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The research focused on assessing groundwater quality in Jawharkel, Ghanikhel, Chak, Mandukhel, Dawrankhel, Noorkhel, Baba Qala, Sanikhel, Muhkumkhel, and Rasheeddan villages, and specifically intended to measure groundwater physical and chemical parameters in the mountainous areas of the Chak Karstic Sedimentary Basin in Chak District, Wardak Province, located in Afghanistan’s central part. The analyzed parameters included electric conductivity, pH, turbidity, odor, taste, color, hardness, as well as chloride (Cl2), nitrogen (N), fluoride (F), iron (Fe), arsenic (Ar), ammonia (NH3), and sulfide (SO4) content. All the analyzed chemical and physical parameters were found to be within acceptable limits. The results obtained were compared with the WHO drinking water quality standards. The study revealed that the values of physical parameters such as color, taste, odor and turbidity fell within the acceptable (recommended standard) limits; that the examined samples demonstrated no toxic elements and/or components; and that the analyzed chemical parameters were likewise within the permissible limits recommended by WHO and ANSA. Water quality in the target rural area proved to be better compared to the concerns of its residents and households, and that local water posed no threat to residents’ health and survival. The article emphasizes the importance of properly applying water quality indicators previously not adequately explored in the target area.

The concept of ecosystem services and their valuation have been used extensively across the last 20 years as a means of demonstrating the immense value of nature to policy-makers. Assessing ecosystem services and assigning an economic value to them has been thought of as the silver bullet. They were expected to bring the breakthrough for biodiversity prioritisation that is sorely needed amidst the current environmental crisis. The vast figures and values attributed to nature was thought to be capable of changing decision-makers’ rational minds to prioritise biodiversity in their agendas. However, to date, there has been limited research that explores how the focus on ecosystem services assessments (ESA) has impacted on policy. This understanding is profoundly needed as, despite much discussion of ecosystem services, biodiversity loss continues. To understand how policy impact is considered in ESA research and what factors enable it, this paper presents the findings from a systematic review of 137 research articles investigating ESA at the EU level (the EU is considered the trailblazer of environmental policy in the international policy arena). Of the studies captured in the systematic review, 48% of the assessments included monetary valuation methods, 62% involved experts or stakeholders and 72% specifically referred to EU, regional, national, or local policy documents. We found that 8% of the articles reported on policy impact, whilst only 8% assessed the potential enabling and 2% the hindering factors of their research to influence policy. It was evident that economic valuation, although widely used, does not necessarily lead to a higher reported policy impact. On the other hand, wide stakeholder involvement was highlighted as a key element to reach policy impact. In this paper we argue that limited coverage of impact is also partly because research on ecosystem services and their valuation, somewhat paradoxically, does not necessarily focus on the impact of these assessments. The findings thus demonstrate a need for further empirical research into the reasons for the insubstantial coverage of policy relevance in scientific reporting. The results also indicate the necessity for a review of ecosystem services valuations' actual effectiveness as a means of communicating scientific research to policy-makers. Furthermore, a wider discussion on complementary or alternative ways to upscale policy impacts is required, along with a better understanding of the target audience's needs.

As resource users interact and impose externalities onto each other, institutions are needed to coordinate resource use, create trust, and provide incentives for sustainable management. Coordinated collective action can play a key role in enabling communities to manage natural resource commons more sustainably. But when such collective action is not present, what can be done to foster it? We contribute to the understanding of how experiential learning through games can affect behavioral change, potentially leading to more sustainable commons management. We present a conceptual framework describing the most important processes involved in experiential learning games. The framework highlights the importance of the game context for achieving game outcomes. We list game features that have been argued to influence learning and behavioral determinants, focusing on the game narrative and experience, game rules, and attributes of players. We briefly describe how each game feature influences the processes in the framework. Next, we apply the conceptual framework to examine design features that were particularly important for influencing behavioral drivers in commons management in three intervention cases from India relating to groundwater, surface water, and forests. Our conceptual reflections underpin the need to debate about underlying assumptions in using games as intervention tools. Making assumptions transparent can help to understand why or under what conditions experiential learning works or fails. There is a critical need for more systematic choices of the right tools for the right purpose. This includes participants of the experiential learning who must be able to relate the game to their real life. A social dilemma in the game should at least, in its basic structure, represent a real-life dilemma. We close by highlighting future research needs both from the conceptual behavioral change as well as the game design perspective.

The main aim of this paper is to analyze the characteristics of the drinking water quality in Kabul city and identify its suitability for drinking. During the work, a total of 60 water samples were collected from four drinking water sources (qanat, open well, tap water, and a hand pump) located at different points and were tested for physical, chemical, and biological parameters. Physical and chemical analyses were performed according to the standard methods, while a bacterial analysis was performed by using the Wagtech Potatest single incubator test kit and membrane filter method. The results obtained were compared with the standards of the World Health Organization (WHO) and Afghanistan’s National Standards Administration (ANSA). The study showed that physical parameters were within acceptable limits for qanat, open well, and tap waters. However, color, taste, odor, and turbidity values exceeded the recommended limits for hand pump wells. All analyzed chemical parameters were within permissible limits recommended by WHO/ANSA. The bacteriological analysis showed total coliform and fecal coliform contamination, particularly in warm weather conditions. The bacteriological contamination reveals the mixing of the sewage water with drinking water due to expired corroded pipes and discharge of wastewater to the groundwater. Several governance recommendations are proposed for improving water quality. They include strengthening coordination between government and public, considering options to install a new water distribution and sewage collection networks, enforcing standards for adequately preventing contamination from septic tanks, and increasing public awareness on low-cost measures such as boiling the drinking water before intake.

