WATER USE IN HUMAN CIVILIZATIONS: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY ANALYSIS OF A PERPETUAL SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL CHALLENGE

Highlights

• Access to water shapes determines rise and collapse of civilizations

• Water conservation, human health and culture are closely connected

• Agricultural intensification triggers multiple cropping, irrigation and fertilization

• Mastering access to water will determine pace and sustainability of urbanization

Abstract

Settlement patterns and social structures have been shaped by access to water since the onset of human societies. This review covers historical and recent examples from Cambodia, Central Asia, India, Latin America and the Arabian Peninsula to analyze the role of water resources in determining the rise and collapse of civilizations. Over recent decades increasing globalization and concomitant possibilities to externalize water needs as virtual water have obscured global dependence on water resources via telecoupling, but rapid urbanization brings it now back to the political agenda. It is foremost in the urban arena of poorer countries where competing claims for water increasingly lead to scale-transcendent conflicts about ecosystem services. Solutions to the dilemma will require broad stakeholder-based agreements on water use taking into account the available data on water resources, their current and potential use efficiency, recycling of water after effective treatment, and social-ecological approaches of improved governance and conflict resolution.

Keywords

agroecology / historical water use / water footprint / water governance / urbanization

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Acknowledgements

This study was conducted in the framework of the Indo-German Research Unit FOR2432/1&2 “Social-ecological systems in the Indian rural-urban interface: Functions, scales, and dynamics of transitions” funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG, BU1308/13-1&2) and the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India. SS acknowledges support of the project GlobeDrought (02WGR1457F) by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) through its Global Resource Water (GRoW) funding initiative. KNG thanks the Universität Kassel, Germany for travel funding enabling a visit as a guest lecturer through the university’s DAAD-financed International Center for Development and Decent Work (ICDD).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Andreas Buerkert, Kotiganahalli Narayanagowd Ganeshaiah, and Stefan Siebert declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2021. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)