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As the adverse impacts of hydrological extremes increase in many regions of the world, a better understanding of the drivers of changes in risk and impacts is essential for effective flood and drought risk management and climate adaptation. However, there is currently a lack of comprehensive, empirical data about the processes, interactions and feedbacks in complex human-water systems leading to flood and drought impacts. Here we present a benchmark dataset containing socio-hydrological data of paired events, i.e., two floods or two droughts that occurred in the same area. The 45 paired events occurred in 42 different study areas and cover a wide range of socio-economic and hydro-climatic conditions. The dataset is unique in covering both floods and droughts, in the number of cases assessed, and in the quantity of socio-hydrological data. The benchmark dataset comprises: 1) detailed review style reports about the events and key processes between the two events of a pair; 2) the key data table containing variables that assess the indicators which characterise management shortcomings, hazard, exposure, vulnerability and impacts of all events; 3) a table of the indicators-of-change that indicate the differences between the first and second event of a pair. The advantages of the dataset are that it enables comparative analyses across all the paired events based on the indicators-of-change and allows for detailed context- and location-specific assessments based on the extensive data and reports of the individual study areas. The dataset can be used by the scientific community for exploratory data analyses e.g. focused on causal links between risk management, changes in hazard, exposure and vulnerability and flood or drought impacts. The data can also be used for the development, calibration and validation of socio-hydrological models. The dataset is available to the public through the GFZ Data Services (Kreibich et al. 2023, link for review: https://dataservices.gfz-potsdam.de/panmetaworks/review/923c14519deb04f83815ce108b48dd2581d57b90ce069bec9c948361028b8c85/).

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

Water resources management and hydrological risk reduction require anticipation of emergent (unexpected or unintended) phenomena as fundamental dynamics of complex human-water systems. Explaining and characterizing these sociohydrological phenomena is a central focus of Panta Rhei–Everything Flows, the Scientific Decade of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (2013-2022). Here we use System Dynamics’ archetypes to describe and classify socio-hydrological phenomena emerging from nonlinear interactions between human and water systems. Archetypes illustrate dynamic behaviours that are frequently observed across (seemingly) different systems, contexts or problem settings. They include intended or unintended actions and reactions with explicit recognition of delays in reaction times. Reinforcing (or positive) and balancing (or negative) feedback loops and system boundaries are key elements for describing archetypes. In the study of human-water systems, the most common archetypes are Limits to Growth, Fixes that Backfire, Success to the Successful, and Tragedy of the Commons. Using system archetypes to generalize the phenomena in coupled human-water systems allows for the comparison among case studies along with the integration of multiple dimensions, thereby contributing to the development of new theories which provide common causes and explanations. We first present several classes of sociohydrological phenomena that have been explored over the past decade, and then discuss their role in explaining the dynamics of human-water systems. Finally, we engage with the implications for integrated water resources management, hydrological risk reduction, and water governance.

Cities face increasing droughts and water shortages as a result of extreme meteorological conditions and expanding human pressure. Future projections estimate that over one billion urban residents will experience severe droughts and water shortages in the near future. Most scientific and policy debates emphasize climate change, population growth and urbanization as the major forces at the genesis of this apocalyptic future. In this paper we argue instead that the root causes of urban water crises have to be retraced in the socioenvironmental injustices enmeshed with the development of a city. For it is not society as a whole that reshapes drought events or trigger water shortages. Usually, the most powerful groups with greater privileges and access to resources, are those who play a more prominent role in decisions on water resource use and allocation, thereby shaping the propagation of drought phenomena more significantly. Accounting for the heterogeneity of human societies is thus key to understand the dynamics of human-water systems and, more specifically, the temporal and spatial propagation of drought phenomena. Sociohydrological models have not yet accounted for the manners in which heterogeneous social groups intersect with drought propagation. This work advances current analyses by modelling heterogenous interactions between human and water systems alongside their unequal influences on the transformation of drought into uneven water crises. The Day Zero crisis in Cape Town constitutes the empirical basis of this work. On the one hand Cape Town’s urban geography epitomizes an unequal landscape of water access and vulnerabilities. On the other hand, Day Zero exemplifies an extreme drought event that will most likely occur across many urban areas. Using a system-dynamic framework we retrace the uneven consumptions of water across Cape Town metropolitan area and estimate the drought resilience trajectories for different social groups. In turn, the socio-hydrological model explores the distinctive implication that each trajectory has for the sustainability of urban water systems. Ultimately, we argue that the unsustainable water uses of the elite can transform a meteorological drought into an urban water crisis.

