The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations Agenda 2030 represent an ambitious blueprint to reduce inequalities globally and achieve a sustainable future for all mankind. Meeting the SDGs for water requires an integrated approach to managing and allocating water resources, by involving all actors and stakeholders, and considering how water resources link different sectors of society. To date, water management practice is dominated by technocratic, scenario-based approaches that may work well in the short term but can result in unintended consequences in the long term due to limited accounting of dynamic feedbacks between the natural, technical, and social dimensions of human-water systems. The discipline of sociohydrology has an important role to play in informing policy by developing a generalizable understanding of phenomena that arise from interactions between water and human systems. To explain these phenomena, sociohydrology must address several scientific challenges to strengthen the field and broaden its scope. These include engagement with social scientists to accommodate social heterogeneity, power relations, trust, cultural beliefs, and cognitive biases, which strongly influence the way in which people alter, and adapt to, changing hydrological regimes. It also requires development of new methods to formulate and test alternative hypotheses for the explanation of emergent phenomena generated by feedbacks between water and society. Advancing sociohydrology in these ways therefore represents a major contribution toward meeting the targets set by the SDGs, the societal grand challenge of our time.

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Sociohydrology : Scientific Challenges in Addressing the Sustainable Development Goals

One of the sustainable development goals set by the United Nations General Assembly is to ensure the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. This requires investment in water purification technologies. World Water Day offers an opportunity to discuss whether such investment will help achieve this laudable goal.

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Sustainable implementation of innovative technologies for water purification

In light of recent calls for an increased commitment to interdisciplinary endeavors, this paper reflects on the implications of a critical geography of water that crosses social and natural sciences. Questions on how to best research the relationship between water and society have been raised both in the field of critical geographies of water and sociohydrology. Yet, there has been little crossover between these disciplinary perspectives. This, we argue, may be partly explained by the fact that interdisciplinary research is both advocated and antagonized. On the one hand, interdisciplinarity is argued to deliver more in terms of effectively informing policy processes and developing theoretical perspectives that can reform and regenerate knowledge. On the other hand, natural and social sciences are often presented as ontologically, epistemologically, and methodologically incompatible. Drawing on our own research experience and expertise, this paper focuses on the multiple ways in which critical geographies of water and sociohydrology are convergent, compatible, and complementary. We reflect on the existing theoretical instruments to engage in interdisciplinary research and question some of the assumptions on the methodological and epistemological incompatibility between natural and social sciences. We then propose that an interdisciplinary resource geography can further understandings of how power and the non-human co-constitute the social world and hydrological flows and advance conceptualizations of water as socionatures.

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/11/10/1973/pdf

Interdisciplinary Critical Geographies of Water: Capturing the Mutual Shaping of Society and Hydrological Flows

This paper analyses the impact of financial crises on the Sustainable Development Goal of eradicating poverty. To do so, we develop an adjusted Multidimensional Poverty Framework (MPF) that includes 15 indicators that span across key poverty aspects related to income, basic needs, health, education and the environment. We then use an econometric model that allows us to examine the impact of financial crises on these indicators in 150 countries over the period 1980–2015. Our analysis produces new estimates on the impact of financial crises on poverty’s multiple social, economic and environmental aspects and equally important captures dynamic linkages between these aspects. Thus, we offer a better understanding of the potential impact of current debt dynamics on Multidimensional Poverty and demonstrate the need to move beyond the boundaries of SDG1, if we are to meet the target of eradicating poverty. Our results indicate that the current financial distress experienced by many low-income countries may reverse the progress that has been made hitherto in reducing poverty. We find that financial crises are associated with an approximately 10% increase of extreme poor in low-income countries. The impact is even stronger in some other poverty aspects. For instance, crises are associated with an average decrease of government spending in education by 17.72% in low-income countries. The dynamic linkages between most of the Multidimensional Poverty indicators, warn of a negative domino effect on a number of SDGs related to poverty, if there is a financial crisis shock. To pre-empt such a domino effect, the specific SDG target 17.4 on attaining long-term debt sustainability through coordinated policies plays a key role and requires urgent attention by the international community.

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Financial crises and the attainment of the SDGs: an adjusted multidimensional poverty approach

Water governance models for meeting sustainable development Goals:A structured literature review

Target 7c of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG 7c) aimed to halve the population that had no sustainable access to water and basic sanitation before 2015. According to the data collected by the Joint Monitoring Programme in charge of measuring progress towards MDG 7c, 2.6 billion people gained access to safe water and 2.3 billion people to basic sanitation. Despite these optimistic figures, many academics have criticised MDG 7c. We provide an overview of this critique by performing a systematic literature review of 62 studies conducted over the MDG implementation period (2002–2015) and shortly after. Our objective is to contribute to the debate on the operationalisation of the Sustainable Development Goal on water and sanitation (SDG 6). The academic debate on MDG 7c mainly focused on the effectiveness of the indicators for safe water and sanitation and on the political dynamics underlying the selection of these indicators. SDG 6 addresses some of the concerns raised on the indicators for safe water and sanitation but fails to acknowledge the politics of indicator setting. We are proposing additional indicators and reflect on the limitations of using only quantitative indicators to measure progress towards SDG 6.

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The Sustainable Development Goal on Water and Sanitation : Learning from the Millennium Development Goals

The regulation of onsite sanitation in Maputo, Mozambique

In this article we draw on an interdisciplinary study on drinking water quality in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, to examine the nature, scale, and politics of waterborne diseases. We show how ...

Johanna Weststrate

Papers

The Sustainable Development Goal on Water and Sanitation : Learning from the Millennium Development Goals

The regulation of onsite sanitation in Maputo, Mozambique

The Urban Metabolism of Waterborne Diseases: Variegated Citizenship, (Waste)Water Flows, and Climatic Variability in Maputo, Mozambique