I know I am late, nevertheless I want to make some comments on the science plan. First of all, the key words change and society seem to fit the needs. In the discussion I found two contributions, which I support strongly, these are the ones by Luigia Brandimarti and the one by David Garen.
My obeservation from most others is the desire to continue on modelling and uncertainty from Pub some with connection to the two keywords, some even not.
However, how can one define such a program without the active participation of the target group, ecologists, social scientists, economists, etc. The reason is probably that the discussion was mainly lead by the pub community.
Accepting that Pub was a success I still ask myself what it produced for engineering practice and society. I am an engineering hydrologist and water manager and I know that society outside the close community represented here is interested in modelling uncertainty, not even in models at all. Society is interested in risk:

The risk that climate change might reduce the availabilty of water for water supply and irrigation or increase floods
The risk that a hydraulic structure is underdesigned (such as dam or dyke) and might fail or is overdesigned and money ist wasted
The risk that overuse of natural resources might destroy natural habitats (Anthropogenic hydrologic alteration and coupled ecologic models)
….

Modelling uncertainty and risk estimation are related of course. However, what I saw under Pub with few exceptions is the attempt to reproduce measure flow series more accurately, For risk assessment that does not mean much. The important question is, what is the risk in the extrapolation of the model to extremes. Models are and will be uncertain, whatever we develop. And they can be uncertain to the degree that avoids wrong decisions.

Another important field not covered so far ist the development of potential future scenarios (scenario technology).Scenarios like climate change (I think we have sufficiently dealt with that for the moment), development of megacities, rural landuse change are some examples.

To look at that in an integrative manner, you will need highly interdisciplinary approaches, which did not become visible. Future models must be basinwide models including water quality and urbanized areas and hydraulic infrastructure, not as all as lumped as now.

Here we need approaches to transfer relevant hydrologic variables to understandable and assessible information for the decision maker including the public.

In fact there is much more available in application than pure hydrologic might think.

So my conclusion is, good choice of topics but a quite unclear and incomplete concept

Regards

Manfred Ostrowski

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I am pleased to see that a very abbreviated version of my previous blog post made it into the document (page 25, under “More Science Questions …”). This has to do with ethics and IWRM. I would just like to point out and re-emphasize what I mean by this as it relates to the draft science plan.

The science plan is full of words, phrases, and sentences mentioning things like

“connection with society”
“economic, policy and legal frameworks that govern water availability”
“connections with … economics and social sciences”
“human connections to the water cycle”
“patterns of social behaviour”
“interdisciplinary approach involving social scientists, economists, decision makers, and users”

And so on. In other words, if this new initiative is to include the human element, fundamental processes influencing human behaviour must be considered.

Human behaviour is driven by primary motivations such as ethics, psychology, economics, and government. For example, water resources development has heretofore been driven by an ethic of domination of nature and an economic system that has ignored environmental impacts and rewarded only those activities that make money for humans.

As another example, in Figure 5, which shows the interrelationships among many hydrologic elements, the item “Understanding helps set management targets” immediately involves ethics and economics. That is, our ethics, assumptions, worldview, and economic incentives as humans are the framework in which management goals are conceived and selected.

The point I want to make is that water resources management is not just a value-free, objective scientific endeavour. Rather, it strikes at the very heart of our values and how we view the role of humans in the world.

To understand how humanity behaves and ought to proceed — in the face of environmental issues (with water being one of the main ones) that continually increase in severity and complexity — we must face square-on what ethic has driven us in the past and what ethic will drive us in the future. While increasing scientific knowledge is good, it needs to be focused on addressing current pressing problems, and in order to do so, we have to put it in the context of what we are going to do with this knowledge (or what we will do in the face of uncertainty and lack of knowledge). What we do is driven by our ethics and our economic system.

These ideas connect most directly with Science Question 5 (“What are key actions to get connected with society?”). However, really, they underlie the motivations for all of the scientific endeavours mentioned in the other science questions. Anyway, I hope that somehow, these ideas can contribute to making the new science plan relevant for addressing urgent water issues in the coming decade.

David Garen
Portland, Oregon, USA

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Happy New Year!!!
Salvatore Grimaldi
President ICSH-IAHS

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1. How do we identify the occurrence and drivers of change in historical hydrologic systems where processes at different scales interact?

2. What are the areas where current hydrologic modeling approaches don’t predict (or retrodict) changing hydrologic systems very well right now? How wrong are we? Why are we wrong? What are the key weaknesses?

3. How do we measure fluxes and changes in water storage and landscape properties (particularly in the subsurface) at scales relevant for understanding macroscopic systems, new model parameterization and real-world problems?

4. How important are different types of hydrologic changes to ecosystems and human society? How do we measure that importance? Where are the vulnerabilities and opportunities that have arisen when hydrologic systems change?

5. How do changes in hydrologic systems (either through changes in forcing or in landscapes) interact and feed back on natural and social systems driven by hydrology?

These questions are not intended as a comprehensive summary of the questions posed and discussed in the draft science plan or discussions leading up to it, but we are contributing them here in the interests of continuing the discussion. Several of the science questions in the draft report represent laudable goals, but seem to belong in the implementation plan. SC3 and SC5 in particular, which ask how the community should go about ensuring model soundness and transparency, and how to do better outreach and engagement, are important challenges for the community to address, but to address them as science questions should perhaps be left to the social sciences.

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