Water Resilience for Human Prosperity

The world's human population now constitutes the largest driving force of changes to the biosphere. Emerging water challenges require new ideas for governance and management of water resources in the context of rapid global change. This book presents a new approach to water resources, addressing global sustainability and focusing on socio-ecological resilience to changes. Topics covered include the risks of unexpected change, human impacts and dependence on global water, the prospects for feeding the world's population by 2050, and a pathway for the future. The book's innovative and integrated approach links green and blue freshwater with terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem functions and use. It also links changes arising from land-use alteration with the impacts of those changes on social-ecological systems and ecosystem services. This is an important, state-of-the-art resource for academic researchers and water resource professionals, and a key reference for graduate students studying water resource governance and management.List of contributors; Preface; Introduction to the book; Acknowledgements; Part I. A New Perspective: 1. The role played by water in the biosphere; Part II. Living in a Human-Dominated World: 2. Human modification of the Earth system; 3. Balancing on a threshold of alternate development paths: regime shifts, traps and transformations; 4. Crucial functioning of and human dependence on the global water system; Part III. Food Production Globally: in Hotspot Regions and in the Landscape: 5. Food production: a mega water challenge; 6. Closing the yield gap in the savannah zone; 7. Water resources and functions for agro-ecological systems at the landscape scale; Part IV. Governance and Pathways: 8. Governance for navigating the novel freshwater dynamics of the Anthropocene; 9. Pathways to the future; Glossary; Index.