From Bullets to Boreholes: A Disaggregated Analysis of Domestic Water Cooperation in Drought-prone Regions

Does water shortage incentivize cooperation? Case studies suggests that water scarcity can rarely, if at all, explain violence, instead such shortages rather facilitate cooperative actions around water. Another major argument from qualitative research holds that water scarcity and armed conflict often occur side by side. These insights have rarely been tested empirically across cases on a sub-national level. Earlier quantitative work instead focused on basin or state level interactions. This article fills these gaps by using disaggregated data to analyze the effect of water scarcity on incidences of domestic water cooperation. Using event data covering the Mediterranean area and Northern Africa (1997–2009), this article first shows that water-related actions, cooperative or conflictual, in general are more frequent in water scarce areas. Second, the analysis demonstrates that water cooperation occurs in areas with difficult access to groundwater and with a history of violence. Third, the findings suggest that the relationship between water scarcity and water cooperation is conditional on levels of democracy. The presented results also differ depending on whether state or non-state actors collaborate in domestic water initiatives. Taken together, these findings provide crucial insights to our understanding of environmental peacebuilding and water security.     

Changing mechanism of global water scarcity events: Impacts of socioeconomic changes and inter-annual hydro-climatic variability

Changes in available fresh water resources, together with changes in water use, force our society to adapt continuously to water scarcity conditions. Although several studies assess the role of long-term climate change and socioeconomic developments on global water scarcity, the impact of inter-annual climate variability is less understood and often neglected. This paper presents a global scale water scarcity assessment that accounts for both temporal changes in socioeconomic conditions and hydro-climatic variability over the period 1960–2000. We thereby visualized for the first time possible over- and underestimations that may have been made in previous water scarcity assessments due to the use long-term means in their analyses. Subsequently, we quantified the relative contribution of hydro-climatic variability and socioeconomic developments on changing water scarcity conditions. We found that hydro-climatic variability and socioeconomic changes interact and that they can strengthen or attenuate each other, both regionally and at the global scale. In general, hydro-climatic variability can be held responsible for the largest share (>79%) of the yearly changes in global water scarcity, whilst only after six to ten years, socioeconomic developments become the largest driver of change. Moreover, our results showed that the growth in the relative contribution of socioeconomic developments to changing water scarcity conditions stabilizes towards 2000 and that the impacts of hydro-climatic variability remain significantly important. The findings presented in this paper could be of use for water managers and policy makers coping with water scarcity issues since correct information both on the current situation and regarding the relative contribution of different mechanisms shaping future conditions is key to successful adaptation and risk reduction.     

Environmental stress and agricultural landownership in Africa

We examine how weather variability affects agricultural landownership rates in Africa, where at least half of the population depends on agriculture to earn a livelihood. In the absence of effective adaptation strategies, households that experience difficulties farming due to environmental stress might leave their land. With implications for demography – through migration – and political instability – when affected populations express grievances – changing landownership patterns could make existing development challenges on the continent even more difficult. We test our hypothesis that drier than average growing seasons will reduce landownership rates using Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). Our DHS dataset includes interviews with 850,961 households in 35 African countries between 2005 and 2017. Compared to regions experiencing weather near the historical average, those with five consecutive dry growing seasons before the DHS experienced a 6.93% decline in the landownership rate. For every additional dry growing season during the five years before each survey, the landownership rate fell by 1.38%. A host of robustness checks support our general conclusion that drying conditions are associated with lower landownership rates.     

Political orientation and climate concern shape visual attention to climate change

Despite the scientific consensus, there is widespread public controversy about climate change. Previous explanations focused on interpretations hampered by political bias or insufficient knowledge of climate facts. We propose that public views of climate change may also be related to an attentional bias at a more basic level of cognitive processing. We hypothesized that selective visual attention towards or away from climate-related information would be associated with climate concern. To test prioritization of climate-related stimuli under conditions of limited attention, we asked participants to identify climate-related and neutral words within a rapid stream of stimuli. Undergraduate students attended to climate-related words more readily than neutral words. This attentional prioritization correlated with self-rated climate concern. We then examined this relationship in a more diverse community sample. Principal component analysis of survey data in the community sample revealed a component indexing a relationship between climate concern and political orientation. That component was correlated with the degree of selective inattention to climate-related words. Our findings suggest that climate-related communications may be most effective if tailored in a manner accounting for how attentional priorities differ between audiences—particularly those with different political orientations.     

