Water, Climatic Variability and Livelihood Resilience: Concepts, Field Insights and Policy Implications

FOREWORD This is the second policy report from the Resilience and Freshwater Initiative (RFI). The ambition of the initiative is to make emerging scientific theories of resilience operational for policy making that concerns integrated water management. The initiative includes a wide scope of network partners such as Institute (SIWI). The findings from this report are however, the sole responsibility of the author. As will be discussed and elaborated in this report, the perspective offered by emerging theories of resilience adds some important and previously poorly elaborated dimensions to what is usually denoted Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM). Put bluntly, while IWRM suggests an approach that " promotes the coordinated development and management of water […] in order to maximize the resultant economic and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems " (GWP 2000:22), a resilience perspective complements this view with an approach that promotes social learning, experimentation and attempts to enhance the ability of actors to tackle uncertainty, complexity and environmental change. The following report highlights the fundamental importance of understanding adaptive processes and the factors contributing to livelihood resilience if the Policy Paper 2 2 world is to meet the Millennium Development Goals. The report also highlights the central role water plays in current rural livelihoods in developing countries, and the impact existing climatic variability and anticipated climate change will have on those livelihoods. In addition, the report discusses how policy-initiatives might produce outcomes that sometimes reduce the resilience of social-ecological freshwater systems, hence contributing to vulnerability. The results should therefore be of interest to all those concerned with how to secure the bloodstream of both nature and society: water. Adaptive capacity and the ability to build resilient livelihoods are, perhaps the two most fundamental challenges facing global society in a context where variability and rapid processes of change dominate the world in which we live. Sustainability has, in fact, been defined as the ability to " create, test and maintain adaptive capacity " (Gunderson and Holling 2002) p.76. This ability to adapt will be of increasing importance over coming decades as climatic change coupled with dynamic changes in economic and demographic systems reshapes livelihoods at rates and scales that are probably unprecedented in human history. Research in South Asia and other parts of the world provides preliminary insights into the critical roles diversification, human mobility (migration and commuting), transportation, financial and communication …