1. Bringing the Hydrosocial Cycle into Climate Change Adaptation Planning: Lessons from Two Andean Mountain Water Towers
- Author
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Sophia L. Borgias, Rafael de Grenade, Megan Mills-Novoa, Bhuwan Thapa, Christopher A. Scott, and Arica Crootof
- Subjects
geography ,education.field_of_study ,geography.geographical_feature_category ,010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences ,05 social sciences ,Geography, Planning and Development ,Population ,0507 social and economic geography ,Climate change ,Wetland ,Glacier ,Snowpack ,01 natural sciences ,Metropolitan area ,Environmental protection ,Climate change adaptation ,education ,050703 geography ,Environmental planning ,Tower ,0105 earth and related environmental sciences ,Earth-Surface Processes - Abstract
Glaciers, snowpack, rivers, lakes, and wetlands in mountain regions provide freshwater for much of the world's population. These systems, however, are acutely sensitive to climate change. In Andean water towers, which supply freshwater to more than 100 million people, climate change adaptation planning is critical. Adaptation plans, however, are more than just documents; they inform and are informed by sociopolitical processes with major implications for hydrosocial relations in mountain water towers. Noting the inadequate scholarly attention to climate change in relation to the hydrosocial cycle, we draw on the hydrosocial literature to examine and compare climate change adaptation plans from mountain water tower regions of Piura, Peru, and the Santiago metropolitan region in Chile. Through a hydrosocial lens, we find that these plans reinforce hydrosocial relations such as upstream–downstream disparities that tend to exclude those who access water informally, have differing ontologies of water, or have ...
- Published
- 2016
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