Margaret Garcia, Associate Professor, SSEBE in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, is lead author of chapter seven -- Human-drought systems -- in Coevolution and Prediction of Coupled Human-Water Systems, a new book from Elsevier.
Says Garcia: This book is the synthesis of the International Association for Hydrological Sciences Panta Rhei focusing on coevolution of water systems and society. Five ASU (and GFL) faculty and one ASU PhD candidate contributed to this international effort as chapter lead, chapter co-author or editorial board member. It is exciting to have this work published because it brings together advances made by scientists across the world collectively focusing on understanding how human activity shapes the water cycle and how, in turn, the water cycle shapes human activity.
A brief summary follows:
Advancing our understanding of the processes linking social and hydrological systems is an essential step toward managing drought risk and increasing drought resilience. Over the past decade, numerous studies have advanced our understanding of human influences on drought propagation, drought responses and their immediate and long-term consequences, and decisions and conditions leading to drought resilience. These advances have been achieved through: (1) the development of datasets that document drought progression, hazards, risk, vulnerability, and adaptation capacity; (2) creation of new modeling methods and application of models to build and test theory; and (3) empirical analyses from in depth case studies to large comparative analyses. While these categories are not mutually exclusive, they provide a way to track scientific progress, build a more fundamental understanding of human-drought systems to advance our capacity to generalize findings, and overcome systematic silos to develop more integrated drought management strategies that can span traditional sectoral and jurisdictional boundaries. The advances to date have enabled researchers to identify common phenomena describing human-drought interactions across space and time. Research on the influence of human actions on drought propagation sets the foundation for further work that can build generalized knowledge about the interrelationships within the human-drought system, across related systems, and in connection with other hazards in the context of many types of human action. More Information
Garcia offers the following acknowledgments:
Margaret Garcia, led chapter 7 focused on droughts. Other ASU authors include SSEBE PhD candidate Burcu Tezcan as chapter 7 co-author, Maura Allaire as Chapter 2 co-author, Jay Famiglietti as chapter 3 co-author, and Marty Anderies and Patricia Gober as editorial board members.
