Addressing Water Governance Challenges in the Anthropocene - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 3

are already stressing the availability of high-quality water resources. Water governance
is essential to managing variability in water supply and delivery (due to seasonality
and local variability), in part through the construction and management of regulating
infrastructure, but also through the rules (permits, ownership rights, laws, regulations)
that administer valuable water resources.
Even if greenhouse gas emissions cease tomorrow, the inertia of the climate system
is committed to a likely increase in global temperatures of at least 2°C by the end of
the century (IPCC 2007 ). The associated shifts in climatological patterns will
require us all, but water managers in particular, to adapt in a timely and effective
manner. The physical and environmental changes pose significant challenges to
water infrastructure and management systems, despite the fact that water stakeholders
have long dealt with changes and stresses relating to climate variability. The pro-
jected speed and magnitude of anthropogenic climate change is set to exacerbate
underlying variation and stresses, rendering future situations less manageable (IISD
2006 ) unless our current institutional arrangements can become adaptive to the real-
ities of future environmental situations.
The release of the fourth assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change ( 2007 ) could have been seen as a tipping point for an increasing
awareness of the linkage between climate change and related resource management
issues, including water management. Significant progress was made, yet the subse-
quent years have seen a number of setbacks to significant traction being made by the
scientific community on a number of resource related issues. Climate and water
cannot be separated as independent issues, especially as water is the primary medium
through which climate impacts will be experienced, through changes in local hydro-
logical patterns (Parry et al. 2007 ). The significance of the water, energy, food nexus
is so fundamental to economic development globally, that the intensification of
hydrological cycle will impact on both rich and poor, whether through too much
water, or too little. Moreover, mountainous areas, commonly considered 'Water
Towers' of the world are at the forefront of these warming patterns (Häberli and
Beniston 1998 ) . Climate impacts on glacier retreat, precipitation patterns (seasonality
and snow line) and associated changes in run off regimes are already observed in
Alpine and Andean regions, and model projections suggest a continuation if not
heightening of current trends (Viviroli et al. 2011 ) .
In 2002, a Nature paper (Crutzen 2002 ) suggested that the advent of a new geo-
logical period was upon us, one defined by the fact that human actions were playing
a dominant role in shaping biospheric processes. This period was called the 'anthro-
pocene', and has fundamentally challenged our perception of human interaction
with bio-physical processes. Humans can no longer view themselves as an observer
of bio-physical or bio-chemical processes, but instead have become a major con-
tributor and actor in them. This has significant consequences for how human actors
should view their part in the 'management' of bio-spherical process and natural
resources. Moreover, it prescribes a shift in how actors evaluate and design the man-
agement processes to cope in a less stable climatological period, and the increasing
need to be aware of the planetary boundaries that we are rapidly approaching
(Rockström et al. 2009 ). The Nature article on planetary boundaries suggested that