Resilience : going from conventional to adaptive freshwater management for human and ecosystem compatibility

This state-of- the-art introduction explains the need for water management to incorporate complexity and uncertainty and the concepts of “resilience” and “adaptive co-management”.

Humans shape freshwater flows and ecosystem dynamics all over the planet. The capacity to cope with change and perturbations of both ecosystems and human societies has to be actively enhanced, and the role of freshwater in this process explicitly incorporated. Resilient ecosystems are important for secure water supplies, and the importance of secure water supplies for resilient ecosystems must be included in water rhetoric and practice in order to reach the international community’s sustainable development and poverty alleviation goals.

Policy and decision makers should promote cross sectoral water management and shift their focus from human uses of freshwater as a technical issue only to the role of freshwater in catchments for the generation of ecosystem and societal services.  Policy and management should be based on the recognition that freshwater systems are complex and do seldom change in a smooth way;  but rather shift suddenly to irreversible and less productive states.  Freshwater management should allow for adaptation to environmental change and crisis. Policies have to provide incentives for stakeholder participation and incorporate ecological knowledge into institutional structures in a multi-governance system.  Social networks with a wide scope of actors have to be developed aiming to connect institutions and organisations in order to build trust, facilitate information flows, identify knowledge gaps and create nodes of expertise for adaptive freshwater management.