Human activities have increasingly intensified the severity, frequency, and negative impacts of droughts in several regions across the world. This trend has led to broader scientific conceptualizations of drought risk that account for human actions and their interplays with natural systems. This review focuses on physical and engineering sciences to examine the way and extent to which these disciplines account for social processes in relation to the production and distribution of drought risk. We conclude that this research has significantly progressed in terms of recognizing the role of humans in reshaping drought risk and its socioenvironmental impacts. We note an increasing engagement with and contribution to understanding vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation patterns. Moreover, by advancing (socio)hydrological models, developing numerical indexes, and enhancing data processing, physical and engineering scientists have determined the extent of human influences in the propagation of drought hazard. However, these studies do not fully capture the complexities of anthropogenic transformations. Very often, they portray society as homogeneous, and decision-making processes as apolitical, thereby concealing the power relations underlying the production of drought and the uneven distribution of its impacts. The resistance in engaging explicitly with politics and social power-despite their major role in producing anthropogenic drought-can be attributed to the strong influence of positivist epistemologies in engineering and physical sciences. We suggest that an active engagement with critical social sciences can further theorizations of drought risk by shedding light on the structural and historical systems of power that engender every socioenvironmental transformation. This article is categorized under:Climate, History, Society, Culture Disciplinary Perspectives.

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.

Risk management has reduced vulnerability to floods and droughts globally1,2, yet their impacts are still increasing3. An improved understanding of the causes of changing impacts is therefore needed, but has been hampered by a lack of empirical data4,5. On the basis of a global dataset of 45 pairs of events that occurred within the same area, we show that risk management generally reduces the impacts of floods and droughts but faces difficulties in reducing the impacts of unprecedented events of a magnitude not previously experienced. If the second event was much more hazardous than the first, its impact was almost always higher. This is because management was not designed to deal with such extreme events: for example, they exceeded the design levels of levees and reservoirs. In two success stories, the impact of the second, more hazardous, event was lower, as a result of improved risk management governance and high investment in integrated management. The observed difficulty of managing unprecedented events is alarming, given that more extreme hydrological events are projected owing to climate change3.

There are growing concerns about the impacts of climate change on equitable urban development. As cities are becoming increasingly exposed to anthropogenic droughts, stakes are particularly high in contexts of severe vulnerability. Yet, the impacts of future urban droughts and the societal responses they will elicit remain poorly understood. Here we develop social-environmental scenarios of anthropogenic drought-related impacts in postcolonial cities, characterized by highly uneven development and differentiated levels of vulnerability. We show how unprecedented droughts are expected to polarize existing inequalities in water access and well-being across genders, race and socio-economic groups. Specifically, unprecedented droughts will likely exacerbate spatial inequalities, generate localized public health crises, and regress development progress in water access. These results suggest that effective climate policies must address water insecurity and other pre-existing inequalities, and develop equitable water conservation measures to ensure effective adaptation to future unprecedented extreme droughts.

Droughts have always been part of Earth climate, yet today these phenomena are becoming more alarming due to their increasing severity and their disastrous socio-ecological impacts. Different scientific definitions or diverse understanding of drought risk have been proposed also because of the simultaneously social and ecological complexity which characterizes droughts relative to other hazards and/or vulnerabilities. This work sets out to confront the distinctive complexity of drought risk throughout a novel approach which combines political ecology perspectives with hydro-climatological insights. Our engagement with political ecologies of land, water, and vulnerability helps to explain the socio-political processes that intersect with the production of droughts and their consequences. Concurrently, hydro-climatology unravels the physical or material processes that both constitute and transform drought phenomena into socio-ecological disasters. The drought-stricken Ladismith in Western Cape, South Africa, is the point of departure of our empirical analysis which portrays the socio-ecological disruption reached by this rural community after five years of below-average rainfall (meteorological drought). We show that Ladismith socio-ecological crisis was mostly engendered by a distinct mechanism of capital accumulation through land and water dispossession, which emerged locally in the form of white commercial agriculture. Our interdisciplinary approach examines these socio-political processes in relation to the drought physical transformations over time and across space. By relating societal and physical processes we advance a novel understanding of drought that sheds light on the crucial interactions between social power, climate, land use, and hydrology, which all too often transform a meteorological event into a soil moisture drought, a hydrological drought, and eventually into a major socio-ecological crisis. Secondly, combining hydro-climatology with political ecology reveals that social power not only influences the vulnerability of the systems affected by droughts, but also shapes the occurrence and manifestation of the hazard itself. This novel conceptualization of drought risk as socially produced is key to intercept the material spaces and physical dynamics through which social power plays out in more extreme and disruptive drought events. A similar approach, by identifying unjust and unsustainable socio-ecological changes, can make drought management policies and strategies more proactive rather than constrain them to relief or adaptation measures.

