Anna Lukasiewicz

Water, agriculture and poverty in the Niger River basin

Livelihoods in the Niger River basin rely mainly on rainfed agriculture, except in the dry extreme north. Low yields and water productivity result from low inputs, short growing seasons, dry spells, and excessive water. The overlap of traditional and modern rules impedes secure access to water and investments in agriculture by generating uncertain land tenure. Improved agriculture and water management require technical, sociological, and regulatory changes to address the wider causes of poverty. Illiteracy and poor water quality, both correlated with high infant mortality, are pressing problems. Rapidly increasing population, climatic changes and dam construction contribute to rural vulnerability.

Assessing Government Intentions for Australian Water Reform Using a Social Justice Framework

Concerns about justice are increasing as Australian governments continue to implement water reform, often facing hostility from stakeholders with conflicting interests. This article presents a social justice framework that can be used to analyze water reform from a justice perspective. The framework is a compilation of existing justice theories taken from the social psychology literature and is based on the components of distributive, procedural, and interactive justice. We applied the framework in a content analysis of eight key policy documents on water reform. Results show that Australian governments intend that justice be achieved across the distributive and procedural components, with distribution scoring highest and procedural concerns being most numerous. Justice in water reform is predominantly constructed as distribution according to need, with transparent, consistent, and accurate decision making as a second priority. The analysis shows that the framework is a useful tool for evaluating and developing policy using a justice perspective.

Institutional challenges of adopting ecosystem-based adaptation to climate change

Abstract In view of past environmental degradation and anticipated climate change impacts, we assessed the potential for ecosystem-based adaptation in the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia. In a workshop with staff from three Catchment Management Authorities (CMAs) who had jurisdiction over three sub-basins, as well as technical experts, nine adaptation options were identified that ranged from environmental flows, restoring river channel habitat, reoperating infrastructure and controlling invasive species. A Catchment Adaptation Framework was developed and used to assess and compare these adaptation options with each of the CMAs, drawing on interviews with their key stakeholders, to identify the risks, benefits and costs. We found that ecosystem-based adaptation can augment catchment management programs and requires investment in a suite of different but complementary measures to lower risk. Our research found institutional challenges in implementing this approach, including the complexities of multi-agency management, constricting legal requirements, narrow funding arrangements, under-developed institutional capacity, difficulties of implementing catchment-scale programs on private property and the need to adhere to community expectations. These institutional issues are ubiquitous internationally and point to the wider issues of providing sufficient management capacity to support adaptation. The Catchment Adaptation Framework presented here enables river basin managers to systematically assess the adaptation options to better inform their decision-making.

How the social construction of the environment affects people's reactions to water policy

Abstract Over the past 20 years, water reform has moved to clarify water rights and responsibilities among users, separated water and land management, and introduced markets. Most recently, water policy has clearly recognised the need for environmental allocations to ensure sustainability. These reforms, especially the last, have created conflicts between stakeholder groups. While these conflicts have been couched on many occasions as irrigation versus conservation, this article shows that the basis of these arguments lies in tacit differences in the constructed meaning attached to the environment by different stakeholders. It explores the differences between how government managers, scientists and non-government stakeholders, such as irrigators, foresters, croppers and graziers, as well as Aboriginal elders, view the environment. Our study is based on interviews with government managers responsible for water management and rural non-government stakeholders in two case study sites in the Murray-Darling Basin, where water reform has caused vigorous debates. The findings show that scientists and government managers tend to see the environment as the passive recipient of human impacts, problems best addressed by objective science. In contrast, landholders see themselves as active agents within the environment, and place much more emphasis on personal experience and local knowledge. These worldviews influence peoples reactions to water policy but are rarely explicitly discussed or acknowledged. This results in unnecessary conflict in public debate. Understanding the government and landholder perspectives is essential as a foundation for effective collaborative planning.

Shared responsibility: the who, what and how

ABSTRACT As natural disasters increase around the world and stretch the capacities of emergency services, national governments and international institutions have stressed the importance of shared responsibility; the idea that all actors within a society have some obligations in disaster management and must work collectively to reduce disaster risk. However, the exact balance between individual and government responsibility is not yet established and continually contested, especially after major events. In Australia, the National Strategy for Disaster Resilience (NSDR) is the overarching policy framework for disaster risk management and aims to create resilient communities through an emphasis on shared responsibility and empowerment. Through a literature review and document analysis of the NSDR and associated policy documents, we clarify, organise and operationalise the necessarily general policy goal of shared responsibility. We first analyse how the NSDR conceptualises communities to discover which community actors are mentioned. We then identify the responsibilities it prescribes or implies for these different actors and consider the types of policy instruments that are relevant to disaster risk management. Our analysis reveals a tension between the NSDR’s placement of government at the centre of disaster risk management, and its other, less well-explained emphasis on community empowerment.

Are we adapting to climate change? A catchment-based adaptation assessment tool for freshwater ecosystems

Freshwater ecosystems in many parts of the world have been severely affected by past management practices that have altered the volume, timing and quality of water flows and caused a decline in their ecological health. Some of these systems are also experiencing the negative impacts of climate change. Adaptation to climate change and the continual need to address existing ecological damage poses ongoing challenges for freshwater managers. In this paper we propose and discuss a Catchment Assessment Framework (CAF) that is used to evaluate existing and potential freshwater management actions, such as riparian revegetation and habitat connectivity, for their adaptation potential. The CAF was developed as a tool for prioritizing low risk climate change adaptation options in Australian catchment management. The CAF enables catchment managers and technical experts to assess management actions against seven inter-related criteria to provide a holistic assessment: relevance to the catchment; climate change adaptation potential, including potential for maladaptation and benefit under different climate scenarios; ecosystem service benefits; compatibility with other actions; implementation constraints; socio-economic consequences; and a risk assessment. It was developed and applied by assessing nine management options with stakeholders in three catchments within the Murray-Darling Basin in south-eastern Australia. We found that while management options are undertaken as a response to existing degradation, they can be used as building blocks for a climate change adaptation strategy that considers a range of different but complementary measures to better manage climate-related risk. The CAF enables practitioners to assess the advantages of a range of adaptation options and to subject them to their wider decision making and management planning.

Book Review: The justices and injustices of ecosystem services

This is an excellent read for those studying not only ecosystem services (ES) but environmental management and sustainability more broadly. The introductory chapter effectively spells out the compl...