Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
to produce a comprehensive, integrated assessment of the world's key water pro-
blems, including the periodic World Water Development Report, which aims to
give an overall picture of the state of the world's freshwater resources and to
provide decision makers with the tools to implement sustainable water manage-
ment (UN, 2003; 2006). More generally, a focus on the geographical dimensions
of water, poverty and development has been characteristic of geographers' work
on these issues, who pay particular attention to questions of scale and space, and
the interrelationship between human and aquatic systems in their study of the
links between water, poverty, geography and development (see, e.g., Wescoat
et al., 2000; D'Souza 2002; Giordano et al., 2002; Sneddon et al., 2002;
Halvorson, 2003, p. 2005).
Successful integrated water resources management is in turn dependent upon data
and analyses produced by environmental geographers and other environmental sci-
entists. For example, adequate source protection (the safeguarding of upland water
sources critical for drinking water supply) is dependent upon a fairly comprehensive
assessment of pollutant sources and pathways (atmospheric as well as hydrological),
development activities and land use change, and meso- and macro-scale climatologi-
cal and meteorological processes such as the changing frequency and intensity of
extreme water-related events (such as droughts, fl oods and storms) (Durley and de
Loë, 2005). Using groundwater hydrology, for example, using groundwater hydrol-
ogy, geographers have assessed the history of groundwater recharge and climate
change in various locales using isotopic compositions to infer the age of groundwa-
ter, and a chloride mass balance method to determine the long-term recharge rate
(Ma et al., 2005). Focusing on the unsaturated profi les of specifi c aquifers (particu-
larly those not receiving contemporary recharge) allows geographers to document
wet and dry periods in the past, effectively using groundwater as an archive of past
environmental and climatic change (Edmunds, 1996; 2005). These fi ndings are of
critical importance for understanding possible variations in precipitation within
watersheds, and linking historical studies to contemporary analyses of variability
(e.g. Mote et al., 2003). These micro-scale fi eld-based fi ndings (which are often
characteristic of the work of environmental geographers, as opposed to other envi-
ronmental scientists) are complemented by research linking macro- and meso-scale
relationships between climate, weather and local hydrological conditions; for
example, through analysing the relationship between ocean surface temperatures,
regional climate and local weather patterns (see, e.g., Grundstein and Leathers 1998;
McKendry et al., 2006).
Integrating these types of research at different scales has long been a goal of
environmental geographers. A persistent drawback has been the diffi culty of gener-
alisation and replicability given the tendency of environmental geographers to focus
on case-specifi c, fi eldwork-intensive research.
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However, remote sensing opens up
the possibility of gathering large datasets relatively inexpensively, enabling geogra-
phers to more fully test hypotheses, and inductively generate falsifi able hypotheses
and more general theories in a way that was not previously possible. Research on
integrated water management is thus emblematic of the diffi culties that have faced
environmental geography, and illustrative of the ways in which new developments
are opening up the possibility of a 'coming of age' of environmental geography
within the environmental sciences. A critical aspect of this work will rest upon the
integration of research by human and physical geographers. Indeed, in practice,
water management is a fi eld which draws simultaneously on the work of social and
