ABSTRACT
Life relationships with water are delicate: all organisms have adapted to specific hydrological conditions, along the watershed gradient from mountains to the sea. While human and other life forms can’t survive without clean water, we also can’t live with too much or too little water without suffering impacts such as from flooding, drought, and pollution. While slight adaptations over the millennia have allowed many life forms to adjust to changing conditions, urbanization and rapid climate change have disrupted hydrologic systems and their regimes, from the tops of watersheds, to farmland and rural areas, to urban river outlets, bays and the sea, threatening survival of millions of species. The impacts of water shortages, sea level rise, storms, flooding, and species loss will fall most acutely to the most vulnerable human populations – those with the least resources to adapt or move – therefore linking climate change impacts directly with equity and justice concerns.
We therefore need to rapidly learn and apply adaptive measures that respond to current and projected climate change impacts, such as stronger storms, more severe drought, and warming temperatures. These measures apply to both how and where we build in cities and rural areas – roads, buildings, landscapes – and also how we farm, manage, and steward landscapes. We can learn from traditional practices, as well as apply ingenuity of existing and new technologies and practices. And, despite the importance of water to every being’s survival, it is largely hidden – a resource to be consumed rather than cared for and respected. Keeping in mind the preciousness and importance of water in all of its forms, locations and uses will be critical to fostering human connection and stewardship of it; we need to foster Watershed Thinking. This chapter will outline a range of scales at which to consider and bring awareness to possibilities for stewarding water resources, from urban, to peri-urban, to rural contexts, and offer examples of practices that can currently be applied at landscape and city scales to better care for and adapt to changing planetary conditions.
