| Title: |
Landscape Sensitivity, Resilience and Sustainable Watershed Management: A Co-evolutionary Perspective
|
| Resource Type: |
document --> technical publication --> report
|
| Country: |
EU Projects
|
| Year: |
2002 |
| Availability: |
J. McGlade (2002) Discussion paper prepared for The AQUADAPT workshop,
Montpellier October 25th-27th 2002
Landscape Sensitivity, Resilience and Sustainable Watershed Management: A Co-evolutionary Perspective
|
| Author 1/Producer: |
McGlade, J.
|
| Author / Producer Type: |
EC Project
|
|
EUGRIS Keyword(s): |
Contaminated land-->Soil and groundwater processes-->Soil and groundwater processes overview
|
| Long description: |
The conservation, and future sustainability of vulnerable fluvio-coastal environments,
along with the need for viable planning criteria and policy instruments for their longterm
management, are some of the central issues at the heart of the contemporary
environmental discourse1. For example, in the Mediterranean, coastal, riverine and
wetland areas are subject to increasing and unprecedented changes, as a
consequence of human-induced processes, such as industrial activities, commercial
harbour construction, land reclamation, drainage, canal construction and growing
urban encroachments (Falkenmark and Lindh 1993; Breton 1996; Breton et al. 1996).
But perhaps the single most important threat to sustainability is to be seen in the
effects of a rapidly expanding tourist sector, along with its attendant hotel and service
industries and their ever-growing demands for water – something particularly acute in
semi-arid regions of Spain (Breton and Sauri 1997). What is most worrying about
such a situation and one that has largely developed over the last 40 years, is that
historically such developments have frequently occurred in the absence of adequate
planning and environmental controls. Indeed, in many cases, land-use planning has
been short-termist, and decisions have been retro-active; that is, they have been
concerned with ‘sticking plaster’ or coping solutions, rather than the implementation of
long-term adaptive management strategies. An inevitable consequence of this
tradition of ad hoc policy-making – and particularly the encouragement of mass tourist
developments - has been the dramatic increase in pollution, soil erosion, pressure on
water consumption and general degradation of the environment including its cultural
and natural heritage (Pearson and Sullivan 1995;McGlade 2001a).
Indeed, in the semi-arid areas of the Mediterranean, particularly in the Middle East
and Spain, water is even more of a critical commodity because of the extreme
variations in rainfall and the ever-present threat of drought. Consequently there is a
constant danger of conflict in river catchments and coastal regions where water
supply and use is contested (Bulloch and Darwish 1993; Smith 1997). One of the
most significant responses to this situation is to be seen in attempts to encourage the
construction of integrated approaches to coastal zone and river basin management.
These have stressed the need for coherent planning methods and cross-disciplinary
approaches to data acquisition2. On the other hand, while much work has been
devoted to the development of legislation and policy instruments within existing
integrated coastal zone management schemes, nonetheless, they are often
ineffective due to the lack of co-ordination between the various actors and institutions
and their often conflicting world views. Moreover, the much-voiced support for crossdisciplinary
cooperation is frequently not matched by practical action.
Perhaps the most significant barrier to addressing these issues stems from a lack of
holistic thinking at governmental and managerial levels. In essence, this is due to a
low-level understanding of the nature of complexity and the nonlinear connectivities
that structure socio-natural systems; for example, solutions are often sought in largescale
decision-support systems models that generally are ill equipped to account for
the levels of complexity involved, especially the array of power structures and
counter-intuitive behaviours displayed by socio-political organizations, and/or the
vested interests of individuals. In particular, there are frequently fundamental
conflicts between those stakeholders focused on political and economic concepts of
growth and others committed to approaches favouring conservation, the
maintenance of biodiversity and local scale interventionist strategies. Significantly,
these conflicts operate at local, regional, national and European scales and reflect
fundamental differences in perception and value systems. Thus a crucial issue, for
any conception of sustainable management, is the need to understand the socioenvironmental
driving forces of change at different spatio-temporal scales. What this
means is an ability to assess the resilience of socio-natural landscapes to a variety
of human and naturally induced pressures - effectively, developing an understanding
of the variable sensitivities of ecological, economic and socio-cultural processes, so
as to anticipate likely future outcomes and possible unforeseen evolutionary
trajectories.
I address these issues by taking a critical look at the theoretical basis within which
current research on socio-natural systems is undertaken, with specific relation to the
current AQUADAPT initiative and its focus on river catchment systems. Specifically I
shall focus on the relationships between resilience (as a manifestation of
sustainability) and the notion of ‘landscape sensitivity’, assessing its potential
usefulness as a theoretical construct that might contribute to a better understanding
of watershed dynamics, in climatically marginal environments.
|
|
Submitted By:
|
Dr Stefan Gödeke WhoDoesWhat?
Last update: 14/02/2006
|
|
|
