[MUSIC] Welcome to Week 5 where we are going to talk about the challenges of water accounting. I am Cristina Madrid, a postdoctoral Marie-Curie fellow at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. I work in the research group of Professor and my research deals with activities where water and energy security interact. I am going to guide you through a number of sessions this week, and we are going to start talking about the complexity of water. In this session, we are going to get familiar with the many definitions water has. How a systems perspective will help us doing an analysis of water and how systemic analysis fit within water science. Let's talk about the complexity of water. I think it is not new that water is the multi-dimensional element. In MuSIASEM, we consider water both a flow and a fund. As you have seen in previous weeks, flow and funds are the two key elements in MuSIASEM analysis. Water is the flow within societal analysis, why? Because we do use water to maintain the identity of the social system. We drink it, use it to wash our clothes, to take a shower, even for recreation. Within ecosystems, however, water is considered a fund because it is part of the identity of the system. For example, a desert is a desert because you don't have water in it, and a fjord is a fjord because you do have a lot of sea water in it. That complexity of water is difficult to integrate in sustainability analysis. Let me put you an example. How would you define drinking water? If I ask you what type of water would you be willing to drink, probably you would say yes to a bottled water coming from any factory. However, if I ask you if you will be willing to drink water from the Ganga River, you might just say no. In that case, you are using a chemical purity definition of drinking water, but there are others. In India, people drink water from the Ganga symbolically, and then they are using the spiritual purity definition of drinking water. In MuSIASEM, water has semantically open attributes, which means that the attribute is defined differently for different actors. The different phases of water have been integrated differently in water science. And that has influenced the water discourse. The water discourse is the idea of what people, like societies, have about water. It is formed by the connection, the interaction between political narratives, social narratives, scientific narratives, and others. If we focus in the scientific narratives, the different scientific disciplines also see water as something different. We have cases where water is defined as an ecosystem service, as a production factor, or even a dangerous element that we have to protect societies against. Water science has not seen water as a multi or as a complex element all the time. Pretty much, water science has evolved from the very technique common earth science hydrology to include ecosystems in the eco-hydrology. And to include the interaction between societies and ecosystems in what is called a socio-ecohydrology. This variation of the way in which water science is performed or approached has also influenced and has been influenced by a change in the water discourse. There are different ways of seeing the evolution of the water discourse, but this is one of the most accepted ones. So societies have changed in their perception of water from a survival point of view where we needed to protect ourselves against floods, for example. And then we passed through the hydraulic mission in which water was needed to be carried away thousands of kilometer's even to be transferred to the places where it was needed. And now, we are in a period of reflexive modernity where water is seen as part of the ecosystems and not something that is so easily tradable. In this reflexive modernity, a very key concept is this of integrated water resource management. The concept of integrated water resource management involves not only management per se, but it also includes policy-making, analysis, and participation issues. And actually, if we focus in some of the poles that form these in this way of approaching water science, we can see different poles. For example, in policy-making, we can observe people who's more prone to use science results than participation and the other way around. If we focus on analysis, there is more people focusing on the social aspects of water use or on the physical aspects of water availability. We can also see studies focusing at the local level or at the global scale, and we can also see analysis focusing on the watershed and the problemshed. Now, what is the problemshed and the watershed? Professor Tony Allan, in 2001, talked about two different ways of approaching water issues. One of them was the watershed, which has been traditionally the way of doing in water science. Watershed analysis focuses on a catchment and the water flows and issues that are associated with the catchment. Other new perspective that Professor Allan introduced was the problemshed. The problemshed focuses in a social issue with water, and it would include all the catchments that are associated to that social issue. For example, let's talk about agriculture in Southern Spain. The southeast of Spain is really arid, as we will see later on. If you focus in the water needed to process all the tomatoes needed in that area, or exported to the rest of Europe, we will see that we will go through different catchments. The problemshed does not only deal with water flows but also the societal indicators of how that water actually maintains a social system. Now, water is different from energy, and from land, and from biomass, and from many other elements. But particularly with fossil energy, there is a very strong difference. Fossil energy is a flow in MuSIASEM. So you have a stock. It can be a gas reservoir you extracted that is an input to the society. The society uses the gas, and then the output comes back to the ecosystem. In this case, to the atmosphere and might be in the form of methane leakage. In the case of water, however, we are taking water from funds in the ecosystems, as we said before. And that means that we are changing the ecosystem's structure with the input of water to their society. We might actually use water more than once within the society. We are able to reuse it or to clean it enough, and then we will let it go. And it will be back to the ecosystem where we will transform the ecosystem. If we look at the two components of systems, the organizational components and the exchange components, that is the equivalent for flows and funds, respectively. We divide the water system in three parts. One part being the societal, the other part being the ecosystem, and the other one being the Earth. We have a table like this. In the societal metabolism, we are worried about the societal integrity. In the ecosystem metabolism, we are worried about the ecosystem integrity. There are relations that connect the biophysical exchange, in this case, the water flows with the societal and the ecosystem integrity. So flow A will represent the water extracted or polluted and is an exchange of water between this ecosystem and the society. Float B, like relation B in this case, is the relation between the society and the ecosystem. That could be, for example, population density. In order to assess their metabolism, we need to relate. There'd be a physical exchange with the organization of the system. This is done with a feasibility check and viability check. You probably have seen already a bit about feasibility and viability checks, so I won't stop a lot to talk a lot about it. But just think about the viability check as a way of analyzing how well or how badly we are using our water within the society. And the feasibility check is a way of checking how well and how badly we are treating our ecosystems. Of course, the societal metabolism is a constraint by the ecosystem metabolism. And that means that the ecosystem is acting as a barrier on how much water the society can take, and what type of water. And in the same way, we will focus in the ecosystem metabolism. The Earth would be the one putting the constraints, in this case. So let me conclude with four remarks. In integrated water resource management that has come as a result of the evolution of water science, we need a systemic approach. This systemic approach will make us connect societies with ecosystems and even with the Earth dynamics. In this connection, water is different from energy. And that means that the analytical definition of water is going to change within the societies as a flow and within the ecosystems as a fan.
