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2008 | Buch

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Mountains: Sources of Water, Sources of Knowledge

herausgegeben von: Ellen Wiegandt

Verlag: Springer Netherlands

Buchreihe : Advances in Global Change Research

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Über dieses Buch

The idea for Mountains: Sources of Water, Sources of Knowledge began with the constitution of the Association Montagne 2002, whose mission was to celebrate the International Year of Mountains in the alpine canton of Valais, Switzerland. The year 2002 was the occasion for diverse activities ranging from exchanges with Bhutan and the construction of a traditional hanging bridge, to a contest for schoolchildren and roving photography exhibits. An international scientific colloquium was also organized at the University Institute Kurt Bösch. Committee members of the Association Montagne subsequently agreed that the presentations should be gathered into a book. The topic seemed particularly approp- ate for the Martin Beniston-edited series, “Advances in Global Change Research,” which regularly publishes the results of the annual Wengen Workshops on Global Climate Change Research as well as of other conferences. This volume was a collective effort. The dedication of the Assoc- tion Montagne committee members was unflagging. The commitment to the overall project of State Councilor Jean-Jacques Rey-Bellet and of Gabrielle Nanchen, then President of the Fondation pour le développement durable des regions de montagne, was particularly noteworthy and is gratefully acknowledged here. We appreciate the support of numerous financial sponsors of the Association Montagne 2002 and its International Year of Mountains activities, who made the conference and the book possible. Martin Beniston deserves thanks for including the volume in his series.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

General Concepts and Processes; Mountain Specificities

1. Framing the Study of Mountain Water Resources: An Introduction

A crucial vulnerability the international community will face in the near future is access to fresh water in sufficient quantity and of adequate quality to meet the needs of a growing global population. As a result, mountains, which have always held a privileged relationship with water as the sources of the world's greatest rivers and the homes of huge glacier reserves, will come under increasing pressure. Already, these “water towers of the world” are threatened by major global forces. Climate change is predicted to modify the quantities of water available and shift its seasonality. Even greater challenges will come from the dynamics of human behavior. Population growth is one obvious threat to sufficient water supply, but equally important are changing norms and evolving activities. Historically dominant activities like agriculture and herding now compete with industry, leisure, domestic, and energy sectors for mountain water. These new uses are overlaid by various social constructs like pricing schemes, regulations, and property rights that shape production and consumption patterns by determining who gets how much water and when. Appropriate solutions for water use management contribute to efficient and equitable distribution. Poor administration is likely to aggravate shortages, increase social and economic disparities, and thereby make water issues a potential source of deadly local and international conflict.

Ellen Wiegandt

2. “Water Towers”—A Global View of the Hydrological Importance of Mountains

Mountains and highlands are often referred to as natural “water towers” because they provide lowlands with essential freshwater for irrigation and food production, for industrial use, and for the domestic needs of rapidly growing urban populations. Therefore, better knowledge about moun tain water resources in different climatic zones is essential for adequate management of these resources. In this chapter, a data-based approach is used that enables the quantification of the hydrological significance of mountains. The study reveals that the world's major water towers are found in arid and semi-arid zones and that pressure on mountain water resources in general will sharpen due to climatic change, population growth, and competing use.

Daniel Viviroli, Rolf Weingartner

3. The History of Irrigation and Water Control in China'S Erhai Catchment: Mitigation and Adaptation to Environmental Change

This chapter introduces an interdisciplinary methodology that combines the use of archaeological and documentary sources alongside environmental proxy indicators found in sedimentary archives to assess, on a hydrological catchment scale, historical human impacts on hydrology. The advantages and benefits of this technique are demonstrated through the results taken from ongoing work on a case study, Erhai in Yunnan province, China. This approach allows us to increase understanding of local knowledge, vulnerability, mitigation, adaptation, and resilience to local, regional, and globally derived environment and climate change.

Darren Crook, Mark Elvin, Richard Jones, Shen Ji, Gez Foster, John Dearing

4. Scarcity, Equity, and Transparency: General Principles for Successfully Governing the Water Commons

A comparative cross-cultural study of several successful farmer-operated irrigation systems in two different parts of the world—the Andes of South America and the Mediterranean coast of Spain—reveals that the same set of institutions (or rules and operating principles) produces sustainable positive outcomes in each case. Several successful irrigation systems, well-documented in the literature, are thought to be of fundamentally distinct types and known to be of widely different scales: Valencia, Alicante, and Murcia in Spain. This success can only be explained in terms of basic similarities underlying the more obvious but superficial differences noted previously by other researchers. Similarities include operating principles the author first identified in his ethnographic research on successful irrigation communities in Peru. A brief overview of the comparative literature on successful systems in other semi-arid regions— India, Nepal, the Philippines—shows that the same basic system for sharing water under conditions of scarcity has emerged independently in a great many communities throughout the world, suggesting that this system is an optimal one, and constitutes a clear and unprecedented case of parallel or convergent social evolution. The author concludes with some implications of such a general model—or “universal” schema—for both the theory and practice of sustainable local irrigation.

