Towards integrated catchment management: opening the paradigm locks between hydrology, ecology and policy‐making

Abstract

A recently launched international initiative on “Hydrology for the Environment, Life and Policy” (HELP) aims at a science‐based approach to integrated catchment management, and in particular to facilitating the dialogue needed between scientists, stakeholders and policy makers. The ultimate challenge of a sustainability‐oriented environmental management is to find the proper balance between humans and the impacts that their activities cause to ecosystems. This makes the catchment a useful landscape unit for an integrated approach where a balancing between humans and nature can be carried out. The catchment can be seen as containing two mosaics, one of human water‐related activities and the other of water‐dependent ecosystems, terrestrial as well as aquatic. These two mosaics are internally linked by water flows but partly incompatible. Therefore, a management task is to orchestrate the catchment for compatibility, which will demand intentional trade‐offs. Past water management policy has often been based on outdated knowledge and technology, for instance by a ‘paradigm lock’ between scientists and stakeholders, isolating them from each other: scientists by the lack of proven utility of their findings, and stakeholders by legal and professional precedence and disaggregated institutions. The HELP initiative encourages the water policy, water resources management and scientific communities to work together within a field‐oriented context so that science may be closely integrated with policy and management needs.

Notes

Correspondence Address: Malin Falkenmark, Stockholm International Water Institute, Hantverkargatan 5, S‐112 21 Stockholm, Sweden. Email: [email protected]

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Malin Falkenmark

Correspondence Address: Malin Falkenmark, Stockholm International Water Institute, Hantverkargatan 5, S‐112 21 Stockholm, Sweden. Email: [email protected]