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Political ecology has already engaged with emotions in order to reveal the intimate, unconscious and unexplored power dynamics which characterise patterns of water use and control. Similar explorations have mostly focused on the emotional struggles of structurally disadvantaged people rather than on the emotions of those with privilege: the elite. This oversight becomes problematic when it conceals disproportionate shares of power and the implications that such power has on the sustainable use and just distribution of water resources. The 2018 water crisis which affected Cape Town’s metropolitan area constitutes the empirical context of this paper, which sets out to address the aforementioned research gap. Focusing on the elite’s emotional responses to Cape Town’s drought and subsequent water crisis, this paper seeks to advance political ecology’s understanding of urban water crises by retracing the emotional geography of Cape Town’s most privileged urban dwellers. In particular, this work leverages the concept of subjectivity to explain the way emotions are constructed and come to materially and discursively reproduce historical power dynamics. These findings reveal that fear, anger, and a sense of pride felt by wealthier Capetonians results from and perpetuates the privileged conditions of those elite. Rooted in colonial and apartheid past, Capetonians’ privileged emotions end up perpetuating the main causes of the water crisis and eventually excluding the most disadvantaged inhabitants from future use and control of water resources. Ultimately, by connecting with privileged emotions, it is possible to challenge certain subjectivities and create space for more just and sustainable urban-water imaginaries.

Over the past two decades, more than 80 metropolitan cities across the world have faced severe water shortages due to droughts and unsustainable water use. Future projections are even more alarming, since urban water crises are expected to escalate and most heavily affect those who are socially, economically and politically disadvantaged. Here we show how social inequalities across different groups or individuals play a major role in the production and manifestation of such crises. Specifically, due to stark socioeconomic inequalities, urban elites are able to overconsume water while excluding less-privileged populations from basic access. Through an interdisciplinary approach, we model the uneven domestic water use across urban spaces and estimate water consumption trends for different social groups. The highly unequal metropolitan area of Cape Town serves as a case in point to illustrate how unsustainable water use by the elite can exacerbate urban water crises at least as much as climate change or population growth. Title in the list of papers of Elisa Savelli's thesis: Unsustainable consumption by elites drives water crisis

This paper conceptualises droughts as socioecological phenomena coproduced by the recursive engagement of human and non-human transformations. Through an interdisciplinary approach that integrates political ecology, material geographies and hydroclimatology, this work simultaneously apprehends the role of politics and power in reshaping drought, along with the agency of biophysical processes – soil, vegetation, hydrology and microclimate – that co-produce droughts and their spatiotemporal patterning. The drought-stricken Ladismith in Western Cape, South Africa, is the instrumental case study and point of departure of our empirical analysis. To advance a materiality of drought that seriously accounts for the coevolution of biophysical and political transformations, we alter the spatiotemporal and empirical foci of drought analyses thereby retracing Ladismith’s socioecological history since colonial times. In turn, such extended framework exposes the agency of soil, vegetation, hydrology and microclimate and their metabolic exchanges with processes of colonisation, apartheid, capitalist and neoliberal transformations of South African economy. We argue that the narrow pursuit of profits and capital accumulation of the few has produced a fundamental disruption between nature and society which contributed to transform Ladismith’s drought into a socioecological crisis. Whilst advancing debates on materiality, we note two fundamental contributions to the study of drought. First, our approach makes hydrological accounts of droughts less politically naive and socially blind. Second, it develops a political ecology of droughts and socioecological crises more attuned to the materiality of drought. We contend that apprehending the materiality of drought and the active role of its non-human processes can further understandings of the workings of power and the production of socioecological injustices.

Scientific knowledge about floods and droughts, that is, hydrological extremes, provides essential input for policy and decision-making processes in water management, climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction (AghaKouchak et al., 2021; Kundzewicz et al., 2014; Montanari et al., 2013; Takeuchi, 2004; Ward et al., 2020). Hydrologists are often challenged by a range of policy-relevant questions in relation to floods and droughts, including: How are they affected by anthropogenic activities and/or global warming? What will be their frequency, severity and spatial distribution in the coming decades? What are the best strategies to reduce vulnerability and alleviate their negative impacts? Hydrologists alone cannot address these questions. Thus, a very long history of collaboration has evolved across disciplines dealing with water-related issues. Scholars engaged in water resources systems, which started with the Harvard Water Program in the 1960s, provided well-established examples of such inter-disciplinary collaborations (Brown et al., 2015). Over the past decade, more and more hydrologists have argued for further engagement with social scientists, including political ecologists and behavioral econo-has uncovered the major role played by politics and power relations in shaping the complex dynamics of human-water systems (Swyngedouw, 1999). Behavioral economists have demonstrated how cognitive heuristics and biases (Slovic, 1987; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) influence human behavior and attitude, as well as the way in which people and decision makers think about hydrological risks (Aerts et al., 2018). As such, accounting for both power relations and cognitive heuristics is key to unravel the interplay of floods, droughts and human societies. In this commentary, we first discuss the challenge of predicting floods and droughts in today's human dominated world, and then propose the integration of multiple research methods as a way to cope Abstract Predicting floods and droughts is essential to inform the development of policy in water management, climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction. Yet, hydrological predictions are highly uncertain, while the frequency, severity and spatial distribution of extreme events are further complicated by the increasing impact of human activities on the water cycle. In this commentary, we argue that four main aspects characterizing the complexity of human-water systems should be explicitly addressed: feedbacks, scales, tradeoffs and inequalities. We propose the integration of multiple research methods as a way to cope with complexity and develop policy-relevant science. Plain Language Summary Several governments today claim to be following the science in addressing crises caused by the occurrence of extreme events, such as floods and droughts, or the emergence of global threats, such as climate change and COVID-19. In this commentary, we show that there are no universal answers to apparently simple questions such as: Do levees reduce flood risk? Do reservoirs alleviate droughts? We argue that the best science we have consists of a plurality of legitimate interpretations and a range of foresights, which can be enriched by integrating multiple disciplines and research methods. DI BALDASSARRE ET AL. Key Points: • Accounting for both power relations and cognitive heuristics is key to unravel the interplay of floods, droughts and human societies • Flood and drought predictions are complicated by the increasing impact of human activities on the water cycle • We propose the integration of multiple research methods as a way to cope with uncertainty and develop policy-relevant science Supporting Information: Supporting Information may be found in the online version of this article. Mård, J., et al. (2021). Integrating multiple research methods to unravel the complexity of human-water systems. AGU Advances, 2, e2021AV000473. https://doi.