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Introduction
Pieter focuses on understanding sociohydrological systems for informing actors in managing water and drought. He emphasizes that water crises involve much more than water alone. They are societal problems with people suffering, but sometimes also making things worse. This means that solutions are in our own hands as well. Therefore scientists, engineers, and others need to join forces. Together we can learn from studying peoples complex relationship with water and drought worldwide.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
September 2013 - April 2020
April 2010 - April 2014
January 2008 - January 2012
Education
November 2003 - May 2009
September 1997 - November 2002
Publications
Publications (121)
Identifying the most reliable reanalysis temperature products is crucial for advancing hydro-climate research in data-scarce regions. This study evaluated two widely used reanalysis datasets in estimating minimum temperature (Tmin) and maximum temperature (Tmax) across various Agro-Ecological Zones (AEZs) of Ethiopia at different temporal scales ov...
In this study, a simple approach for comparing future water footprints (WF) has been presented. Six General Circulation Models (GCMs) for three Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) were applied, during 1990–2019 (30 years). The LARS-WG model was used to calculate the different RCPs from the six GCM models for each of the ten selected locati...
Water-related conflicts in river catchments occur due to both internal and external pressures that affect catchment water availability. Lack of common understanding of human–water perspectives by catchment stakeholders increases the complexity of human–water issues at the river catchment scale. Among a range of participatory approaches, the develop...
In regions characterized by a high concentration of small reservoirs, there is often public debate about the effectiveness of these structures in locally adapting to and mitigating drought impacts, bearing in mind their potential to modify or induce drought events in downstream areas. In this study, we investigated the influence of a Dense Network...
The contributions to this Research Topic illustrate the diversity of approaches and richness in relevant sociohydrological topics. They also show the challenges and efforts required to make progress toward adequately informing and supporting actors
involved in water-related disaster-risk reduction and multi-level water governance.
A cascade of drought impacts refers to a series of interconnected events that trigger a chain reaction of impacts, extending beyond water scarcity, to affect agricultural production, socio-economic factors, and the environment. This paper aims to understand the role of society in mitigating drought impacts, particularly through policy responses. Co...
Drought impacts monitoring has been called the missing piece in drought assessment. The potential to improve drought management is high but uncertain due to rare analyses of impacts datasets, predominantly because there are few impacts monitoring programmes to generate the datasets. Drought impacts monitoring is conducted on the ground in much of B...
This study provides the first overview of the scientific knowledge on E. coli prediction models for freshwater in cities. While previously reviewed E. coli prediction models for freshwater beaches predominantly target lakes, urban models mainly target rivers. We found indications that model performance for urban rivers is lower than for recreationa...
To increase drought preparedness in semi-arid regions across the world many small and medium reservoirs have been built in recent decades. Together these reservoirs form a Dense Reservoir Network (DRN) and its presence generates numerous challenges for water management. Most of the reservoirs that constitute the network are unmonitored and unregist...
Adequate tools for evaluating the Sustainable Intensification of Agriculture (SIA) level are crucial, especially in drylands with limited resources. Based on emergy indices and environmental footprints, We propose an evaluation framework for the case of major crop intensification in Xinjiang, China, and examine the local SIA from 2001 to 2020. The...
Human actions induce and modify droughts. However, scientific gaps remain with respect to how hydrological processes, anthropogenic dynamics, and individuals' perceptions of impacts are intrinsically entangled in drought occurrence and evolution. This adds complexity to drought assessment studies that cannot be addressed by the natural and environm...
Water-related conflicts in river catchments occur due to both internal and external pressures that affect catchment water availability. Lack of shared understanding by catchment stakeholders increase the complexity of human-water issues at the river catchment scale. Among a range of participatory approaches, the development and use of serious games...
Despite recent studies emphasising the dual human and physical nature of droughts, there is a lag in advancing this insight in drought monitoring and early warning systems (DEWS). These systems mainly depend on physical indices and often overlook the experiences of affected communities, resulting in a drought-monitoring gap. This study introduces t...
This study evaluated performances of the Climate Hazard Group Infrared Precipitation with stations version 2.0 (CHIRPS v2.0) and Multi-Source Weighted-Ensemble Precipitation version 2.8 (MSWEP v2.8) products against observed data. Rainfall climatology was simulated for different agro-ecological zones (AEZs) of Ethiopia during 1991–2020 at different...