Paul Trawick

5. From Principles to Action: Incentives to Enforce Common Property Water Management

It is now commonplace to acknowledge the long history and broad geographical spread of common property resource management schemes. At present, common property solutions are also debated in arenas such as climate change (where the atmosphere is the commons) and water allocation. These discussions raise general questions about the efficiency and equity of cooperative solutions as well about the likelihood of their implementation. Several factors are relevant in this context: how actors overcome collective action problems in order to create a community of users (i.e., how to prevent “exit”), how to regulate overuse and thus prevent dissipation of resources (i.e., how to control “entrance”), and how to maintain open and democratic decision-making about property use to assure efficient and equitable exploitation. In the high mountain communities of the Valais, common property management of some water and land resources has a long history which has continued until today. The practice is well-documented, providing a wealth of data to examine the evolution of village-level institutions developed to regulate their uncertain resource base in order to meet the needs of current and future generations. This chapter argues that individual incentives and collective control produced systems that were both efficient and equitable. These historical solutions are relevant to contemporary challenges concerning collective action and resource management.

Ellen Wiegandt

Multiple Uses and Competition for Mountain Water

6. Hydroelectric Resources Between State and Market in the Alpine Countries

This chapter analyzes hydroelectric exploitation in the alpine countries and provides a case study on an installation situated in Switzerland. In particular, it examines the implications of the opening of electricity markets to competition, which raises deep controversies. It takes into account the institutional, socioeconomic, environmental, and energy aspects of the problem. It outlines the historical roots of current problems, as well as the prospects for the medium and long term. As a whole, the article provides a rather positive judgment on the hydroelectric exploitation's prospects, in spite of the complexity of the problems and uncertainties. Concerning the mountain regions, it suggests taking advantage of the opportunity provided by the electricity sector's reorganization in order to improve their situation as electricity producers and traders. In this respect, they should concentrate on peak production and promote green labels.

Franco Romerio

7. Crans-Montana: Water Resources Management in an Alpine Tourist Resort

Water is a key element of services supplied by Crans-Montana. It is part of the landscape and is the physical base for sport activities in its various forms (water, snow, ice). Because of the high concentration of tourist activities at this Swiss alpine resort during certain seasons—and the multiple uses of water in tourism—problems of supply sometimes emerge. When this is the case, the uses of this resource for tourism enter into competition with other types of water uses (drinking water for the resident population, irrigation, and hydroelectric production). Recent studies show that current water problems in the Crans-Montana resort are not due to water scarcity per se, but are the result of dysfunctional management. Decision makers are increasingly conscious of the need to better manage this resource. The challenge is to find how to connect “traditional” knowledge with “modern” techniques about water use and management.

Christophe Clivaz, Emmanuel Reynard

Water Conflicts and Conflict Resolution Mechanisms

8. Water Value, Water Management, and Water Conflict: A Systematic Approach

This report on the work of an Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian-American-Dutch project shows that water issues are best dealt with by thinking in terms of water values rather than water quantities. In this way, water conflicts can be reduced to disputes over money—in many cases, surprisingly little money. It is argued that actual free-water markets will not successfully allocate water resources, partly because water markets are unlikely to be competitive and partly because of externalities including both environmental concerns and the fact that countries place special values on the use of water in agriculture—values that exceed the returns to farmers. However, it is possible to build economic models of water use that incorporate such features and that can guide water management and infrastructure decisions. These models produce “shadow values” that can guide decisions in the same way free-market prices would if they could cope with the difficulties mentioned above. These shadow values can then be used to guide international (or other) cooperation in water. These methods are applied to Israel, Jordan, and Palestine, and the gains from cooperation are found to be much larger than the gains from reasonably large shifts in water ownership. By such means, water conflicts can be resolved.

