1,721,254 research outputs found
Stakeholders dialogues to reinforce the governance of the WEFE nexus in complex water systems. Learning from Lake Como, Italy
No full textSocial surveys to support personal experience in human-water-climate change interactions. A review on farmers' behavior
Full text linkWater resources management and climate change represent two necessarily interdisciplinary topics in which the natural and social sciences must be integrated [1]. Although this nexus was generally overlooked in the accurate statistics and modelling literature by mostly focusing on understanding the natural processes, a paradigm shift is required to put social in the modelling loop [2]. Consequently, water domains (physical, social, political, and symbolic matters) should be entwined in research configurations by considering social learning, personal experience, observations, and human choices. As argued by [3], deepen social perception is fundamental for two main reasons: as a key component of the socio-political context and as the first step for behaviour transformation and attitude change. In this line, social and behavioural sciences have discussed associative processing methods, such as social surveys, to monitor the nature, extent, significance, and influence of personal experience regarding human-nature interactions [4]. Farmers develop their activity supporting the complexity of interrelated nature and human systems characterized by biophysical conditions and social behaviour [5]. Consequently, farmers are in a favourable position to provide first-hand observations and narratives of water resources availability and climate change perceived impacts [6]. Could social surveys contribute to deepening farmers’ behaviour on water supply and climate change impacts while providing new social scenarios to advance understanding of data-mining, processing, and modelling of human-water systems? This contribution provides an upgraded and comprehensive overview of the social surveys added-value in building a methodological approach and defining an intellectual structure to monitoring farmers’ behaviour on water-climate change nexus. The literature review will provide new insides to be discussed for policy formulation and implementation at the local and the regional scale.
[1] G. Escribano-Francés, P. Quevauviller, E. San Martín González, and E. Vargas Amelin, Environmental Science and Policy 69, 1 (2017)
[2] M. Giuliani, A. Castelletti, and C. Gandolfi, Water Resources Research 52: 6928 (2016)
[3] L. Antronico, R. Coscarelli, F. De Pascale, and D. Di Matteo, Sustainability 12: 6985 (2020)
[4] J.R. Marlon, S. van der Linden, P. Howe, A. Leiserowitz, S.H.L, Woo, and K. Broad, Journal of Risk Research 22: 936 (2018)
[5] M. Abid, J. Scheffran, U.A. Schneider, and E. Elahi, Environmental Management 63: 110 (2019)
[6] K. Talanow, E.N. Topp, J. Loos, and B. Martin-Lopez, Journal of Rural Studies 81: 203 (2021
The HydroSocial Cycle approach to deepen on socio-ecological systems analysis and water management
Full text linkBalancing socio-ecological systems among competing water demands is a difficult and complex task. Traditional approaches based on limited, linear growth optimization strategies overseen by command/control have partially failed to account for the inherent unpredictability and irreducible uncertainty affecting most water systems due to climate change. Governments and managers are increasingly faced with understanding driving-factors of major change processes affecting multifunctional systems. In the last decades, the shift to address the integrated management of water resources from a technocratic ‘‘top-down’’ to a more integrated ‘‘bottom-up’’ and participatory approach was motivated by the awareness that water challenges require integrated solutions and a socially legitimate planning process. Assuming water flows as physical, social, political, and symbolic matters, it is necessary to entwining these domains in specific configurations, in which key stakeholders and decision-makers could directly interact through social-learning. The literature on integrated water resources management highlights two important factors to achieve this goal: to deepen stakeholders’ perception and to ensure their
participation as a mechanism of co-production of knowledge. Stakeholder Analysis and Governance Modelling approaches are providing useful knowledge about how to integrate social-learning in water management, making the invisible, visible. The first one aims to identify and categorize stakeholders according to competing water demands, while the second one determines interactions, synergies, overlapping discourses, expectations, and influences between stakeholders, including power-relationships. The HydroSocial Cycle (HSC) analysis combines both approaches as a framework to reinforce integrated water management by focusing on stakeholder analysis and collaborative governance. This method considers that water and society are (re)making each other so the nature and competing objectives of stakeholders involved in complex water systems may affect its sustainability and management. Using data collected from a qualitative questionnaire and applying descriptive statistics and matrices, the HSC deepens on interests, expectations, and power-influence relationships between stakeholders by addressing six main issues affecting decision-making processes: relevance, representativeness, recognition,