This paper aims to understand the national-level policy change that occurred in Brazilian drought management, whereby the policy shifted from reactive crisis management to a drought preparedness approach. We found that a combination of factors supported the policy change, such as the interplay of multiple drought events in different regions of the...
Abstract
This study applies ‘Social-Ecological Systems (SES)’ concepts with the aim of analysing why and how events happening across spatial, jurisdictional, and temporal scales influence droughts and their impacts in rural communities. To trace the evolution of droughts and their impacts on the livelihood system, we conducted a drought diagnosis i...
Human actions induce and modify droughts. Yet, there remain scientific gaps regarding how anthropogenic dynamics and hydrological processes are intrinsically entangled in drought evolution. This poses the challenge of developing ways to evaluate human behavior and its pattern of co-evolution with the hydrological cycle, mainly related to water use...
Study region: Upper Ewaso Ng’iro catchment is located in Eastern Africa – a water-scarce region. Study focus: Streamflow is in decline in the catchment despite the pattern of increasing amounts of rainfall in the East African region. This study explored historical human-water interplays to understand the coevolution of hydrological systems and soci...
Globally, agriculture is the primary water consumption sector. This study used water footprint (WF) as a bottom-up tool and satellite imagery as a top-down tool to estimate the internal water use (WU) in the agricultural sector in an innovative way to show the effects of water-intensive use in agriculture in an arid country. The WF of Iran has been...
Hydrological modeling, water accounting assessments, and land evaluations are well-known techniques to carry out water resources carrying capacity (WRCC) assessments at multiple spatial levels. Using the results of an existing process-based model for assessing WRCC from very fine to national spatial scales, we propose a mathematical meta-model, i.e...
Particularly in arid and semiarid areas, more and more populations rely almost entirely on imported water. However, the extent to which intentional discharge into transiting river
systems and unintentional leakage may be augmenting water resources for communities along and down gradient of the water transfer scheme has not previously been subject t...
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 Associa...
The United Nations has proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aim to achieve coordinated green development in energy, economic and environmental dimensions. Hydropower is currently the world's most important renewable energy source, it has made up for the electricity shortage and created great economic value, but at the same time, the...
Small reservoirs play an important role in providing water to rural communities. Increased construction of small reservoirs to mitigate the effects of droughts leads to a High-density Reservoirs Network (HdRN) of small reservoirs, which can potentially modify the streamflows both in dry and wet periods. However, there is a lack of understanding of...
Ethiopia’s federal government has committed to one of the most ambitious forest and landscape restoration targets as part of the Bonn Challenge. To achieve the targets, actors at multiple governance levels aim to influence relevant ecological processes, drawing particular attention to the governance processes that are used to translate national res...
In northeast Brazil, fight-against-drought and cope-with-drought have been identified as two different drought policy paradigms. This article aims to examine the persistence, coexistence, intertwining, and evolution of these drought policy paradigms by studying how they inform national policy responses in human-water systems. The questions guiding...
Canals and canalized rivers form a major part of surface water systems in European delta cities and societal ambitions to use these waters increase. This is the first assessment of how suitability of these waters can improve for three important uses: transportation, thermal energy extraction (TEE) and recreation. We assess suitability with Suitabil...
Climate change is one of the ongoing challenges. This phenomenon will affect all parts of the world, including Iran. Therefore, understanding and projecting climate change can be a way forward for future planning in different areas. To do this, the present study applied six general circulation models (GCM) to assess climate change in some stations...
Drought events and their impacts vary spatially and temporally due to diverse pedo-climatic and hydrologic conditions, as well as variations in exposure and vulnerability, such as demographics and response actions. While hazard severity and frequency of past drought events have been studied in detail, little is known about the effect of drought man...
Drought management is currently informed by a variety of approaches, mostly responding to drought crisis when it happens. Toward more effective and integrated drought management, we introduce a conceptual drought diagnosis framework inspired by diagnostic concepts from the field of medicine. This framework comprises five steps: 1. Initial diagnosti...
Human activities both aggravate and alleviate streamflow drought. Here we show that aggravation is dominant in contrasting cases around the world analysed with a consistent methodology. Our 28 cases included different combinations of human-water interactions. We found that water abstraction aggravated all drought characteristics, with increases of...