While depicted as a major global threat, water insecurity usually affects the most disadvantaged and marginalized people. Current definitions of water insecurity still fail to address this injustice as they either over-simplify and disconnect human-water dynamics or disregard the politics thereof. In light of this critique, this paper aims to contribute to reconceptualise water insecurity by integrating examinations of socio-political processes in analyses of chronic water insecurity and extreme drought events. To this end, we draw on sociohydrology and critical political ecology as a way to retrace the mutual shaping of hydrological flows and power dynamics that over time produce uneven geographies of water insecurity. We do so in the face of extreme droughts to understand to what extent these events intersect with the production and distribution of water insecurity. This paper draws on empirical work on the severe drought which affected Cape Town in 2015-17 and escalated into a water crisis also known as Day Zero. Despite being portrayed as a middle-class crisis, our study found that the marginalized people were the most affected while the wealthier elite were able to water secure themselves. This unequal picture sharply reflects the same water insecurities which existed long before Day Zero. We, thus, argue that they are a legacy of the spatial and economic segregation which has shaped Cape Town since colonial times. More than producing it, the drought has accelerated a pre-existing water crisis and exacerbated the level of water insecurity of every Capetonian. Proving that water insecurity is a sociohydrological phenomenon, we believe that such politically aware conceptualization is key to address its root causes and prevent the resulting injustices. Our analysis contributes to advance understanding of water insecurity by incorporating questions of uneven distribution and sociohydrological justice.

Recent aid and trade policies reveal a ‘paradigm shift’ in which traditional donors have moved away from a focus on poverty alleviation and returned to an approach firmly aimed at economic growth. ...

Kenyan water utilities face a challenge of balancing the financial objective of commercial viability with the social objective of service expansion. To achieve this, they employ service differentiation in which different categories of consumers receive different levels of service. Although service differentiation has achieved results, it reflects a prioritization of financial objectives over social objectives and raises three particular concerns. First, service differentiation reflects a withdrawal of the utility from core service provision responsibilities. Second, it results in inequitable service provision. Finally, it may lock low-income consumers into a low level of service.

Sociohydrology has advanced understandings of water related phenomena by conceptualizing changes in hydrological flows and risks as the result of the interplay between water and society. However, social power and the heterogeneity of human societies, which are crucial to unravel the feedback mechanisms underlying human-water systems, have not been sufficiently considered. In response, this paper proposes an interdisciplinary approach that draws on political ecology perspectives to combine sociohydrological insights with analyses of social power and of the ways in which different social groups distinctively interact with water systems. We draw on empirical evidence of Cape Town’s water insecurity before and during the prolonged drought (2015–2017) that escalated into a severe water crisis, also known as Day Zero. The study integrates times series of reservoir storage and water consumption with 40 interviews and focus group discussions to firstly retrace the historical legacy of Colonial rules, Apartheid and, more recently, neoliberal policies. Within this human-water system, we show how Cape Town’s political legacy has encouraged unsustainable levels of water consumption amongst the (white) elite and tolerated chronic water insecurity amongst (black) informal dwellers. This uneven geography of water insecurity is also discernible in the unequal experiences of drought and water resilience trajectories of diverse social groups across Cape Town. We conclude that accounting for social power and inequalities can advance sociohydrology by identifying those mechanisms (within society) that determine what water is secured and what human-water interactions and dynamics will be sustained over time. Furthermore, by engaging with social power, sociohydrology can play a significant role in informing policies that reduce inequalities in water access and unsustainable water use.