climate services can play a role in both producing and preventing maladaptation. The dynamics explored through system archetypes are: i) “fixes that fail”, where short-sighted solutions fail to address the root causes of a problem; ii) “band aid solutions”, where the benefits brought about in the short-term come at the expenses of delaying long-term adaptive actions; and iii) “success to the successful”, where some groups increasingly benefit from climate services at the expenses of other groups. We demonstrate how these dynamics constitute maladaptive processes, as well as identifying the tools and theories that can be used in this type of assessment. Finally, we provide a framework and recommendations to guide the ex-ante assessment of maladaptation risk when designing and implementing climate services.
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| 7. |
- De Luca, Paolo, et al.
(författare)
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Concurrent wet and dry hydrological extremes at the global scale
- 2020
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Ingår i: Earth System Dynamics. - : Copernicus GmbH. - 2190-4979 .- 2190-4987. ; 11:1, s. 251-266
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Multi-hazard events can be associated with larger socio-economic impacts than single-hazard events. Understanding the spatio-temporal interactions that characterize the former is therefore of relevance to disaster risk reduction measures. Here, we consider two high-impact hazards, namely wet and dry hydrological extremes, and quantify their global co-occurrence. We define these using the monthly self-calibrated Palmer Drought Severity Index based on the Penman-Monteith model (sc_PDSI_pm), covering the period 1950-2014, at 2.5 degrees horizontal resolution. We find that the land areas affected by extreme wet, dry, and wet-dry events (i.e. geographically remote yet temporally co-occurring wet or dry extremes) are all increasing with time, the trends of which in dry and wet-dry episodes are significant (p value << 0.01). The most geographically widespread wet-dry event was associated with the strong La Nina in 2010. This caused wet-dry anomalies across a land area of 21 million km(2) with documented high-impact flooding and drought episodes spanning diverse regions. To further elucidate the interplay of wet and dry extremes at a grid cell scale, we introduce two new metrics: the wet-dry (WD) ratio and the extreme transition (ET) time intervals. The WD ratio measures the relative occurrence of wet or dry extremes, whereas ET quantifies the average separation time of hydrological extremes with opposite signs. The WD ratio shows that the incidence of wet extremes dominates over dry extremes in the USA, northern and southern South America, northern Europe, north Africa, western China, and most of Australia. Conversely, dry extremes are more prominent in most of the remaining regions. The median ET for wet to dry is similar to 27 months, while the dry-to-wet median ET is 21 months. We also evaluate correlations between wet-dry hydrological extremes and leading modes of climate variability, namely the El Nina-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), and Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO). We find that ENSO and PDO have a similar influence globally, with the former significantly impacting (p value < 0.05) a larger area (18.1 % of total sc_PDSI_pm area) compared to the latter (12.0 %), whereas the AMO shows an almost inverse pattern and significantly impacts the largest area overall (18.9 %). ENSO and PDO show the most significant correlations over northern South America, the central and western USA, the Middle East, eastern Russia, and eastern Australia. On the other hand, the AMO shows significant associations over Mexico, Brazil, central Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, China, and eastern Russia. Our analysis brings new insights on hydrological multi-hazards that are of relevance to governments and organizations with globally distributed interests. Specifically, the multi-hazard maps may be used to evaluate worst-case disaster scenarios considering the potential co-occurrence of wet and dry hydrological extremes.
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| 8. |
- Rusca, Maria, Dr, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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Scenarios of Human Responses to Unprecedented Social-Environmental Extreme Events
- 2021
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Ingår i: Earth's Future. - : American Geophysical Union (AGU). - 2328-4277. ; 9:4
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)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.
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| 9. |
- Ferdous, Md Ruknul, et al.
(författare)
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The interplay between structural flood protection, population density, and flood mortality along the Jamuna River, Bangladesh
- 2020
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Ingår i: Regional Environmental Change. - : SPRINGER HEIDELBERG. - 1436-3798 .- 1436-378X. ; 20:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Levees protect floodplain areas from frequent flooding, but they can paradoxically contribute to more severe flood losses. The construction or reinforcement of levees can attract more assets and people in flood-prone area, thereby increasing the potential flood damage when levees eventually fail. Moreover, structural protection measures can generate a sense of complacency, which can reduce preparedness, thereby increasing flood mortality rates. We explore these phenomena in the Jamuna River floodplain in Bangladesh. In this study area, different levels of flood protection have co-existed alongside each other since the 1960s, with a levee being constructed only on the right bank and its maintenance being assured only in certain places. Primary and secondary data on population density, human settlements, and flood fatalities were collected to carry out a comparative analysis of two urban areas and two rural areas with different flood protection levels. We found that the higher the level of flood protection, the higher the increase of population density over the past decades as well as the number of assets exposed to flooding. Our results also show that flood mortality rates associated with the 2017 flooding in Bangladesh were lower in the areas with lower protection level. This empirical analysis of the unintended consequences of structural flood protection is relevant for the making of sustainable policies of disaster risk reduction and adaptation to climate change in rapidly changing environments.
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| 10. |
- Mondino, Elena, 1993-
(författare)
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Changes in Hydrological Risk Perception and Implications for Disaster Risk Reduction
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Economic losses caused by hydrological extremes, such as floods and droughts, are exacerbating because of increased anthropogenic activities and global environmental changes. Understanding how individuals and communities interact with hydrological extremes thus becomes fundamental to develop effective strategies for disaster risk reduction. Risk perception plays an important role in determining how individuals and communities respond to the occurrence of an extreme event. This thesis aims at addressing aspects of risk perception that remain largely unknown. They include: i) how flood risk perceptions change over time, ii) the role of previous experiences, and iii) how the perception of flood risk relates to the perception of other natural hazards, such as droughts. The work is based on survey data collected in different study areas – both in Italy and Sweden at the local and national scales – via longitudinal as well as cross-sectional approaches. In relation to the three main objectives, this thesis found that: i) flood risk perceptions evolve differently over time depending on social groups; ii) different types of previous experiences with floods directly influence specific facets of risk perception, with knowledge deriving from the experience also playing an important role; iii) flood risk perception is heavily intertwined with drought risk perception. These results have policy and theoretical implications. Concerning the former, they can inform disaster risk reduction efforts in terms of risk communication and promote an integrated management of hydrological risk. As for the latter, they stress the importance of taking social heterogeneity into account when modelling the interaction between the social and the hydrological spheres, as this can influence the community’s response to extreme events. Fostering human adaptation to climate extremes is a priority. This thesis argues that adaptation can be achieved by promoting the awareness that not only are we at risk, but also that we have the means to address the risk.
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