Franklin M. Fisher

9. Evolutionary Explanations of Syrian—Turkish Water Conflict

The issues of water and territory dominate relations between Syria and Turkey, upstream and downstream riparians in the Euphrates and Tigris basin. This chapter propose an evolutionary game to explore eventual trajectories of riparian relations. Turkish hawks are defined as those Turkish foreign policies that support no water concessions. Turkish doves can instead support the flow of an increased amount of water to Syria on the basis of an international agreement. Syrian hawks are those Syrian foreign policies that do not recognize Turkish sovereignty over Hatay—also known as the Sandjak of Alexandretta. Syrian doves can in turn accept that the territory belongs now to Turkey. It is found that evolutionary stability does not depend upon the values territory and water represent for the fitness of Syrian and Turkish foreign policies. No evolutionary stability is possible unless doves are cooperative towards hawks. If doves are cooperative towards hawks, the unique evolutionarily stable outcome implies their extinction. Riparian relations will ultimately evolve into mutual intransigence.

Serdar Ş Güner

10. Water Use and Risk: the Use of Prospect Theory to Guide Public Policy Decision-Making

Water is fundamental to human existence and it has no substitutes. As such, policy disputes over water can be expected to be more severe than policy disputes involving almost any other resource. This chapter considers two types of policy disputes over water and water usage. The first type of policy dispute concerns development projects, which are usually very large-scale projects like dams, irrigation systems, and desalination plants, and involve major investments by governments and/or corporations. The second type of policy disputes concerns conservation projects, which typically involve restricting flow rates through existing facilities or otherwise altering existing utilization habits, and thereby involve small measures taken by a large number of individuals. The purpose of this chapter is two-fold—to explain the source of these disputes and to examine the usual attempts at managing the resolution of these disputes. Both the source and the resolution of these problems rest on the psychology of human decision-making.

Raymond Dacey

Indigenous Knowledge; Technical Solutions

11. Disasters, Development, and Glacial Lake Control in Twentieth-Century Peru

During the past 65 years, glacier melting in Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range has caused some of the world's most deadly glacial lake outburst floods and glacier avalanches. Since the onset of these catastrophes in 1941, various groups have understood glacier hazards in distinct ways. Scientists and engineers saw them as technical problems. Economic developers and government officials believed glacier hazards threatened vital hydroelectric, irrigation, and tourism projects. And local residents feared glaciers and glacial lakes, though they ranked natural disasters among other social, political, and economic risks. Despite these marked differences in defining glacier hazards, local residents, authorities, developers, and scientific experts generally sought the same solution to Cordillera Blanca glacier disasters: draining glacial lakes to avoid outburst floods. Thus, risk perception varied, but each group proposed similar strategies to prevent glacier disasters. This chapter also suggests that development interests can help reduce the risk of natural disasters for local people and that local, marginalized populations can influence their degree of vulnerability to natural disasters.

Mark Carey

12. Wetlands and Indigenous Knowledge in the Highlands of Western Ethiopia

Wetlands in the highlands of western Ethiopia are important natural resources that provide a range of goods and services to local communities. A perceived increase in the drainage and cultivation of these wetlands in the mid 1990s, however, prompted concerns of widespread wetland degradation and unsustainable levels of utilisation, with consequences for food and water security. Drawing upon participatory field research carried out in Illubabor zone, Ethiopia, this chapter discusses the contribution of indigenous knowledge (IK) to wetland management in the area, and assesses its implications for the sustainability of the wetland environment. The results of the research suggest that continuous wetland drainage and cultivation in Illubabor has been ongoing for at least 30 years and that indigenous management practices based on IK have evolved over time, through farmers' experience of the wetland environment. Contrary to initial concerns, these management practices appear to form the basis of sustainable wetland use strategies. It is suggested, however, that recent government initiatives that are not sensitive to indigenous wetland management practices may threaten the sustainability of the wetland system.

Alan Dixon

13. A New Ancient Water Mill:Remembering Former Techniques

Waterwheels are one of the most ancient and most common machines. They appeared at the end of the second century B.C. and remained the most important source of mechanical energy beside that of humans and animals till the Industrial Revolution, driving mills, saws, pumps, bellows or hammers. Through a description of their design found in old texts, it has been possible to trace the conception of technology, beginning with the craft industry and ending with mathematical physics. In order to revive this extremely important technique, a water mill was constructed near Sion, using historical methods and workmanship. It includes a wooden waterwheel as well as all gears necessary to allow two millstones to rotate at a specified speed. Moreover, measurements were made on a scale model of the waterwheel with its ancient geometry, which has shown an efficiency of nearly 80 percent.

