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Water – Wrestling with Wicked Problems Prof Inaugural lecture Water – Wrestling with Wicked Problems Prof. Dr. Eddy J. Moors Water – Wrestling with Wicked Problems Inaugural lecture of Prof. Dr. Eddy J. Moors Rector of IHE Delft Institute for Water Education Delft, The Netherlands 5 October 2017 Published by: IHE Delft Institute for Water Education PO Box 3015, 2601 DA Delft, The Netherlands www.un-ihe.org [email protected] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. You are free: • to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work • to Remix — to adapt the work Under the following conditions: • Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). • Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes. With thanks to Ruth Webber, Peter Stroo and Vera Schouten. ISBN 978-90-73445-33-8 Contents Setting the scene 5 Wicked problems 6 Questions to be asked 8 Trends 9 Complexity 15 What is happening at the global level? 19 Ways forward 21 How can we contribute? 25 Education 26 Research 26 Co-creation and collaboration 27 Closure 28 References 30 Biography 31 Annex: List of present PhD research topics at IHE Delft 32 Water – Wrestling with Wicked Problems 3 Setting the scene My inaugural lecture “Water – Wrestling with Wicked Problems”, is about water and especially issues that deal with problems of water. How have I got where I am and why am I interested in wicked water problems? As a child, I experienced the tender touch of water when playing, swimming, and diving with the sensation of being weightless in a completely different world. Later in life, I also got to know the force of water while helping to rescue people from a capsized dinghy off the rocky shores of Spain; swimming to the bank of the Volta Noire in Burkina Faso after the boat from which we were attempting a discharge measurement, sank; and the power of water while driving over a two lane road on the frozen surface of the Lena River in East Siberia. I felt the need for water when staying in the desert north of Agadez in Niger, as well as the joy of water, when the water came rolling through the empty bed of the wadi. And the delight of water when taking the first sip of water offered by my host after a long hot day. These personal experiences made me addicted to water. This addiction, and the fact that water has so many appearances, added to my numerous observations that people may have completely different perceptions, made me realise that a large number of water related problems are wicked problems. On the following pages, I would like to explain why I consider a large number of water related problems as being wicked. I will then say something about present trends and how I think we could be looking for solutions. I would like to close this booklet by expressing my ideas about how, especially from my point of view, we as IHE Delft, can contribute to working these problems out. Water – Wrestling with Wicked Problems 5 Wicked problems What is a wicked problem? Wicked problems are sometimes defined as problems that are difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize (see Figure 1). A wicked problem refers to a complex problem for which there is no simple method or solution, there is no single answer and every attempt can matter, because it affects the things people depend upon. Wicked problems are often socially complex and they have to deal with changing behaviours and outcomes that are unforeseen. For a more elaborate definition of wicked problems, the work by Rittel and Webber (1973) is a good starting point. Leaking pipe and water bottle at New Delhi railway station. Water – Wrestling with Wicked Problems 6 o clear soltion ociall noreseen comle Wicked otcomes Problem nter hanging deendent behaiors Figure 1 Wicked problem. Globally, much of the water for human consumption comes from rivers. We have more than 250 international transboundary river basins in the world. Those are shared by almost 150 different states and more than 2.5 billion people are relying on the availability of this water resource (see e.g. De Stefano et al. 2012). This already shows not only the size, but also the complexity of the problem. Water resource management has often been described as a wicked problem, especially because there are no easy solutions. It is wicked because there are unknown dimensions to the related science, with open questions such as: How much water is available? Where is the water coming from? How is this changing in time? What is causing these changes? In addition, there are in almost all cases, multiple stakeholders that deal with the management of water resources. This renders the decision-making difficult and sometimes even impossible. Other examples of wicked problems in the water sector are, among others, related to groundwater resources such as: the use of the fossil groundwater under a large part of Africa, the fast decline of the groundwater table in the Middle East, but also the strategic management of the groundwater store under “de Veluwe” during prolonged periods of drought. All these issues have, besides a large natural science component, a strong social- economic component as well. Water – Wrestling with Wicked Problems 7 Questions to be asked Questions that can be asked in the water sector are, for example: • When does a flood become a nuisance? Is it if the water level reaches ankle, knee or hip high? Mobile dam used during floods of 2015 in Austria. • What is water scarcity? How do we deal with water availability, water demand and water allocation? • What are critical moments in time and space? Are they shifting with climate change? And related to the questions above: • What are our windows of opportunity? • How much information do we need to enable informed decision-making? • What are our different perspectives and perceptions and how do we bring them together to be able to prioritize actions? • How about equity? Is migration driven by equity imbalance? Is this imbalance and migration related to water? • Are smallholder farmers looking towards a sustainable and acceptable level of quality of life, or is it a dead end road and should we make more haste with alternative solutions? Of course we would also like to know what possible solutions are, or will, become available. But before I continue discussing these problems further, I would like to give a short overview of the main trends I see happening in the world we are living in, which may have an influence on the water sector. Water – Wrestling with Wicked Problems 8 Trends There are a number of ongoing trends that may have a direct impact on the water sector, or whose impact may be indirect, for example the availability of funds, or the increased accessibility to new technologies. Awareness raising. Climate change is a much discussed trend. The past trend in CO2 emissions of 2.4% yearly increase during the period 2004 to 2013, has levelled off in the last couple of years (see www.globalcarbonproject.org), mainly due to China’s reduced coal use. Whether this trend continues in the next few years or not, will depend largely on the implementation of the commitments made by the different countries in the Paris agreement in 2015. Although this is a good start, it should be realised that the present commitments will most likely not be enough to reach the objective of remaining below the 2 degree global temperature increase. The 1.5 degree maximum increase pledged for by the small island states, is even less likely to be achieved. Even though there is no scientific doubt about the physical relationship between increased greenhouse gas concentration and an increase in air temperature, there are still discussions on the cause and effects of the emissions. At the risk of over-simplifying, one may conclude that globally, temperatures show an increasing trend overall, with some variation depending on latitude and elevation, while the trend in precipitation is more complicated, making it harder to generalise. Historic precipitation series show larger differences than temperature series, often within the boundaries of its natural variation, in a number of places with a tendency of change in timing and increasing variation, as well on the wet as the dry side. Water – Wrestling with Wicked Problems 9 Figure 2 shows the historic trend, as well as the projected trend, of four indicators that are subsets of temperature and precipitation for three different emission pathways, i.e. RCP 2.5, 4.5 and 8.5. Often these subsets are of more importance to help the end user to appreciate the implications for their sector. Figure 2 Future climate (Source: IPCC, AR5). What these changes mean for different sectors is depicted in Figure 3, taken from the IPCC fifth assessment report. Here it shows which sectors are affected and what our confidence is in the attribution to climate change. For example in the case of India, you can see that the sector that is mainly affected, is food production. You can also see that the confidence in the attribution to climate change is at the medium level. The figure also shows that it is not only due to climate change that this sector is affected. Water – Wrestling with Wicked Problems 10 Figure 3 Observed impacts attributed to climate change (Source: IPCC, AR5).
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