Pieter van Oel

Pieter van Oel
Wageningen University & Research | WUR · Water Resources Management group

PhD

About

121
Publications
51,894
Reads
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3,758
Citations
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.
Additional affiliations
September 2013 - April 2020
Wageningen University & Research
Position
  • Professor (Associate)
April 2010 - April 2014
University of Twente
Position
  • PostDoc Position
Description
  • WOTRO-IP Lake Naivasha basin, Kenya
January 2008 - January 2012
University of Twente
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
Education
November 2003 - May 2009
University of Twente
Field of study
  • Civil Engineering
September 1997 - November 2002
University of Twente
Field of study
  • Civil Engineering

Publications

Publications (121)
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
Full-text available
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.
Preprint
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
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...
Article
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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
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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....
Article
Full-text available
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...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...