Luigi Piemontese

• PhD
• Researcher at University of Florence

Drought impacts are increasingly recognised as socially influenced processes instead of mere hydro-climatic events. Yet, drought assessments continue to be entrenched in disciplinary boundaries or limited by top-down modelling approaches, excluding those who directly experience the impacts of droughts. Transdisciplinary approaches to knowledge co-c...

The Mediterranean region is increasingly suffering from water scarcity in summer as a consequence of climate change. Drier conditions call for increased use of irrigation to avoid severe production losses, increasing the pressure on overexploited surface and subsurface water resources. The use of non-conventional waters (NCW) - such as desalination...

Extreme droughts are affecting millions of livestock farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, causing water shortages, famines, migration and fatalities. The construction of new small water infrastructures (SWIs), such as deep wells and boreholes, is increasingly supported by climate resilience programmes of non-governmental organizations and national govern...

Extreme droughts are affecting millions of livestock farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, causing water shortages, famines, migration, and fatalities. The construction of new small water infrastructures (e.g., wells, boreholes, and small dams) is increasingly supported by NGOs and national governments to improve water availability for agro-pastoralists,...

Sand dams are simple and effective structures built across ephemeral riverbeds in arid/semi-arid regions to harvest water within sand pores and increase water availability and quality for rural communities. The complex morphological, hydrological, social and economic conditions that make sand dams a beneficial tool for water resilience are largely...

Sand dams are simple and effective structures built across ephemeral riverbeds in arid/semi‐arid regions to harvest water within sand pores and increase water availability and quality for rural communities. The complex morphological, hydrological, social and economic conditions that make sand dams a beneficial tool for water resilience are largely...

In the last decades, the hydrology and water management sectors have been dealing with global changes, proposing several innovative solutions. Climate changes are leading to an increase in long hot and dry periods, alternating with short and intense rainfall events. Urban areas are particularly vulnerable to these changes: rapid population growth a...

Mediterranean watersheds are expected to face increased and more severe drought events due to climate change. Urgent action is needed to shift from a reactive approach to a proactive one, for which drought risk assessment is fundamental. Nevertheless, the current methodology to calculate composite risk indicators is still debated, undermining the o...

The Budyko framework consists of a curvilinear relationship between the evaporative ratio (i.e., actual evaporation over precipitation) and the aridity index (i.e., potential evaporation over precipitation) and defines evaporation's water and energy limits. A basin's movement within the Budyko space illustrates its hydroclimatic change and helps id...

Droughts have huge negative impacts on livelihoods and economies throughout the world, and climate change is expected to increase their future frequency and severity. For an effective drought management, drought risk assessment is considered of major importance. However, despite the high number of studies, shared and clear guidelines to perform dro...

Sand dams are impermeable water harvesting structures built to collect and store water within the volume of sediments transported by ephemeral rivers. The artificial sandy aquifer created by the sand dam reduces evaporation losses relative to surface water storage in traditional dams. Recent years have seen a renaissance of studies on sand dams as...

In Uganda, upgrading smallholder agriculture is a necessary step to achieve the interlinked sustainable development goals of hunger eradication, poverty reduction and land degradation neutrality. However, targeting the right restoration practices and estimate their cost-benefit at the national scale is difficult given the highly contextual nature o...

Sand dams are simple and effective structures built across ephemeral riverbeds in arid/semi-arid regions to harvest water within sand pores and increase water availability and quality for rural communities. The complex morphological, hydrological, social and economic conditions that make sand dams a beneficial tool for water resilience are largely...

Archetype analysis is a promising approach in sustainability science to identify patterns and explain mechanisms shaping the sustainability of social-ecological systems. Although considerable efforts have been devoted to developing quality standards and methodological advances for archetype analysis, archetype validation remains a major challenge....

In African small-scale agriculture, sustainable land and water management (SLWM) is key to improving food production while coping with climate change. However, the rate of SLWM adoption remains low, suggesting a gap between generalized SLWM advantages for rural development across the literature, and the existence of context-dependent barriers to it...

In response to the interconnected character of societal challenges, there is a growing interest in transdisciplinary sustainability research. However, for transdisciplinary research to be able to support the generation of new knowledge in a participatory and reflexive manner, a number of challenges have been identified in each stage of the transdis...

Water harvesting has been widely applied in different social-ecological contexts, proving to be a valuable approach to sustainable intensification of agriculture. Global estimates of the potential of water harvesting are generally based on purely biophysical assessments and mostly neglect the socioeconomic dimension of agriculture. This neglect bec...

Fresh water—the bloodstream of the biosphere—is at the center of the planetary drama of the Anthropocene. Water fluxes and stores regulate the Earth's climate and are essential for thriving aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, as well as water, food, and energy security. But the water cycle is also being modified by humans at an unprecedented scale...

The planetary boundaries framework proposes quantified guardrails to human modification of global environmental processes that regulate the stability of the planet and has been considered in sustainability science, governance, and corporate management. However, the planetary boundary for human freshwater use has been critiqued as a singular measure...

The authors wish to make the following correction to this paper: The author name “Zahra Kalantary” should be “Zahra Kalantari” [...]

The planetary boundaries framework has proven useful for many global sustainability contexts, but is challenging to apply to freshwater, which is spatially heterogeneous, part of complex socio-ecological systems and often dominated by local dynamics. To date, the planetary boundary for water has been simplistically defined by as the global rate of...

Current water management and irrigation practices are pushing water consumption to unsustainable rates, which can be worsened in the view of growing global population and climate change. Sustainable land and water management practices in agriculture are key to meet global sustainability targets, thus the United Nations recently declared that 2021-2...

Projections of global warming in Africa are generally associated with increasing aridity and decreasing water availability. However, most freshwater assessments focus on single hydroclimatic indicators (e.g., runoff, precipitation, or aridity), lacking analysis on combined changes in evaporative demand, and water availability on land. There remains...

The planetary boundaries framework has proven useful for many global sustainability contexts, but is challenging to apply to freshwater, which is spatially heterogeneous, part of complex socio-ecological systems and often dominated by local dynamics. To date, the planetary boundary for water has been simplistically defined by as the global rate of...

Wetlands are often vital physical and social components of a country's natural capital, as well as providers of ecosystem services to local and national communities. We performed a network analysis to prioritize Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets for sustainable development in iconic wetlands and wetlandscapes around the world. The analysis...

Wetlands are often vital physical and social components of a country's natural capital, as well as providers of ecosystem services to local and national communities. We performed a network analysis to prioritize Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets for sustainable development in iconic wetlands and wetlandscapes around the world. The analysis...

Wetlands are often vital physical and social components of a country’s natural capital, as well as providers of ecosystem services to local and national communities. We performed a network analysis to prioritize Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets for sustainable development in iconic wetlands and wetlandscapes around the world. The analysis...