Water funds are task-specific organisations that conserve and restore watersheds. The funds provide sustained finance and a collaborative space for actors at different levels to improve the water regulation functions of upstream ecosystems, safeguard water quality, and establish ecological connectivity with the aim of ensuring downstream water quan...
Building on different bodies of the governance literature, we propose a conceptual framework specifying nine scale-sensitive governance arrangements that aim to (1) create cross-scale fit between the governance and ecological scales, and/or (2) foster cross-level alignment between different governance levels. To understand how scale-sensitive gover...
Drought monitoring and early warning systems (DEWSs) are seen as helpful tools to tackle drought at an early stage and reduce the possibility of harm or loss. They usually include indices attributed to meteorological, agricultural and/or hydrological drought: physically based drought drivers. These indices are used to determine the onset, end and s...
Metrics of hydrological mimicry ('mimetrics') reflect similarity in ecological structure and/or functions between managed and natural ecosystems. Only the land-surface parts of hydrological cycles are directly visible and represented in local knowledge and water-related legislation. Human impacts on water cycles (HIWC) can, beyond climate change, a...
Drought‐affected regions often contain high densities of small reservoirs, usually informally built, as drought‐coping mechanism. These structures influence socio‐hydrological dynamics and have the potential to alter hydrological processes relevant to drought emergence and development. This study aimed to analyze the influence of a high concentrati...
Urban surface waters are used in many different ways. With increasing demand for human use functions, improved insight is required into the functional quality of these waters. A method to assess this functional quality in a systematic way and for a wide variety of use functions is not available. We propose to use suitability indices (SIs) for asses...
The São Francisco River (SFR) flow has been partially transferred to dryland catchments in Northeastern Brazil (NEB), to help deal with recurrent regional water shortages. However, the influence of this water transfer on overexploited aquifer systems had not been investigated. Our goal was to assess the groundwater recharge and the potential of the...
In a recent editorial in the journal Nature Sustainability , the editors raised the concern that journal submissions on water studies appear too similar. The gist of the editorial: “too many publications and not enough ideas.” In this response, we contest this notion, and point to the numerous new ideas that result from taking a broader view of the...
Different methods have been proposed in population dynamics to estimate carrying capacity (K). This study estimates K for Iran, using three novel methods by integrating land and water limits into assessments based on Human Appropriated Net Primary Production (HANPP). The first method uses land suitability as the limiting resource. It gives theoreti...
East African forested mountain regions are vital in generating and supplying water resources to adjacent arid and semi-arid lowlands. However, these ecosystems are under pressure from both climate and land use changes. This study aimed to analyze the effects of climate and land use changes on water yield using the Budyko framework as a first-order...
Drought events and their impacts vary spatially and temporally due to diverse pedo-climatic and hydrologic conditions, as well as variations in exposure and vulnerability, such as demographics and response actions. While hazardous severity and frequency of past drought events have been studied in detail, little is known about the effect of drought...
Study region
The catchment above Bengbu in the Huaihe River Basin, China
Study focus
In the Anthropocene, hydrological drought is significantly affected by human activities, and the degree of different human activities affecting droughts may vary in different physiographic and anthropogenic contexts. This study aims to quantify the relative contri...
Reservoirs of hydropower plants (HPP) can amend water, energy, and food security in semi-arid regions. However, during severe droughts, the priority of energy demand leads to critical conditions of water availability. To reduce water use for energy, one possible measure is the adoption of solar power, an abundant energy source in semi-arid regions....
Building reservoirs is a response to cope with drought in drylands. However, this human modification to the landscape may trigger both positive and negative effects. Here, we investigate how a network of reservoirs influences the propagation of meteorological drought (MD) into hydrological drought (HD) in a large semi-arid catchment in Brazil. We a...
Drought monitoring and Early Warning Systems (DEWS) are seen as helpful tools to tackle drought at an early stage and reduce the possibility of harm or loss. They usually include indices attributed to meteorological, agricultural and/or hydrological drought: physically based drought drivers. These indices are used to determine the onset, end and se...
East-African forested mountain regions are vital in generating and supplying water resources to adjacent arid and semi-arid lowlands. However, these ecosystems are under pressure from both climate and land-use changes. This study aimed to analyze the effects of climate and land-use changes on water yield using the Budyko conceptual framework. For 9...
