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Editors’ introduction
Water International ( IF 2.6 ) Pub Date : 2020-04-02 , DOI: 10.1080/02508060.2020.1759311 Raya Marina Stephan 1 , James E. Nickum 2
Water International ( IF 2.6 ) Pub Date : 2020-04-02 , DOI: 10.1080/02508060.2020.1759311 Raya Marina Stephan 1 , James E. Nickum 2
Affiliation
We are writing this introduction under lockdown like half of the world’s population (so far), continuing to work and interact thanks to the miracle of modern technology, but very much missing our ‘normal’ lives. The current pandemic, due to the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (causing COVID-19), brings into question whether we will have to adjust to a new normal, both in our own lives and in the water sector. Vulnerable populations, in developing but also in developed countries, are all the more left behind, especially when they have access to such a limited supply of clean water that washing their hands frequently is out of the question; or when they cannot leave their houses to fetch water from distant sources. Utility revenues, often already inadequate, are threatened by the rise in unemployed users. Infrastructure budgets even in developed countries are at risk from the effects on national budgets of the enormous bailouts being used to try to ease the economic fallout. Even the temporary closure of national borders raises the spectre of further challenges to the governance of shared waters. And so on. As the IWRA readies to celebrate its 50th anniversary in November 2021, it and the water sector will have to face novel and increasingly complex water governance problems in the next half century. But let us turn to the issue at hand. Water International offers both special thematic issues and open issues, in approximately equal measure on average. But like hydrological cycles in much of the world, averages are dominated by strings. Last year we had a string of excellent special issues. Several are incubating for publication later this year and beyond. For now, the string is one of open issues, here the fourth in a row, where we offer a choice selection from among the hundreds of individual submissions we receive each year. These cover a range of topics and approaches. Yet, miraculously, we do not have to abandon thematic integrity. The articles in this issue are assembled in three thematic categories, per our now established custom. The first is engineered rivers. The second, much related to the pandemic at hand, is water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). And lastly, we bring back the water coping in African communities category we introduced in issue 43.5. We begin with engineered rivers, and the problems that arise as rivers and societies coevolve with engineering efforts. The three articles assembled under this category look at major rivers in three countries on different continents: China, Peru and Spain. Yan, Zhou, Liu, Wang and Li take a fine-grained look at the evolution of water use in the Yellow River basin since 1980 at a subbasin level As a whole, the basin, extensive but with limited runoff, has been overexploited to meet increased demand, especially from irrigated agriculture, which remains by far the largest user of water, with approximatively 70% of the total water use, including extensive areas irrigated outside the basin. Yet a kind of inverted Kuznets curve seems to apply to both agricultural and industrial water use, and overall consumption has stabilized since the year 2000. This stabilization is mainly a result of higher water use efficiency, driven in large part by policies such as the WATER INTERNATIONAL 2020, VOL. 45, NO. 3, 145–147 https://doi.org/10.1080/02508060.2020.1759311
更新日期：2020-04-02
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