Michel Dubas

14. Water-Related Natural Disasters: Strategies to Deal With Debris Flows: The Case of Tschengls, Italy

The chapter reports on a case study of how people and public administrations dealt in the past and currently deal with the danger of debris flow. After a brief description of main debris flow features, the time series of debris flow events and the history of training works at the Tschengls torrent are reported. Finally, a modern approach based on a theoretical background of debris flow research is described. The integral analysis allows us to assess the debris flow activity and intensity in satisfactory detail and therefore allows us to derive recommendations for structural and nonstructural measures.

Walter Gostner, Gian Reto Bezzola, Markus Schatzmann, Hans-Erwin Minor

15. Flood Volume Estimation and Flood Mitigation: Adige River Basin

In the present work, we describe an extended flood risk analysis carried out in the Adige River basin in Italy. The methodologies adopted were used in a comparative approach that highlighted the limits and potentiality of some methods with respect to others. Principles presented may be considered of interest for general problems of flood risk management. The work carried out shows interesting results along with a broad number of specificities that may constitute a useful support for those who will apply hydrological analyses on large-size basins. The study basin covers a wide area of about 12,000 km². In such a case, a satisfactory analysis becomes complex because of the large number of phenomena involved in flood generation that need to be taken into account.

Salvatore Manfreda, Mauro Fiorentino

16. Hydrological Assessment for Selected Karstic Springs in the Mountain Regions of Bulgaria

Karstic water is an important source of water in the rural areas of Bulgaria. In this study, we estimate the impact of climate variability on the regime of karstic springs of two mountainous regions of the country. Since 1981 Bulgaria has experienced a continuous decrease in rainfall combined with an increase in air temperature. As a result, ground water levels and spring discharge have decreased. Data from three karstic springs were used. The springs refer to karstified Proterozoic marbles. Their watersheds are situated in the Pirin and Rhodopes mountains located in the southwestern part of Bulgaria. The infiltrated snowmelt water is the main source of spring recharge. The springs are included in the National Hydrogeological Network. Time series of spring discharge were studied, with a special focus on the drought period during 1982–1994, which was compared to the 1960–2001 observation period. The 1982–1994 drought period in Bulgaria also considerably influenced the evaluated springs. The strongest reduction in spring discharges was registered during the period 1985–1994. After 1996, the yearly average discharges have tended to reach their multiannual average values. However, reduced values of spring discharges were observed again in 2000 and 2001. The quantification of the effect of a documented long drought period is of great significance for the prediction of the effects of future climatic change on groundwater resources.

Tatiana Orehova, Elena Kirilova Bojilova

Policy Implications for Efficient and Equitable Water Use

17. Water and Mountains, Upstream and Downstream: Analyzing Unequal Relations

This chapter analyzes unequal access to water with a special focus on the Central Asian situation. It emphasizes the crucial issue of property rights and examines what happens when these are distributed in ways that lead to major inefficiencies and conflict. The chapter first presents a game theoretical investigation of this type of conflict situation and then ways in which the conflict might be solved if parties continue having relative risk aversion. In the case of Central Asia this type of solution would lead to mutually beneficial outcomes if credibility problems were lifted by using international institutions to guarantee the observance of contracts that contain prescriptions to share benefits associated with a change in the property rights structure.

Urs Luterbacher, Duishen Mamatkanov

18. Creating a Policy Environment for Sustainable Water use

This chapter discusses the historical context of water use, rights, and development, much of which has contributed to the current water shortage in many arid regions of the world. In addition, it attributes many perceived water crises to poor water management instead of an insufficient water supply. Poor water management is discussed in several contexts, including the ecological implications of past water development, social and public health ramifications, and a general underestimation of all costs associated with water development. Recommendations are provided to improve the management of water resources in the future. These recommendations include recognizing that uncertainty about costs and benefits of water management choices must be taken into account by decision-makers, and that incorporating community management of water resources can lead to improved water management. Other recommendations include improving water pricing and allocation systems, such as through a switch from queuing systems to tradable permits; as well as using water pricing mechanisms that incorporate the negative externalities of water quality deterioration. Finally, the chapter provides description of how to improve the cost-effectiveness of policies to improve water quality and quantity through better targeting.

Karina Schoengold, David Zilberman

Backmatter

Titel: Mountains: Sources of Water, Sources of Knowledge
herausgegeben von: Ellen Wiegandt
Verlag: Springer Netherlands
Electronic ISBN: 978-1-4020-6748-8
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-6747-1
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6748-8