Matching Items (3)
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- All Subjects: Water resources management
- Creators: Chhetri, Netra
Description
With the ongoing drought surpassing a decade in Arizona, scholars, water managers and decision-makers have heightened attention to the availability of water resources, especially in rapidly growing regions where demand may outgrow supplies or outpace the capacity of the community water systems. Community water system managing entities and the biophysical and social characteristics of a place mediate communities' vulnerability to hazards such as drought and long-term climate change. The arid southwestern Phoenix metropolitan area is illustrative of the challenges that developed urban areas in arid climates face globally as population growth and climate change stress already fragile human-environmental systems. This thesis reveals the factors abating and exacerbating differential community water system vulnerability to water scarcity in communities simultaneously facing drought and rapid peri-urban growth. Employing a grounded, qualitative comparative case study approach, this thesis explores the interaction of social, biophysical and institutional factors as they effect the exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity of community water systems in Cave Creek and Buckeye, Arizona. Buckeye, once a small agricultural town in the West Valley, is wholly dependent on groundwater and currently planning for massive development to accommodate 218,591 new residents by 2020. Amid desert hills and near Tonto National Forest in the North Valley, Cave Creek is an upscale residential community suffering frequent water outages due to aging infrastructure and lack of system redundancy. Analyzing interviews, media accounts and policy documents, a narrative was composed explaining how place based factors, nested within a regional institutional water management framework, impact short and long-term vulnerability. This research adds to the library of vulnerability assessments completed using Polsky et al.'s Vulnerability Scoping Diagram and serves a pragmatic need assisting in the development of decision making tools that better represent the drivers of placed based vulnerability in arid metropolitan regions.
ContributorsZautner, Lilah (Author) / Larson, Kelli (Thesis advisor) / Bolin, Bob (Committee member) / Chhetri, Netra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Inequities and exclusions, compounded by the increasing intensity of extreme weather events, pose significant challenges to urban planning for low-elevation coastal zones (LECZ). Inclusive development (ID) and urban flood resilience (UFR) have emerged as widely endorsed solutions by scholars. Granting that they gain substantial support and enthusiasm, they have the potential to transform vulnerable urban areas. While their noble intentions are commendable, the intricacies of ID cannot be overlooked, as UFR often inherits and perpetuates the inequalities ingrained in conventional development paradigms. Given the critical importance of ID and UFR in contemporary urban planning, my dissertation research devolved into their fusion by answering my main research question, what constitutes inclusive urban flood resilience? This investigation was carried out through a series of four secondary research questions distributed over three academic papers, each contributing a unique perspective and insights to this burgeoning field. Through a systematic literature review and employing bibliometric and thematic analyses, Chapter 2 offers a comprehensive understanding of inclusive development and a refined definition of the concept. Subsequently, taking Georgetown, the capital city of Guyana, as a case study, Chapter 3 estimates its UFR and employs dimensionality reduction by way of principal component analysis to present these findings in a transparent manner. Chapter 4 builds on the findings of the previous chapters, by first presenting a novel approach to evaluate inclusive development within the framework of the results of Chapter 2, and secondly, together with a systematic meta-analysis of flood resilience measurements, it offers an examination of the ID-UFR nexus. The findings suggest that the concept of inclusive development is nuanced by context-specific definitions, that flood resilience in Georgetown varies among its sub-districts, and that city dimensions (natural, built, social, economic, and institutional), as assessed by pooling global studies, do not share synergistic relationships, being a measure of inclusive development. These findings are critical to urban planning in Georgetown and similar contexts globally as they provide data-driven guidance for understanding these concepts and applying them toward developing inclusive and flood-resilient cities and communities.
ContributorsRenville, Dwayne (Author) / Cheng, Chingwen (Thesis advisor) / Vogel, Kathleen (Thesis advisor) / Chhetri, Netra (Committee member) / Zeng, Ruijie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Farmer-Managed Irrigation Systems (FMIS) are community managed and operated irrigation systems, celebrated for their successful governance of water resources for many decades and in several countries. Nevertheless, in the face of climatic, political, and social change, their future is uncertain. This dissertation utilizes household adaptive capacity, socio-ecological system (SES) robustness, and the Institutional Analysis and Development framework to structure a multi-scalar and multi-stressor analysis of changes experienced in Nepal’s FMIS. The dissertation documents irrigators’ perception of environmental change, impacts, and response; diagnoses the multiple disturbances impacting the robustness of the FMIS; and analyzes changes in the FMIS as an institution over time, in an effort to understand the major drivers of SES change. Fifteen FMIS from five districts of Nepal were selected for the study. Data were collected through field observations, household surveys, key informant interviews, and focus group discussions. The status of the existing rules was compared with the data collected three decades ago in the Nepal Irrigation Institutions and Systems database. This study finds that FMIS’s robustness is threatened by uncertain water supply, inefficient infrastructure, scarcity of farm labor, weakening collective action, and natural disasters. Farm households, whose actions are necessary to sustain the management of FMIS, perceive environmental change differently according to their ecological region and position along the irrigation canal, leading to different adaptation strategies. Despite livelihood diversification, irrigators rely primarily on irrigation infrastructure management to respond to the impacts of environmental change. Institutional analysis demonstrates the evolution of FMIS in terms of working rules in the face of multiple stressors. In this study, payoff, information, and position rules have exhibited the most substantive change. However, boundary, choice, aggregation, and scope rules are less likely to change. The findings of this work point to the need for geographically differentiated adaptation support policies, and a need for closer attention to the dynamics of labor, environmental change, and institutional persistence in agriculture and irrigation sectors. FMIS being an exemplary institutional arrangement for the study of a SES, the research findings benefit similar institutions globally facing challenges to the sustainable governance of common pool resources.
ContributorsParajuli, Jagadish (Author) / Eakin, Hallie (Thesis advisor) / Chhetri, Netra (Thesis advisor) / Anderies, Marty (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021