You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Confronted with an increase in floods, droughts and other natural hazards, cities and regions are alert to find climate proof solutions that overcome the limitations of traditional grey infrastructure. Nature-based solutions are proposed as a valid way to address risk and adapt to climate change while increasing resilience through the multiple benefits they generate. However, in spite of the widespread academic and political support for NBS, their implementation is lacking. As key barriers to implementation there are institutional and regulatory barriers, an absence of clear evaluation of NBS performance, funding/financing barriers and knowledge and acceptance barriers. This Open Access book...
Four other themes will addressed: politics, economics, the environment and the history of land investments in sub-Saharan Africa.
This book describes concepts and tools needed for water resources management, including methods for modeling, simulation, optimization, big data analysis, data mining, remote sensing, geographical information system, game theory, conflict resolution, System dynamics, agent-based models, multiobjective, multicriteria, and multiattribute decision making and risk and uncertainty analysis, for better and sustainable management of water resources and consumption, thus mitigating the present and future global water shortage crisis. It presents the applications of these tools through case studies which demonstrate its benefits of proper management of water resources systems. This book acts as a reference for students, professors, industrial practitioners, and stakeholders in the field of water resources and hydrology.
Water is one of the most important natural resources covering 75 percent of the Earth's surface. It is a major component of living organisms contributing to about 60 percent of the human body. Different European environmental monitoring programmes confirm that the current land and water resources in Europe are extremely vulnerable and subject to a range of external pressures. Water management needs to be implemented with caution following thorough evaluation. Therefore, it is crucial for the current generation to manage and preserve water resources for future generations in a sustainable way. Current human development patterns suggest that in the future there will be an increase in populatio...
The focus of this book is on the key water-related vulnerabilities to climate change in Africa, particularly in its most vulnerable areas, exploring potential management responses to such vulnerabilities. The African countries are particularly exposed and vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change, with important impacts on water resources and hydrological systems, water availability, water resource management and sea level variations. Already, under various anthropogenic pressures, the status of water resources in Africa has been changing over the past decades, with decreasing water quality, falling groundwater levels, and variability in rainfall, both in terms of timing and inten...
"The world water problems are a due to bad governance, not to physical water scarcity." This book is inspired by this statement and explores whether it holds in a specific country, Spain, where climatic conditions – Spain is one of the most arid countries of the European Union - would fully justify saying that water problems are due to physical water scarcity. The metrification of water uses and their monetary value is a first important step in understanding how reallocation of water among users could help mitigating many of current water problems in Spain. However, water reallocation among users or from users to nature is far from simple. Initiatives portrayed as the solution to the water...
This book examines Nile water security through the morphology of the river: it uses the always changing form of the river as a theoretical and empirical device to map and understand how infrastructures and discourses dynamically interact with the Nile. By bringing a history of two centuries of dam development on the Nile in relation with the drainage of a hill slope in Ethiopia on the one hand and irrigation reform in Sudan on the other, the author shows how the scales, units and ‘populations’ figuring in projects to securitize the river emerge through the rearrangement of its water and sediments. The analysis of ‘Making water security’ is more than yet another story of how modern pr...
Nature-Based Solutions and Water Security: An Action Agenda for the 21st Century presents an action agenda for natural infrastructure on topics of standards and principles, technical evaluation and design tools, capacity building and innovative finance. Chapters introduce the topic and concepts of natural infrastructure, or nature-based solutions (NBS) and water security, with important background on the urgency of the global water crisis and the role that NBS can, and should play, in addressing this crisis. Sections also present the community of practice's collective thinking on a prioritized action agenda to guide more rapid progress in mainstreaming NBS. With contributions from global aut...
This book explores how the sustainability of farming enterprises can be assessed, with a particular focus on the state of Bulgarian farms during EU CAP implementation and how such sustainability can be improved. It also investigates the evolution of the concept of sustainability. It analyses the economic, social and environmental sustainability of farming enterprises of different juridical types, sizes, specialization, and location. Factors and perspectives crucial in sustainable farming are identified, and directions for further research highlighted. The book will appeal to scientific researchers, teachers, students, farmers, professional and non-governmental organizations, administrators, and policy-makers.
Increasing irrigation efficiency has been high on the political agenda in Spain for many years. However, the overarching aim to reduce agricultural water consumption has not been met so far. To explore this phenomenon, Nora Schütze investigates processes of coordination between the water and agricultural sector in three Spanish river basins in the context of the EU Water Framework Directive implementation. From the perspective of polycentric governance, she identifies multiple mechanisms which illustrate how and why actors interact in certain ways, and thus shows why environmental aims of the Water Framework Directive remain unachieved.