Ecosystem Services for Urban Water Security by Blal Adem Esmail & Davide Geneletti

Author:Blal Adem Esmail & Davide Geneletti
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030456665
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

3.6 Concluding Remarks

This chapter presented an operational approach for designing and assessing impacts of Watershed Investments, building on the concepts of ecosystem services and boundary work. The approach can effectively support the implementation of Watershed Investments that aim at achieving urban water security along with other social or environmental objectives. By addressing stakeholders’ concerns of credibility, saliency and legitimacy, it can facilitate negotiation of objectives, definition of scenarios, assessment of alternative Watershed Investments and planning a follow-up, to tackle local challenges, ultimately, to help achieve resilient socio-ecological system. Specifically, the strategic component identifies as key inputs of the process of Watershed Investment design and assessment, the definition of objectives and visioning of feasible and desirable scenarios by stakeholders. The technical component applies spatially explicit modelling to design investments, hence to model the impacts on selected ecosystem services. Ultimately, by addressing the challenges of linking diverse stakeholders and knowledge system across management levels and institutional boundaries, the proposed approach for designing and assessing impacts of Watershed Investments can contribute to implementing adaptive management in the urban water sector, in real-life .

In the remainder of the book, we present a practical application of the proposed approach in a case study of the urban water sector, in Sub-Saharan Africa context. More specifically, Chap. 4 briefly introduces the case of Asmara city and its main water supply, the Toker Watershed, highlighting two key socio-ecological challenges relating to soil erosion and water scarcity. It also presents a central actor in the case study, the Asmara Water Supply Department. Following, Chap. 5 presents an application of the approach for designing and assessing impact of Watershed Investments. Assuming urban water security and rural poverty alleviation as two objectives for investment, the case study application explores all the steps of the proposed approach.

References

Abson DJ, von Wehrden H, Baumgärtner S, Fischer J, Hanspach J, Härdtle W, Heinrichs H, Klein AM, Lang DJ, Martens P, Walmsley D (2014) Ecosystem services as a boundary object for sustainability. Ecol Econ 103:29–37. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1016/​j.​ecolecon.​2014.​04.​012Crossref

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.