performance, knowledge, and collaboration. The aim of this contribution is to outline this method from both theory and practice perspective by highlighting the benefits of including social sciences approaches in transdisciplinary research collaborations when testing water management strategies affecting competing and dynamic water systems
Exploring socio-natural factors of farmers’ adaptation: A review on risk awareness and perception towards climate change
No full textIn this work, a review of the literature examining farmer awareness and perception towards climate change is reported to identify the main statements and driving factors affecting farmers’ awareness and perception. For example, asking about the statement ‘climate change is occurring or had occurred’, between 50-90% of farmers agreement was obtained, including experiences in which awareness is significant or total (75-100%) (Hundera et al. 2019, Mutandwa et al. 2019, Zhang et al. 2020). Most of the studies also reveal how climate change awareness is mainly based on some observed changes in weather patterns, such as the change in temperature and rainfall patterns with about an 80-98% of agreement (Ado et al. 2019, Voss 2021). Likewise, more than 90% of the farmers thought climate change impacts crop production, with 59% of the respondents asserting that the impact is quite obvious (Guo et al. 2021). Moreover, close to 60-76% of the farmers were aware of climate change because the weather is becoming unpredictable (Chhogyel et al. 2020). According to Le Dang et al. (2014), when farmers believe that higher risks of climate change are threatening their physical health, finance, production, social relationships and psychology, they are more likely to have an intention to adapt to climate change. Furthermore, adaptation intention also increases when farmers perceive greater effectiveness of adaptive measures in general and more agency to conduct adaptive measures in particular. On the contrary, some studies, such as Azadi et al. (2019), concluded how farmers’ beliefs and awareness of climate change had no effects on their adaptation behaviours and risk perception. These authors argued that farmers’ adaptation behaviours might occur without engaging their belief systems about climate causality. Otherwise, the results obtained by De Matos Carlos et al. (2020) demonstrated that there is no direct relation between awareness and perception about the harmful effects of climate change and adaptation; perception only affects adaptation when mediated by belief in the adverse effects of climate change (this result is called by the literature of ‘indirect effect’). In other words, awareness and perception will influence adaptation practices when farmers believe in climate change. This type of results could contribute to reformulate policy interventions by considering farmers’ recommendations and preferences to better respond to climate change from local experience
Inferring human preferences in multisector systems via Inverse Reinforcement Learning
No full textIn a changing climate and society, the importance of cross-sector interactions becomes crucial for understanding the co-evolution of human and natural systems, where the role of individual and collective human decisions is a major driver of system vulnerabilities and adaptive capacity. While mathematical models of natural processes have been studied and developed for centuries and, today, they are extremely sophisticated at fine spatial and temporal scales, there is an urgent need to shed light on the key role of human behaviors across multisector systems. For instance, the majority of current global hydrological models incorporate pre-defined rules for simulating reservoir operations, which distinguish between reservoirs used for irrigation or non-irrigation purposes only. However, many water systems are operated to meet competing multi-sector demands and it is often unclear how operators confront these demands.
In this work, we introduce a Reinforcement Learning approach to model the dynamics of multipurpose reservoir systems. Specifically, our method first uses Inverse Reinforcement Learning to identify the trade-off among competing objectives from historical observations of the reservoir system dynamics. The identified objective function is then used in the formulation of an optimal control problem returning a closed-loop policy which allows the simulation of the observed dynamics of the reservoir system. We demonstrate the potential of the proposed method in a real-world application involving the multipurpose regulation of Lake Como in northern Italy. Results show that our approach effectively infers the trade-off between flood control and water supply adopted in the observed system’s operation, and yields a control policy that closely approximates the observed system dynamics
Farmers' attitudes regarding climate change: How risk awareness and perception effects adaptive capacity?