Agricultural water stress is a critical problem undermining socioeconomic development and environmental sustainability of water and land resources in many agriculture-based economies. Uzbekistan is an example of such case, where for coping with the problem, water reforms such as creation of Water User Associations (WUAs) attempted to decentralize the decision-making to some extent encouraging bottom-up approach to water governance. However, the results have been disappointing so far, particularly visible in persistence of priority in water allocation for farmers with state-ordered crops and neglect of smallholders as legitimate water users. The study presented here describes some of the discrepancies between paper and practice in the example of water governance in one studied community. Using household survey, interviews, and focus group discussion, the authors show that true transformation into bottom up cannot be achieved through pure state-facilitation, especially if it remains on paper and largely limited to technical measures. Such state-facilitated bottom up is bound to fail with the arrival of new levels of water stress. Preferential treatment also undermines incentives of farmers to improve productivity in using water and land resources. The authors highlight that a balanced attention is needed in relation to reforms that encourage not only supply-side solutions, even though they are very necessary. Reforms are also necessary directed at enabling smallholders to participate in decision-making in dealing with water stress, and take more active role in communicating their needs, negotiating fair allocation, and coordinating implementation of agreed water plans.

Transboundary water governance often represents challenges specific to the commons dilemma. Use of water in one country affects use in another country, yet dynamic and diverse political and socioeconomic factors coupled with relatively large size of a resource system that links not only other sectors such as land and energy but also crosses national jurisdictions make it particularly challenging for interested and affected actors to self-organize. Central Asia represents a typical case of this commons dilemma, where more than 60 million people depend on transboundary waters shared by five independent republics that suffer from vicious cycle of historical rivalry and complexity. We explore whether and how benefit sharing, where the focus is on benefits and not quantities of water, can help solve the transboundary commons dilemma. Further, we suggest distinguishing three priorities in benefit-sharing solutions: economic-development; egalitarian-social; and environmental. Investigating various configurations of prioritization, we discuss selected expressions of it available in the literature in general and from our transboundary waters case study in Central Asia in particular. Based on our findings we stress the importance of setting environmental preservation (restoration) and equitability of sharing as the joint top priority for benefit sharing to be sustainable in the long run, in contrast to a short-term perspective with prevailing economic-development emphasis. In the context of historical distrust conditions and interdependencies, we highlight the mutually important causal relationship between benefit sharing and trust building. For making the new arrangements resilient, particularly in case of large-scale commons, benefit sharing also requires a strong civil society.

This study argues that scholars and policy-makers need to understand environmental activists better to bridge the gap between growing activism and policy. Conventional wisdom is that environmental activists generally support stronger climate policies. But there is still little understanding about diversity of views within activist groups when it comes to specific policies, and existing studies indicate that their views are not uniform, which can weaken their impact as a group. Activists might unite to demand change, but not necessarily agree on details of the desired change. Exploring the differences within the group, this paper focuses on how to nudge those who already share favorable attitudes towards policies that mitigate climate change. The motivation has been to see, in presence of general support for stronger environmental policies, whether this support could be channeled into more specific policies. We first take on a methodological challenge to construct an index of environmental predisposition. Then drawing from existing social-behavioral scholarship, we analyze results of an experimental survey with select treatments previously reported as promising. In November and December 2019, we collected responses from 119 participants at the Fridays for Future demonstrations in Germany. The results indicate that there are indeed important differences within the group, and nudging effects exist even in this rather strongly predisposed group, with participants assigned to the experimental group showing higher levels of support for the introduction of a carbon tax that is traditionally seen as a difficult policy to gain widespread public support. We find that those who score neither too high nor too low are more likely to respond to nudging. Yet, the effects vary for general outcomes such as policy support, behavioral intentions, and environmental citizenship. Overall, the findings show the value of understanding the heterogeneity of individual views within environmental movements better and directing interventions in large resource systems such as climate to specific issues and target groups for accelerating transformations towards sustainability.

The importance of water security has gained prominence on the international water agenda, but the focus seems to be directed towards water demand. An essential element of water security is the functioning of public organizations responsible for water supply through direct and indirect security approaches. Despite this, there has been a tendency to overlook the water security strategies of these organizations as well as constraints on their operation. This paper discusses the critical role of water supply in achieving sustainable water security and presents two case studies from Central Asia on the management of water supply for irrigated agriculture. The analysis concludes that existing water supply bureaucracies need to be revitalized to effectively address key challenges in water security.

Ongoing discussions on water-energy-food nexus generally lack a historical perspective and more rigorous institutional analysis. Scrutinizing a relatively mature benefit sharing approach in the context of transboundary water management, the study shows how such analysis can be implemented to facilitate understanding in an environment of high institutional and resource complexity. Similar to system perspective within nexus, benefit sharing is viewed as a positive sum approach capable of facilitating cooperation among riparian parties by shifting the focus from the quantities of water to benefits derivable from its use and allocation. While shared benefits from use and allocation are logical corollary of the most fundamental principles of international water law, there are still many controversies as to the conditions under which benefit sharing could serve best as an approach. Recently, the approach has been receiving wider attention in the literature and is increasingly applied in various basins to enhance negotiations. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the costs associated with benefit sharing, particularly in the long run. The study provides a number of concerns that have been likely overlooked in the literature and examines the approach in the case of the Ferghana Valley shared by Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan utilizing data for the period from 1917 to 2013. Institutional analysis traces back the origins of property rights of the transboundary infrastructure, shows cooperative activities and fierce negotiations on various governance levels. The research discusses implications of the findings for the nexus debate and unveils at least four types of costs associated with benefit sharing: (1) Costs related to equity of sharing (horizontal and vertical); (2) Costs to the environment; (3) Transaction costs and risks of losing water control; and (4) Costs as a result of likely misuse of issue linkages.