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Coupled human‐water systems (CHWS) are diverse and have been studied across a wide variety of disciplines. Integrating multiple disciplinary perspectives on CHWS provides a comprehensive and actionable understanding of these complex systems. While interdisciplinary integration has often remained elusive, specific combinations of disciplines might be comparably easier to integrate (compatible), and/or their combination might be particularly likely to uncover previously unobtainable insights (complementary). This paper systematically identifies such promising combinations by mapping disciplines along a common set of topical, philosophical, and methodological dimensions. It also identifies key challenges and lessons for multidisciplinary research teams seeking to integrate highly promising (complementary) but poorly compatible disciplines. Applied to eight disciplines that span the environmental physical sciences and the quantitative and qualitative social sciences, we found that promising combinations of disciplines identified by the typology broadly reproduce patterns of recent interdisciplinary collaborative research revealed by a bibliometric analysis. We also found that some disciplines are centrally located within the typology by being compatible and complementary to multiple other disciplines along distinct dimensions. This points to the potential for these disciplines to act as catalysts for wider interdisciplinary integration.

This article is categorized under:

Engineering Water > Methods

Human Water > Methods

Science of Water > Methods

 

The common‐pool nature of groundwater resources creates incentives to over pump that contribute to their rapid global depletion. In transboundary aquifers, users are separated by a territorial border and might face substantially different economic and hydrogeologic conditions that can alternatively dampen or amplify incentives to over pump. We develop a theoretical model that couples principles of game theory and groundwater flow to capture the combined effect of well locations and user asymmetries on pumping incentives. We find that heterogeneities across users (here referred to as asymmetries) in terms of either energy cost, groundwater profitability or aquifer response tend to dampen incentives to over pump. However, combinations of two or more types of asymmetry can substantially amplify common‐pool overdraft, particularly when the same user simultaneously faces comparatively higher costs (or aquifer response) and profitability. We use this theoretical insight to interpret the emergence of the Disi agreement between Saudi Arabia and Jordan in association with the Disi‐Amman water pipeline. By using bounded non‐dimensional parameters to encode user asymmetries and groundwater connectivity, the theory provides a tractable generalized framework to understand the premature depletion of shared aquifers, whether transboundary or not.

 

Abstract. Streamflow regimes are rapidly changing in many regions of the world. Attribution of these changes to specific hydrological processes and their underlying climatic and anthropogenic drivers is essential to formulate an effective water policy. Traditional approaches to hydrologic attribution rely on the ability to infer hydrological processes through the development of catchment-scale hydrological models. However, such approaches are challenging to implement in practice due to limitations in using models to accurately associate changes in observed outcomes with corresponding drivers. Here we present an alternative approach that leverages the method of multiple hypotheses to attribute changes in streamflow in the Upper Jhelum watershed, an important tributary headwater region of the Indus basin, where a dramatic decline in streamflow since 2000 has yet to be adequately attributed to its corresponding drivers. We generate and empirically evaluate a series of alternative and complementary hypotheses concerning distinct components of the water balance. This process allows a holistic understanding of watershed-scale processes to be developed, even though the catchment-scale water balance remains open. Using remote sensing and secondary data, we explore changes in climate, surface water, and groundwater. The evidence reveals that climate, rather than land use, had a considerably stronger influence on reductions in streamflow, both through reduced precipitation and increased evapotranspiration. Baseflow analyses suggest different mechanisms affecting streamflow decline in upstream and downstream regions, respectively. These findings offer promising avenues for future research in the Upper Jhelum watershed, and an alternative approach to hydrological attribution in data-scarce regions.