Full text linkSocial and behavioural sciences have discussed and debated associative processing methods and the nature, extent, significance, and influence of personal extreme weather experience over the past decade to understand how it affects adaptive capacity. Local perceptions provide important baseline information for understanding individual exposure to climate risks, which are essential for effective policy formulation and implementation. Deepen on farmers’ perceptions, considering risk awareness, is fundamental for two main reasons: as a key component of the socio-political context and as the first step for behaviour transformation and attitude change. Some authors understand risk awareness as of the first step before developing any resilience-building process but also as a requirement that must be met during the resilience development process because it drives transformation. Likewise, risk perception is how individuals receive information or stimuli from their environment, transform it into psychological awareness, and (re)act accordingly. Perception varies with the individual’s past experiences and the present sets or attitudes act through values, needs, memories, moods, social circumstances, and expectations. Farmers’ awareness and perception towards climate change reflect their judgments and may affect their adaptation and mitigation behaviour. Consequently, if farmers are not aware of climate change risks, they will not respond to them. In this work, a review on farmers’ awareness, perceived impacts, and adaptation measures regarding climate change is reported to identify the main statements and driving factors affecting farmers’ behaviour. We analysed a portfolio of 435 articles collected from WoS and Scopus databases between 2010-2020 using a two- tier method: a bibliometrics analysis coupled with a systematic review. We outlined main gaps and drivers to deepening the relevant areas that need more investigation to reduce farming vulnerability
How far is climate change adaptation policy from practice? Contrasting the effectiveness and acceptance of local and regional strategies in irrigated agricultural systems in Northern Italy
Full text linkGlobal climate change poses significant challenges to future agricultural production, with significant implications for global food security, agricultural producer livelihoods, and environmental degradation. Agricultural water systems are highly sensitive and exposed to potentially substantial climate change impacts. In fact, agriculture is the sector most affected by water scarcity, as it accounts for 70% of global freshwater withdrawals and more than 90% consumption. Farmers develop their activity supporting a complex coupled human and natural system characterized by political, economic, institutional, cultural and biophysical conditions. Furthermore, real-world climate change adaptive responses can be differentiated along a number of social, spatial and temporal dimensions, while they can be protective, in terms of taking preventive measures against negative impacts, or opportunistic as they take advantage of potential beneficial effects of climate change. Yet, adaptation can be constrained not only by technical difficulties or scientific uncertainties, but also by the absence of political will and consensus, opposed economic and cultural factors, lack of governance in decision-making processes, conflicting strategies among governments at national and local scale, and shortcoming of tangible results. Previous research highlighted how adaptation strategies and actions need to be evaluated also in terms of their acceptance by stakeholders at different levels (i.e. water authorities, irrigation districts, individual farms). The aim of this contribution is to assess the effectiveness of main climate change adaptation policies carried out in irrigated agriculture in Lombardy (Italy) with respect to what extent and under what socio-economic, environmental
and cultural conditions they are being implemented to reduce the gap between theory and practice. For this purpose, we conducted a review of the literature, an evidence-based and SWOT analysis to highlight which driving factors and multifactor criteria should be taken into account to cope with the risk of maladaptation
and lack of confidence in achieving climate change adaptation goals
Modelling farmer behaviours in coupled human-nature systems under changing climate and society
No full textClimate change and water resources governance represent two necessarily interdisciplinary topics in which the natural and social sciences must be integrated. Assuming water flows as physical, social, political, and symbolic matters, it is necessary to entwining these domains in specific configurations in which water users, managers, and decision-makers could be directly involved. Social learning is considered an important issue in achieving this goal by promoting new understanding or shared meaning to (1) increase adaptive capacity, (2) build trust and collaborative problem solving, and (3) ensure better co-working. The perception of climate change is fundamental for two important reasons: first, because it constitutes a key component of the socio-political context within which policymakers exercise their decisions in socio-ecological systems. The second reason is more direct: climate
change adaptation requires behaviour transformation and attitude change from those who make individual and collective choices that have a huge impact on the planet’s climate balance. The MODFABE project aims to increase the robustness of decision-making processes in Coupled Human-Nature Systems (CHNS) by modelling farmers’ perception and adaptation capacity to climate change. The MODFABE’s core is to integrate observational data (farmers’ perception) into an existing behavioural model (DistriLake) applied to the management of water supply and demand in Lake Como (Italy) to increase the rationality of farmers’ interventions in the decision-making processes considering multiple competing purposes and a multi-objective context.
The Muzza system is the case study acting as a test for understanding which driving factors are affecting farmers’ perception regarding climate change impacts and how their adaptation capacity affects the management of the CHNS. Results could be extrapolated to other socio-ecological systems and used to reformulate policy recommendations from social-learning to better respond to climate change by considering the preferences shift toward a new equilibrium in decision-making processes
Social data, narratives, and agent-based modelling to explore farmers’ behaviour and climate change actions
No full textUnveiling behavioral heterogeneity: An Agent-Based Model exploration of farmer decision-making in the face of climate change
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