RESUMEN
The sustainable management of water resources is required to avoid water scarcity becoming widespread. This article explores the potential application of a social-ecological framework, used predominantly in the fields of ecology and conservation, as a tool to improve the sustainability and resilience of water resources. The "red-loop green-loop" (RL-GL) model has previously been used to map both sustainable and unsustainable social-ecological feedbacks between ecosystems and their communities in countries such as Sweden and Jamaica. In this article, we demonstrate the novel application of the RL-GL framework to water resources management using the 2017/18 Cape Town water crisis. We used the framework to analyse the social-ecological dynamics of pre-crisis and planned contingency scenarios. We found that the water resources management system was almost solely reliant on a single, non-ecosystem form of infrastructure, the provincial dam system. As prolonged drought impacted this key water resource, resilience to resource collapse was shown to be low and a missing feedback between the water resource and the Cape Town community was highlighted. The collapse of water resources ("Day Zero") was averted through a combination of government and community group led measures, incorporating both local ecosystem (green-loop) and non-local ecosystem (red-loop) forms of water resource management, and increased rainfall returning to the area. Additional disaster management plans proposed by the municipality included the tighter integration of red and green-loop water management approaches, which acted to foster a stronger connection between the Cape Town community and their water resources. We advocate the wider development and application of the RL-GL model, theoretically and empirically, to investigate missing feedbacks between water resources and their communities.
Asunto(s)
Ecosistema , Recursos Hídricos , Ciudades , Conservación de los Recursos Naturales , Sudáfrica , Suecia , AguaRESUMEN
Although collaborative governance has been presented as central in environmental management, it does not guarantee sustainable natural resources management. Due to methodological challenges and a lack of robust interdisciplinary data, few studies have linked collaborative processes to ecological outcomes. This paper contributes to that research effort by investigating whether the relative involvement of different interest groups in deliberations matters from an ecological perspective. To that end, this interdisciplinary paper links social and ecological indicators across two large French river basins in a dataset spanning 25 years. We find that the presence of different interest groups - agricultural, industrial and NGOs - during deliberations, is linked to different ecological outcomes. Most notably, the composition of present members does not play the same role depending on the type of pollution source studied (e.g. point and/or diffuse sources).