Since the onset of human societies, settlement patterns and social structures have been shaped by access to water. This review covers historical and recent examples from Cambodia, Central Asia, India, Latin America an...Since the onset of human societies, settlement patterns and social structures have been shaped by access to water. This review covers historical and recent examples from Cambodia, Central Asia, India, Latin America and the Arabian Peninsula to analyze the role of water resources in determining the rise and collapse of civilizations. Over recent decades increasing globalization and concomitant possibilities to externalize water needs as virtual water have obscured global dependence on water resources via telecoupling, but rapid urbanization brings it now back to the political agenda. It is foremost in the urban arena of poorer countries where competing claims for water increasingly lead to scale-transcendent conflicts about ecosystem services. Solutions to the dilemma will require broad stakeholder-based agreements on water use taking into account the available data on water resources, their current and potential use efficiency, recycling of water after effective treatment, and social-ecological approaches of improved governance and conflict resolution.展开更多
基金the framework of the Indo-German Research Unit FOR2432/1&2 “Social-ecological systems in the Indian rural-urban interface: Functions, scales, and dynamics of transitions” funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG, BU1308/13-1&2) and the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of Indiasupport of the project Globe Drought (02WGR1457F) by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) through its Global Resource Water (GRo W) funding initiative。
文摘Since the onset of human societies, settlement patterns and social structures have been shaped by access to water. This review covers historical and recent examples from Cambodia, Central Asia, India, Latin America and the Arabian Peninsula to analyze the role of water resources in determining the rise and collapse of civilizations. Over recent decades increasing globalization and concomitant possibilities to externalize water needs as virtual water have obscured global dependence on water resources via telecoupling, but rapid urbanization brings it now back to the political agenda. It is foremost in the urban arena of poorer countries where competing claims for water increasingly lead to scale-transcendent conflicts about ecosystem services. Solutions to the dilemma will require broad stakeholder-based agreements on water use taking into account the available data on water resources, their current and potential use efficiency, recycling of water after effective treatment, and social-ecological approaches of improved governance and conflict resolution.
