IAHS-EGU 2014 Panta Rhei

IAHS-EGU 2014 Panta Rhei IWRM conference Bologna, Italy KMnotes130614 What is Panta Rhei? Panta Rhei is the name of the IAHS scientific decade 2013-2022. The purpose of Panta Rhei is to “reach an improved interpretation of the processes governing the water cycle by focusing on their changing dynamics in connection with rapidly changing human systems”.

Why important? Mainly driven from a hydrological perspective, who are trying to be more inclusive esp of social sciences (working with social scientists). You have an opportunity to get involved in the themes and working groups now and to contribute to the current community vision paper.

Key players? Apart from you, Alberto Montanari organised the conference and chaired an excellent session on the community vision paper, Hulpert Savenije (President of IAHS, Delft) and Günter Blöschl (EGU, Vienna).

KEY THEMES/POINTS Need for greater levels of synthesis and what is required to enable it. Requirement for improved indicators, which will enable understanding and monitoring of catchments as social ecological systems linked with governance. Humans are not passive actors and the complex management systems we have built, need to be in our models, including human behaviour. How to move from responding to existing problematic situations to being more pre-emptive? Water systems designed in the past are often now not fit for purpose. Gunther closed the conference suggesting that Panta Rhei can help the development of coherent theory on the two-way interaction between society and water.

INDIVIDUALS/TALKS (that I thought were good and/or important) Pieter van der Zaag (UNESCO-IHE) fascinating keynote on the need for bridging concepts and consensus across natural and social sciences as different epistemic communities see the same thing differently (we are sitting in local optima). Compared four different disciplines e.g. political geographers. Highlighted the importance of Norgard’s concept of coevolution.

Günter Blöschl, (Vienna University of Technology, Austria), Tom Evans (Indiana University) and Peter Loucks (Cornell, US)(and others) stressed the need to learn across individual studies to advance our understanding of the two way interactions between society and water.

Graham Jewitt (University of Kwazuli-Natal, SA) suggested for interested in how we train the next generation of interdisciplinary catchment scientists. Graham presented a triangle of that was required for improving catchments, with a focus on unpacking CoP. Tom Evans (Indiana University) in his keynote on governance, learning and complexity in water system made the case of the tight coupling between monitoring and governance (need robust governance indicators). Need more meta-analysis based on common coding across case-studies (he has been heavily influenced by Lin Ostrom’ framework) Peter Loucks (Cornell, US) in his keynote provided an overview of systems based approaches to water. If you model can do synthesis you will get a noble prize. Water has many dimensions and if we can understand these we can influence decision making. A challenge is that objectives change over time.

Quentin Grafton (ANU) in his eye opening keynote on the economics of water desalination in Sydney. Decision influenced by what climate data you use (in terms of over what period). The decision to build the plant was more about politics than finances.

Ezio Todini (Università di Bologna) in his keynote suggested we should communicate predictive knowledge and not predictive uncertainty to non-research stakeholders. Anthropogenic change on hydrology is interactive.

Andreas Schumann (Ruhr- University Bochum) presented in his keynote models of blue and green water in a region of China, highlighting that anthropogenic change is an interactive process. Though his model structures did not include what had driven land use/crop growth.

Tobi Krueger (Humboldt-Universität) on his talk about upping the social in socio-hydrology, presented impressive examples of stakeholder co-production of models to better understand catchments and what interventions we should make.

Barry Cloke (ANU, Australia) in hit talk on marrying hydrological modelling and integrated assessment needs of water resource management stressed that model structures (systems dynamics) need to include all the key components of the situation and the need for team based catchment research and importance of strong yet open minded leadership. Future challenge is how to formulate human behaviour in models to handle social and cultural differences.

Berit Arheimer (SMHI, Sweden) leads hydrological research in an operational setting. They have produced (and support) the impressive open source hydrological catchment model (HYPE). She is leading the new EU project water switch on. In her keynote she highlighted the trade-offs between ecology, water and energy esp. in small hydro schemes and need to understand (and importance of) human changes in river flows. Berit finished saying we have different roles as scientists (based on Pielke’s book) and need to be aware of what role Jennie Barron (SEI, York) presented a case study based on agricultural catchments in Burkino Faso based on hydrological data and modelling (SWAT) over 1980-2010 and livelihood mapping. Useful set of indicators. No silver bullet, need to make better use of soil moisture from rainfall (esp using mineral fertilisers).

Giuliano Di Baldassarre (Uppsala) presented a fascinating example of challenging the current narratives of population dynamics in Bangladesh based on inundation modelling with Lisflood and survey data.

Amin Elshorbagy (University of Saskatchewan) talked about the effect of water supply uncertainty and policy change on integrated water resource systems impressive linking of causal and quantitative models and presentation of risk profiles Fiona Dyer (University of Canberra) presented comparative analysis (including influence diagrams) of two cases (MD in Australia and US) exploring How is climate science being used to inform water resource plans. Highlighting that climate science is not being used explicitly in water resources planning.

Jörg Helmschrot (Universität Hamburg) part of scientific co-ordination team for the impressive Southern African Science Service Centre for Climate Change and Adaptive Land Management (SASSCAL): joint initiative of Angola, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia, and Germany, responding to the challenges of global change.

Gemma Carr (runs Vienna doctoral programme on water resource systems) talked about developing a dynamic framework to examine the interplay between environmental stress, stakeholder participation processes and hydrological systems. Asked what features of participatory processes lead to changes in management decisions. Highlighted the importance of intermediary outcomes based on the application of her framework to nine case-studies.

Leon Hermans (Delft) talked about dynamic adaptive policy pathways and adaptation tipping points.

Sideris (MeteoSwiss) presented on operational/real time radar-raingauge combination.

Alessandro Masoero (Politecnico di Torino) fairly simple L-moment statistical river network models and visualisation based on his thesis.