Extreme weather and marriage among girls and women in Bangladesh

Climate change interacts with social, economic, and political forces in ways that can shape demographic behavior. Yet, the link between environmental stress and marriage has received limited attention. Using survey data from 615 Bangladeshi households, we examine the relationship between extreme weather in the form of heat waves and dry spells, and the risk of marriage over the period from 1989 to 2013. We find that girls and women are at an increased risk of marrying in the year of or following heat waves. The link is strongest for women aged 18 to 23, and weakest for those 11 to 14. We also explore the hypothesis that extreme weather leads families to accept less desirable marriage proposals for daughters. We find that those who wed during periods of extreme heat married into poorer households and to husbands with less education. Similarly, those who married during abnormally dry periods married men man with less education and who were more supportive of intimate partner violence. Together these results suggest that, when Bangladeshi families face environmental shocks, they cope by hastening the marriage of daughters or accepting less desirable marriage proposals. Such practices are likely to have long-term impacts on the health and well-being of women and children, and underscore the unique vulnerabilities faced by women as climate change intensifies.     

Beyond scarcity: Rethinking water,climate change and conflict in the Sudans

This article develops a new framework for understanding environment-conflict relations, on both theoretical grounds and through a qualitative historical analysis of the links between water and conflict in the states of Sudan and South Sudan. Theoretically, the article critiques the dominant emphases on ‘scarcity’, ‘state failure’ and ‘under-development’ within discussions of environmental security, and proposes an alternative model of environment-conflict relations centring on resource abundance and globally-embedded processes of state-building and development. Empirically, it examines three claimed (or possible) linkages between water and conflict in the Sudans: over trans-boundary waters of the Nile; over the links between internal resource scarcities and civil conflict; and over the internal conflict impacts of water abundance and development. We find that there exists only limited evidence in support of the first two of these linkages, but plentiful evidence that water abundance, and state-directed processes of economic development and internal colonisation relating to water, have had violent consequences. We conclude that analysts and policymakers should pay more attention to the impacts of resource abundance, militarised state power and global political economic forces in their assessments of the potential conflict impacts of environmental and especially climate change.     

Collective action for changing forests: A spatial,social-ecological approach to assessing participation in invasive plant management

Environmental governance research has discovered much about what drives collective action to address human-environment issues, including factors such as risk perceptions and self-efficacy. Yet the design of many studies limits our ability to draw conclusions about collective action under conditions of environmental change, especially across spatial or temporal scales. In this study, we integrate social and biophysical data—assessing data over time and examining the influence of space—to analyze efforts by community members to manage rapid environmental change in the form of an invasive plant (Mikania micrantha) in community forests in Chitwan, Nepal. Invasive species are an increasingly complex ethical, cultural, and ecological issue that is becoming more pressing with global environmental and social changes. We combine household surveys, ecological surveys, and spatial data in Bayesian hierarchical linear models to explore changes in the drivers of collective action since initial household surveys in 2014. We find that risk perceptions, reliance on forest resources, perceptions of forest safety, and M. micrantha abundance were the most influential factors in our models. Additionally, our findings suggest that the influence of M. micrantha abundance on collective action varies across spatial scales, indicating important interactions between social and biophysical drivers of collective action. Ultimately, our results highlight the importance of considering social and biophysical factors across space and time to inform the design of institutions that will be effective in addressing collection action problems tied to environmental change.     

Collapse and recovery in a remote small island—A tale of adaptive cycles or downward spirals?

Few studies consider how social-ecological systems recover from disturbance. We consider the small semi-autonomous island of Rodrigues (Indian Ocean). Based on semi-structured interviews (n = 70), a fisher survey (n = 73), weather data and official records we build a timeline of key events. We tabulate local perceptions (5+ mentions) of changes (social, economic and natural capital) and look for signs of adaptive cycles in the island's social-ecological past. Rising human pressure and extreme weather event impacts are reported since first settlement. We propose a recent “collapse” phase catalysed in the 1970s by severe drought, based on respondents’ perceptions of still-ongoing changes in farming and fishing, water, external dependence, migration and inter-island political change. Connectivity (flows of people, goods, information, money, power) appear to have strengthed local island recovery, but degradation continued, not least due to water scarcity and a lack of shared political vision as Rodrigues became more tied into the wider world.Overall, our findings suggest social-ecological systems may get stuck in a post-collapse recovery without any new structure emerging, presuming adaptive cycles can even be detected. Data gaps and global change redefining spatial and temporal scales could mean the adaptive cycle's usefulness is limited in development policy-making contexts.     