Scientific literature currently lacks comprehensive understanding of urban surface water use functions. This hampers sound analysis of the demand and potential supply of these functions. This study provides a comprehensive overview of potential use functions, by integrating knowledge from ecosystem services and integrated urban water management fie...
Increases in water demand often result in unsustainable water use, leaving insufficient amounts of water for the environment. Therefore, water-saving strategies have been introduced to the environmental policy agenda in many (semi)-arid regions. As many such interventions failed to reach their objectives, a comprehensive tool is needed to assess th...
Location-specific forms of agroforestry management can reduce problems in the forest–water–people nexus, by balancing upstream and downstream interests, but social and ecological finetuning is needed. New ways of achieving shared understanding of the underlying ecological and social-ecological relations is needed to adapt and contextualize generic...
The forest and landscape restoration (FLR) targets set as part of the Bonn Challenge draw attention to the governance arrangements required to translate national FLR targets into local action. To achieve the targets, actors at multiple levels of the governance scale aim to influence relevant processes on the ecological scale. In this article, we fo...
Most rice farmers in Nepal’s Terai region do not fully utilize irrigation during breaks in monsoon rainfall. This leads to yield losses despite abundant groundwater resources and ongoing expansion of diesel pumps and tubewell infrastructure. We investigate this puzzle by characterizing delay factors governing tubewell irrigation across wealth and p...
Adequate tools for evaluating sustainable intensification (SI) of crop production for agro-hydrological system are not readily available. Building on existing concepts, we propose a framework for evaluating SI at the field and river basin levels. The framework serves as a means to assess and visualise SI indicator values, including yield, water-use...
Virtual water flows, incorporated in global food trade has increased the last decade. The drivers and consequences are complex. These complex relations between humans and water resources are studied from different perspectives. In this article, an overview of four such perspectives on water in global food production and trade is provided. These fou...
As global demand for food increases and impacts of climate-
related extremes become more severe new governance
mechanisms have become relevant. Individual and collective
effortsbyactors inwater-for food governance couldallcontribute
to sustainably managing the locally scarce water resources that
are mobilized to meet the world’s demand for food. Th...
With increasing water shortages partly due to increasing demands, water has become a globally relevant issue especially in arid and semi-arid regions. Water-saving irrigation technologies provide new ways for improving the efficiency of water use for agricultural production. Although efficient irrigation management could lead to water savings and i...
The regional effects of local water storage are largely unknown. This study identifies, categorizes and discusses the challenges in assessing the potential of local water storage. These are illustrated using a structured method applied to a Dutch case. We conclude that the focus must shift from storage 'potential' (the quantity of water that can be...
Regional long-term water management plans depend increasingly on investments by local water users such as farmers. However, local circumstances and individual situations vary and investment decisions are made under uncertainty. Water users may therefore perceive the costs and benefits very differently, leading to non-uniform investment decisions. T...
This paper is the outcome of a community initiative to identify major unsolved scientific problems in hydrology motivated by a need for stronger harmonisation of research efforts. The procedure involved a public consultation through on-line media, followed by two workshops through which a large number of potential science questions were collated, p...
We introduce ten studies in the field of water footprint assessment (WFA) that are representative of the type of papers currently being published in this broad interdisciplinary field. WFA is the study of freshwater use, scarcity, and pollution in relation to consumption, production, and trade patterns. The reliable availability of sufficient and c...
The Lake Naivasha Basin in Kenya has experienced significant land use cover changes (LUCC) that has been hypothesized to have altered the hydrological regime in recent decades. While it is generally recognized that LUCC will impact evapotranspiration (ET), the precise nature of such impact is not very well understood. This paper describes how land...
Social influence affects individual decision-making on soil conservation. Understanding the emergent diffusion of collective conservation effort is relevant to natural resource management at the river basin level. This study focuses on the effect of subjective norms and collective action on the diffusion of Soil Conservation Effort (SCE) in the Lak...
The expansion of reservoirs to cope with droughts and water shortages is hotly debated in many places around the world. We argue that there are two counterintuitive dynamics that should be considered in this debate: supply–demand cycles and reservoir effects. Supply–demand cycles describe instances where increasing water supply enables higher water...
Ecosystem‐based fisheries management (EBFM) is an important complement to existing fisheries management approaches to maintain ecosystem health and function; to translate goals and aspirations for sustainability into operational objectives, the preferences of the fishing communities should be considered for successful implementation of EBFM. This s...
