Riesgo Climático y la Seguridad Hídrica
en el Continente Americano
Climate Risk and Water Security in the Americas
TALLER DE CIENCIA Y POLÍTICA
SCIENCE – POLICY WORKSHOP
San José del Cabo, México
Feb. 27 – Mar. 2, 2011
Working definitions of key concepts
Presentation by Robert Varady
Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy
• Water Security
• Integrated assessment
• Co-generation & use of knowledge
and ways of knowing
• Adaptation, coping, and scale
Water security
Environment and security
A post-realist perspective
• Environment and security are closely intertwined, esp.
where water is scarce & in transboundary regions
• “Realist” view of security focused on national sovereignty:
Environmental conflicts = threats to security, stability, wellbeing.
• “Post-realist” or non-traditional view of security:
– More holistic
– Expands concept to: social, economic, demographic, agricultural
& natural-resources matters
– Sees tradeoffs between security & other values
– Promotes cooperative approaches to environmental conflicts
Environment and security
A post-realist perspective
• Redefinition of security includes
Food security and poverty, climate variability and change, water
security, energy security, environmental quality, vulnerability to
extreme events
• Our approach to water security
– Post-realist
– Favors tradition of cooperative solutions to shared problems,
esp. in multinational settings
Drivers of environmental change
– Water scarcity
• Principal long-term driver
• Historically, limited settlements in the Americas
• Brought by massive irrigation and other development schemes
– Cattle
• Overgrazing, deveg. & degraded land, depleted riparian areas & aquifers
– Mining of gold, silver, and copper
• Heavy water use, and depletion & pollution of water of sources
• Dust-borne air pollution
• Deforestation and devegetation
– Industrialization
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Maquiladoras
Population growth & urbanization
Overburdened infrastructure—water delivery, treatment & sanit. systems
Increased vehicular traffic, dust, and other air pollution
Environmental security
Water issues
– Population growth in arid & semiarid regions:
Water security & econ. development are interlinked.
– Poor governance & mismanagement of natural resources
growing imbalance between water supply & demand.
– Few resources are as vital to future as water . . .
and yet complexity involved is not fully understood.
Integrated Assessment
What we mean by
‘Integrated Assessment’
Interdisciplinary process of combining, interpreting &
communicating knowledge
• From diverse scientific disciplines
• So that entire set of cause/effect interactions of a problem can
be evaluated from synoptically such that:
(i) There should be added value compared to single disciplinary assessment
(ii) This provide useful information to decision makers
Kloprogge and Van der Sluijs, 2006
Integration
in our work
Includes, but not limited to,
sectoral perspectives
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Management (of water, emergencies, disasters)
Farming & ranching
Industry
Urban & rural issues, including demog. change
Diversity of disciplinary perspectives
― Physical, natural & social sciences
Transboundary collaboration
Co-generation & Use of Knowledge
and Ways of Knowing
Co-generation and transfer
of knowledge in our work
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Involves scientists, managers, decisionmakers, civil society
Emphasizes contexts and governance
Renders knowledge more germane, useful, usable
Stimulates “adaptive pathways”—adoption of more
adaptive, “climatic thinking” into operations & planning
― Helps formulate research agendas
― Aims to influence public policy
Multinational/transboundary
‘Community of Practice’
Can facilitate . . .
• Adaptive pathways
– New institutional priorities or ways of operating
• e.g., if an organization changes its management structure or practices to
address climate change
• Opportunities
– Emergence of networks
– Flexibility, institutional/social learning
Can help overcome . . .
• Challenges
– Disciplinary pigeonholing, bureaucratic rigidity, sparse information
– Defining problems in mutually-satisfactory ways
– Maintaining continuity of effort
Wilder, et al. 2010
Assessing Collaboration
• All collaborations are not created equal!
• Scholars have reached consensus on:
− People from various viewpoints should come together to
discuss intractable problems, find workable solutions
− Only face-to-face engagement can produce trust, shared
experiences, positive relationships, empathic
understanding leading to innovations in governance
Wilder et al. 2010; Pelling et al. 2008; Lemos and Morehouse 2005; Cash et al., 2003
Bridging different
ways of knowing
The integrated approach recognizes
how actors use‘multiple ways of knowing’(MWK) to
frame water or climate problems and improve
collaborative processes
• Stakeholders define problems differently & arrive at
different solutions (lack of MWK commonly leads to failures
of water governance arrangements)
• Three levels of ways of knowing:
― Transfer (lowest), Translation, Transformation (highest)
H. Ingram and J. Endter-Wada 2008
Adaptation, Coping, and Scale
Adaptation and coping
A working definition
• What do we mean by ‘adaptation’ to climate variability and
change (CVC) ?
Actions that reduce vulnerability of a system (e.g., city), its various populations
(e.g., children, the poor), or overall population to negative impacts of CVC.
Autonomous adaptation or coping occurs without any specific planning (e.g., by
companies or individuals)
• What is adaptive capacity or adaptability?
The ability of a system, a population, a household. or an individual to:
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Adjust to CVC
Reduce or moderate potential damages resulting from CVC
Take advantage of opportunities, or
Cope with consequences of CVC
Elements of adaptive capacity include knowledge, institutional capacity, and
financial & technological resources.
Romero Lankao, P., and D. Gnatz, D. In press. Framework for addressing the interactions between
urban areas and climate change. 2011 Human Settlements Report on Cities and Climate Change.
Adaptation and scale
Scale—spatial and institutional—can be seen as an
important element of context (like location, culture,
moment in time, political setting, robustness of
institutions, level of infrastructure. . . .)
• What is the relationship between adaptation and scale?
• Do some policies or strategies work at some scales, but not
at others?
• At what scale is adaptation likely to be most effective?
• What characteristics of CVC policy design and on-theground coordination are best to bridge contexts and
function across spatial and institutional scales?