Environmental conflicts and defenders: A global overview

Recent research and policies recognize the importance of environmental defenders for global sustainability and emphasize their need for protection against violence and repression. However, effective support may benefit from a more systematic understanding of the underlying environmental conflicts, as well as from better knowledge on the factors that enable environmental defenders to mobilize successfully. We have created the global Environmental Justice Atlas to address this knowledge gap. Here we present a large-n analysis of 2743 cases that sheds light on the characteristics of environmental conflicts and the environmental defenders involved, as well as on successful mobilization strategies. We find that bottom-up mobilizations for more sustainable and socially just uses of the environment occur worldwide across all income groups, testifying to the global existence of various forms of grassroots environmentalism as a promising force for sustainability. Environmental defenders are frequently members of vulnerable groups who employ largely non-violent protest forms. In 11% of cases globally, they contributed to halt environmentally destructive and socially conflictive projects, defending the environment and livelihoods. Combining strategies of preventive mobilization, protest diversification and litigation can increase this success rate significantly to up to 27%. However, defenders face globally also high rates of criminalization (20% of cases), physical violence (18%), and assassinations (13%), which significantly increase when Indigenous people are involved. Our results call for targeted actions to enhance the conditions enabling successful mobilizations, and for specific support for Indigenous environmental defenders.     

Multi-causal pathways of public opposition to dam projects in Asia: A fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA)

Scholars overwhelmingly adopt the case study method when analyzing causal conditions inducing anti-dam-protests. We have carried out the first medium-N-study on this topic analyzing public opposition to 12 dam projects in Asia. For this purpose, we employ a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) which is based on a thorough review of scholarly writings and press reports on the dam projects at question as well as an online survey and semi-structured interviews. We identify two causal recipes sufficient for the emergence of significant anti-dam-protests. First, lacking social safeguards in combination with the presence of political opportunity structures and higher levels of development are sufficient for significant anti-dam-protests to emerge. Second, lacking social safeguards in combination with rampant corruption and environmental risk induce these protests. Current scholarly literature particuarly emphasizes political opportunity structures and development as causal conditions inducing significant protests. Our findings build on this literature to highlight the importance of project-specific conditions.     

Attenuation Correction Procedures for Water Vapour Fluxes from Closed-Path Eddy-Covariance Systems

Evapotranspiration is a source of water vapour to the atmosphere, and as a crucial indicator of landscape behaviour its accurate measurement has widespread implications. Here we investigate errors that are prevalent and systematic in the closed-path eddy-covariance measurement of latent heat flux: the attenuation of fluxes through dampened cospectral power at high frequencies. This process is especially pronounced during periods of high relative humidity through the adsorption and desorption of water vapour along the tube walls. These effects are additionally amplified during lower air temperature conditions. Here, we quantify the underestimation of evapotranspiration by a closed-path system by comparing its flux estimate to simultaneous and adjacent measurements from an open-path sensor. We apply models relating flux loss to relative humidity itself, to the lag time of the cross-correlation peak between the water vapour and vertical wind velocity signals, and to models of cospectral attenuation relative to the cospectral power of simultaneous sensible heat-flux measurements. We find that including the role of temperature in modifying the attenuation–humidity relationship is essential for unbiased flux correction, and that physically based cospectral attenuation methods are effective characterizers of closed-path instrument signal loss relative to the unattenuated flux value.     

Spatially explicit assessment of water embodied in European trade: A product-level multi-regional input-output analysis

Responsible water management in an era of globalised supply chains needs to consider both local and regional water balances and international trade. In this paper, we assess the water footprints of total final demand in the EU-27 at a very detailed product level and spatial scale—an important step towards informed water policy. We apply the multi-regional input-output (MRIO) model EXIOBASE, including water data, to track the distribution of water use along product supply chains within and across countries. This enables the first spatially-explicit MRIO analysis of water embodied in Europe’s external trade for almost 11,000 watersheds world-wide, tracing indirect (“virtual”) water consumption in one country back to those watersheds where the water was actually extracted. We show that the EU-27 indirectly imports large quantities of blue and green water via international trade of products, most notably processed crop products, and these imports far exceed the water used from domestic sources. The Indus, Danube and Mississippi watersheds are the largest individual contributors to the EU-27’s final water consumption, which causes large environmental impacts due to water scarcity in both the Indus and Mississippi watersheds. We conclude by sketching out policy options to ensure that sustainable water management within and outside European borders is not compromised by European consumption.     