To effectively manage hydrological drought, there is an urgent need to better understand and evaluate its human drivers. Using the ‘downstreamness’ concept, we assess the role of a reservoir network in the emergence and evolution of droughts in a river basin in Brazil. In our case study, the downstreamness concept shows the effect of a network of r...
Regional long-term water management plans increasingly depend on investments by local water users such as farmers. However, local circumstances and individual situations vary and investment decisions are made under uncertainty. Therefore, the perceived values of costs and benefits may also vary considerably among water users, leading to non-uniform...
Human interventions in response to drought can both alleviate and enhance drought. Developments of infrastructure for freshwater storage, groundwater abstraction and irrigation have proved to be effective in overcoming meteorological and agricultural drought in many locations worldwide. At the same time such developments may exacerbate hydrological...
Human interventions in response to drought can both alleviate and enhance drought. Developments of infrastructure for freshwater storage, groundwater abstraction and irrigation have proved to be effective in overcoming meteorological and agricultural drought in many locations worldwide. At the same time such developments may exacerbate hydrological...
This special issue is a collection of recent papers in the field of Water Footprint Assessment (WFA), an emerging area of research focused on the analysis of freshwater use, scarcity, and pollution in relation to consumption, production, and trade. As increasing freshwater scarcity forms a major risk to the global economy, sustainable management of...
The main objective of this study was to estimate the different components of the water footprint for sugarcane production under the conditions of free (FD) and controlled drainage (as an on-farm strategy for agricultural water management, CD) in an arid and semi-arid region in the south-west of Iran (Khuzestan Province). The different components of...
Stakeholder analysis and social network analysis were used to analyze stakeholders’ social and structural characteristics based on their interests, influence and interactions in Lake Naivasha basin, Kenya. Even though the Kenyan government and its agencies seem to command higher influence and interest in water resource management, the presence of i...
Stakeholder analysis and social network analysis were used to analyze stakeholders’ social and structural characteristics based on their interests, influence and interactions in Lake Naivasha basin, Kenya. Even though the Kenyan government and its agencies seem to command higher influence and interest in water resource management, the presence of i...
p>This special issue is a collection of recent papers in the field of Water Footprint Assessment (WFA), an emerging area of research focused on the analysis of freshwater use, scarcity, and pollution in relation to consumption, production, and trade. As increasing freshwater scarcity forms a major risk to the global economy, sustainable management...
Urmia Lake, the world's second largest hypersaline lake, has decreased in size over recent decades primarily because inflow has diminished. This has caused serious socio-environmental consequences similar to those of the Aral Sea disaster. By using the variable infiltration capacity (VIC) model, this study estimates the relative contributions of cl...
Local water storages can contribute significantly to meet regional demands for water and offer governments a strategy for reducing or delaying investment in large-centralised water infrastructure. Local water storages include ponds, canals, drainage systems and subsurface aquifers. Augmentation of local water storages and determination of their reg...
As aquaculture becomes more important for feeding the growing world population, so too do the required natural resources needed to produce aquaculture feed. While there is potential to replace fish meal and fish oil with terrestrial feed ingredients, it is important to understand both the positive and negative implications of such a development. Th...
This study presents the state-of-the-art understanding of the data-scarce and hydrogeologically complex groundwater system of Lake Naivasha, Kenya, with the particular aim of exploring the influence groundwater abstractions have on Lake Naivasha's water level. We developed multiple alternative but plausible parameterizations for a MODFLOW groundwat...
A valuation scenario was designed using a contingent-valuation approach and presented
to decision makers in business firms in Kenya’s Lake Naivasha basin to test
how applicable a water fund might be as a potential financing mechanism for a
payment for water-related ecosystem services scheme. The findings indicate that
measuring a firm’s willingness...
Recent hydro-climatological trends and variability characteristics were investigated for the Lake Naivasha Basin with the aim of understanding the changes in water balance components and their evolution over the past 50 years. Using Bayesian change point analysis proposed by Barry and Hartigan (1993) and modified Mann-Kendall tests time series of a...
This study describes the mismatch between required knowledge and efforts by
scientists and stakeholders in the Lake Naivasha basin, Kenya. In the basin, integrated
water resources management (IWRM) suffers from the absence of critically relevant
knowledge. This study further presents a spatial integrated assessment framework for
supporting IWRM in...