Скачать или смотреть Ezra Systems Seminar Series on April 26, 2024: Andrea Rinaldo (EPFL)

Reflected in Water: Ecohydrology, Resilience, and Inequalities

Will future large-scale water resources plans make compelling arguments for including the reduction of the loss of biodiversity across scales in fluvial landscapes? Is the structure of river networks a template for large-scale spread of waterborne disease infections? Are we capable to provide solid economic arguments for preventing water development schemes in the light of the social and economic cost of predicted increased burden of disease they would bring? Do biological invasions, including historic population migrations that shaped human community compositions as we see them now, depend on physical constraints like the waterscape acting as the substrate for their dispersal? Social discounting applied to public policies concerned with the preservation of the natural capital needs quantitative assessments, and thus environmental science and engineering. Key is our capability to assess and predict the fate of water controls on living communities. My take: time is ripe to rethink the distributive justice of water resources management and to reduce inequalities on a global scale. We now have the tools – reflected in water.