Extreme weather events and climate change concern

This paper examines whether experience of extreme weather events—such as excessive heat, droughts, flooding, and hurricanes—increases an individual’s level concern about climate change. We bring together micro-level geospatial data on extreme weather events from NOAA’s Storm Events Database with public opinion data from multiple years of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study to study this question. We find evidence of a modest, but discernible positive relationship between experiencing extreme weather activity and expressions of concern about climate change. However, the effect only materializes for recent extreme weather activity; activity that occurred over longer periods of time does not affect public opinion. These results are generally robust to various measurement strategies and model specifications. Our findings contribute to the public opinion literature on the importance of local environmental conditions on attitude formation.     

Economic and political drivers of environmental impact shifting between countries

There is mounting evidence that major improvements in environmental quality in high-income countries over the past decades may have been achieved to a large degree through relocation of environmental impacts of consumption to other, usually poorer countries. While political and academic debates on appropriate policy interventions to address this challenge are gaining ground, we still know rather little about the drivers of international environmental impact shifting, other than international trade flows per se. We address this issue by focusing on the effects of economic inequality and political factors. We argue that income inequality between and within countries as well as variation in political institutions, environmental clauses in preferential trade agreements (PTAs), and participation in international environmental treaties could be important drivers or mitigators of environmental impact shifting between countries. We use novel panel data on five types of environmental impact flows between country dyads (187 countries, 1990–2015) to assess these arguments. We find that richer countries and countries with higher domestic economic equality tend to be the “outsourcers”, and poorer, domestically more unequal countries the “insourcers” of environmental impacts. Discrepancies in democracy levels aggravate the outsourcing from more equal to more unequal societies. In turn, environmental clauses in PTAs have a mitigating effect on environmental impact shifting, but participation in international environmental agreements has no such effect. Our findings highlight the need for green economy policies that reduce environmental footprints of consumption not only within high-income democracies, but also make their global supply chains more sustainable.     

Coping with scarcity: The construction of the water conservation imperative in newspapers (1999–2018)

As water-stressed areas are expanding worldwide due to climate change, water conservation has become an important tool for managing water resources in drought contexts. Within a political ecology framework, our research questions the success story of water conservation. To do so, we conducted a quantitative textual analysis of 520 daily local press articles dealing with drought and water issues in Phoenix and Tucson (Arizona, USA). Using two open-access lexicometric software, our analysis traces the rise of the water conservation narrative in the press. Our results show how newspapers can become an instrument of public policies to work towards their social acceptance. Moreover, water conservation is framed as a consensual tool. It reassures that threats associated with water scarcity will be successfully managed to sustain urban growth in arid regions. In this sense, water conservation operates following a logic of fix, in line with the successive hydrosocial fixes that helped the development of arid lands and does not question inherited power structures in water management.     

Phosphorus vulnerability: A qualitative framework for assessing the vulnerability of national and regional food systems to the multi-dimensional stressors of phosphorus scarcity

The element phosphorus underpins the viability of global and national food systems, by ensuring soil fertility, maximising crop yields, supporting farmer livelihoods and ultimately nutritional security of the global population. The implications of global phosphorus scarcity therefore have serious potential consequences for future food security, yet these implications have not been be comprehensively or sufficiently assessed at the global or national scales. This paper offers a new integrated framework for assessing the vulnerability of national food systems to global phosphorus scarcity—the Phosphorus Vulnerability Assessment framework. Drawing on developments in assessing climate and water vulnerability, the framework identifies and integrates 26 phosphorus-related biophysical, technical, geopolitical, socio-economic and institutional factors that can lead to food system vulnerability. The theoretical framework allows analysis of context-specific food system by examining impact due to exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity. The framework will also ultimately provide guidance for food and agriculture policy-makers, phosphate producers and phosphorus end-users (primarily farmers and consumers) to take action to reduce their vulnerability to this new global challenge.     

