Rivers, Flows and People-Connecting Ecosystems with Human Communities, Cultures and Livelihoods

摘要: Rivers are socio-ecological systems-lifelines for the wellbeing of millions of people, centres of culture, and repositories of precious natural capital in every basin worldwide. As water insecurity and the pace of water infrastructure development intensify, environmental flows have taken the stage as a robust management approach for sustaining river health, biodiversity and livelihoods. Environmental flows are intended to describe the quantity, timing, and quality of water flows required to sustain freshwater and estuarine ecosystems and the human livelihoods and well-being that depend on these ecosystems. Efforts to date have concentrated on establishing, consolidating and scaling up the cross-boundary science of ecohydrology. Remarkably, until recently, the equally vital social aspects, and the methods, knowledge, capacity and institutions essential to support them, have remained weakly developed and rather detached from this transdisciplinary effort. Moreover, few institutional bridges exist linking social scientists to those natural scientists with expertise in environmental flow assessment. Encouragingly, significant momentum is now building in this growth area, to ensure that the social sciences become a central element of both the policy and the practice of effective environmental flow implementation.