Cardiff University | Prifysgol Caerdydd ORCA
Online Research @ Cardiff 
WelshClear Cookie - decide language by browser settings

HESS opinions: A conceptual framework for assessing socio-hydrological resilience under change

Mao, Feng ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5889-1825, Clark, Julian, Karpouzoglou, Timothy, Dewulf, Art, Buytaert, Wouter and Hannah, David 2017. HESS opinions: A conceptual framework for assessing socio-hydrological resilience under change. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 21 (7) , pp. 3655-3670. 10.5194/hess-21-3655-2017

[thumbnail of hess-21-3655-2017.pdf] PDF - Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.

Download (1MB)

Abstract

Despite growing interest in resilience, there is still significant scope for increasing its conceptual clarity and practical relevance in socio-hydrological contexts: specifically, questions of how socio-hydrological systems respond to and cope with perturbations and how these connect to resilience remain unanswered. In this opinion paper, we propose a novel conceptual framework for understanding and assessing resilience in coupled socio-hydrological contexts, and encourage debate on the inter-connections between socio-hydrology and resilience. Taking a systems perspective, we argue that resilience is a set of systematic properties with three dimensions: absorptive, adaptive, and transformative, and contend that socio-hydrological systems can be viewed as various forms of human–water couplings, reflecting different aspects of these interactions. We propose a framework consisting of two parts. The first part addresses the identity of socio-hydrological resilience, answering questions such as 'resilience of what in relation to what'. We identify three existing framings of resilience for different types of human–water systems and subsystems, which have been used in different fields: (1) the water subsystem, highlighting hydrological resilience to anthropogenic hazards; (2) the human subsystem, foregrounding social resilience to hydrological hazards; and (3) the coupled human–water system, exhibiting socio-hydrological resilience. We argue that these three system types and resiliences afford new insights into the clarification and evaluation of different water management challenges. The first two types address hydrological and social states, while the third type emphasises the feedbacks and interactions between human and water components within complex systems subject to internal or external disturbances. In the second part, we focus on resilience management and develop the notion of the 'resilience canvas', a novel heuristic device to identify possible pathways and to facilitate the design of bespoke strategies for enhancing resilience in the socio-hydrological context. The resilience canvas is constructed by combining absorptive and adaptive capacities as two axes. At the corners of the resulting two-dimensional space are four quadrants which we conceptualise as representing resilient, vulnerable, susceptible, and resistant system states. To address projected change-induced uncertainties, we recommend that efforts now be focused on shifting socio-hydrological systems from resistant towards resilient status. In sum, the novel framework proposed here clarifies the ambiguity inherent in socio-hydrological resilience, and provides a viable basis for further theoretical and practical development.

Item Type: Article
Date Type: Published Online
Status: Published
Schools: Earth and Environmental Sciences
Additional Information: This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence
Publisher: Copernicus Publications
ISSN: 1607-7938
Date of First Compliant Deposit: 27 July 2020
Date of Acceptance: 30 May 2017
Last Modified: 15 May 2023 03:33
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/133767

Citation Data

Cited 31 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item Edit Item

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

View more statistics