Household dependence on solid cooking fuels in Peru: An analysis of environmental and socioeconomic conditions

Solid fuel use is linked with adverse effects on the environment and human health. Yet, solid fuels remain an important energy source for households in developing countries. Even when country-level dependence on solid fuels is modest, there is often significant variation in within-country patterns of solid fuel use. This study examines a range of environmental and socioeconomic conditions to understand the relationship between them and household energy use within a country. While our results are derived from a study of regional patterns of solid fuel dependence in Peru, the contribution of this study is broad: variables that we include in our models of households’ fuel choice decisions are likely to shape such decisions in most developing countries. Our findings indicate that environmental conditions, such as elevation and forest cover, are associated with solid fuel use. Socioeconomic factors, including urbanization, poverty and female literacy, are similarly important. In addition, we identify nuanced links between types of female employment and indigenous population, on the one hand, and solid fuel use, on the other.     

Hydro-climatic change,conflict and security

Climate change is likely to increase the frequency and intensity of water-related hazards on human populations. This has generated security concerns and calls for urgent policy action. However, the simplified narrative that links climate change to security via water and violent conflict is wanting. First, it is not confirmed by empirical evidence. Second, it ignores the varied character and implications of hydro-climatic hazards, the multi-faceted nature of conflict and adaptive action, and crucial intricacies of security. Integrating for the first time research and findings from diverse disciplines, we provide a more nuanced picture of the climate-water-security nexus. We consider findings from the transboundary waters, armed conflict, vulnerability, and political ecology literatures and specify the implications and priorities for policy relevant research. Although the social effects of future hydro-climatic change cannot be safely predicted, there is a good understanding of the factors that aggravate risks to social wellbeing. To reduce vulnerability, pertinent democratic and social/civil security institutions should be strengthened where they exist, and promoted where they are still absent.     

Might climate change the “healthy migrant” effect?

Migrants from Mexico to the U.S. tend to be healthier than non-migrants in their origin – part of a pattern termed the “healthy migrant effect”. With climate change altering livelihoods across the globe, we ask how the migration-health connection may be altered by environmental strain. On the one hand, positive health selectivity may be intensified if migration becomes more challenging – and therefore increasingly likely to be undertaken by only the healthiest. On the other hand, positive health selectivity may decline if the “push” associated with environmental strain acts upon individuals regardless of health. We use Mexican Migration Project data to model Mexico-US migration by male household heads with consideration of migrant health as well as recent rainfall conditions in communities of origin. Results reveal intriguing interactions such that when moderately dry regions experience rainfall shortage, health selectivity is lower – meaning that less healthy household heads also engage in international migration. We posit that social networks may underlie this association. We further argue that since environmental context may alter the relationship between migration and health, future research on the “healthy migrant effect” should consider environmental conditions. As to implications, if climate change yields pressure on less healthy individuals to migrate, the need for migrant-sensitive health systems and services may be intensified in destination regions.     

Identifying hot spots of security vulnerability associated with climate change in Africa

Given its high dependence on rainfed agriculture and its comparatively low adaptive capacity, Africa is frequently invoked as especially vulnerable to climate change. Within Africa, there is likely to be considerable variation in vulnerability to climate change both between and within countries. This paper seeks to advance the agenda of identifying the hot spots of what we term “climate security” vulnerability, areas where the confluence of vulnerabilities could put large numbers of people at risk of death from climate-related hazards. This article blends the expertise of social scientists and climate scientists. It builds on a model of composite vulnerability that incorporates four “baskets” or processes that are thought to contribute to vulnerability including: (1) physical exposure, (2) population density, (3) household and community resilience, and (4) governance and political violence. Whereas previous iterations of the model relied on historical physical exposure data of natural hazards, this paper uses results from regional model simulations of African climate in the late 20th century and mid-21st century to develop measures of extreme weather events—dry days, heat wave events, and heavy rainfall days—coupled with an indicator of low-lying coastal elevation. For the late 20th century, this mapping process reveals the most vulnerable areas are concentrated in Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger, Somalia, Sudan, and South Sudan, with pockets in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Guinea, Mauritania, and Sierra Leone. The mid 21st century projection shows more extensive vulnerability throughout the Sahel, including Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, northern Nigeria, Niger, and across Sudan.