Building resilient water systems for future generations
Date published: 2024-11-08 12:00:00
A person overlooks a rocky lake.
Photo: luza studios
Water is an essential element of life. While we are fortunate in Canada that sources of water are largely abundant, many of these sources are increasingly threatened by ongoing challenges like pollution and climate change. Julia Baird, Canada Research Chair in Human Dimensions of Water Resources and Water Resilience at Brock University, is exploring how people and organizations make decisions about water management. Her goal is to uncover insights that will help ensure decisions affecting water systems benefit both future generations and ecosystems overall.
“The decisions we make have an impact on the water systems, and what happens with the water systems affects us,” she says. “The big question for me is how do we encourage decisions that support water sustainability now and into the future.”
Complex issues need resilient solutions
Although protecting water sources is generally acknowledged as important, different groups don’t always agree on how best to do it. Traditional strategies for protecting water sources have been focused on simple problems like pollution from an identifiable source. When the cause of an issue is easy to pinpoint, the path to dealing with it is often clear.
But current understanding of water issues is more complex. It acknowledges that all systems are interconnected and there is rarely a single cause of any problem. Further, any decisions will affect multiple parties, potentially in many different ways. For example, flooding can be caused by a range of factors, including changing weather patterns, aging infrastructure and decisions about land use. Those floods can be a minor nuisance for people in some areas, while, for others, the effects can be devastating.
That’s why Baird’s work is focused on water resilience: a water system’s capacity to resist change, adapt when needed or transform into a different system that can still support well-being. Resilience-based approaches to water management are better able to respond to changes in systems that are not always predictable, such as increased frequency of severe weather events.
“Resilience is partly about resisting change, but with the changes we’re already seeing and expecting in the near future, adaptation and transformation are even more important,” says Baird.
The human dimension
Julia Baird and fellow panel members at the PECS-3: Pathways to Sustainability conference in Montreal, August 2024.
Photo: Jen Holzer
Growing up on a farm gave Baird a lifelong appreciation for the close relationship between humans and the natural world. But while studying soil science in university, she realized that, despite this relationship, there was often a disconnect between what science advises and what actually gets done.
“I did all this research on seeding rates, and I started to wonder, why doesn’t everyone use these seeding rates?” she says. “Why, when the science is clear, is the science not enough for people to take the recommended action?”
That question inspired her to switch her focus to social sciences, where she could examine the complexities of decision-making, both at an individual level and where multiple people are involved. She was particularly interested in decisions related to sustainability and, ultimately, resilience—a concept that aligned perfectly with her understanding of the challenges around sustainability.
Building resilience through empathy
One of the big questions Baird and her team are exploring is how individuals think about and make decisions related to water resilience. Part of their work involved developing a new scale to measure endorsement of water resilience principles. That let the team look more objectively at factors associated with endorsement. Their scale has since been published and is available for other researchers to use in their own research.
Through a Canada and United States-based survey, Baird’s team also found that empathy was the biggest predictor of positive attitudes toward water resilience, including support for resilience-based governance strategies. An expanded survey including participants from Australia, India, South Africa and the United Kingdom, as well as Canada and the US, suggested the connection between resilience endorsement and empathy was not tied to North American culture alone, but could be considered more broadly applicable.
Baird says this is good news, because there is a large body of work showing that empathy can be strengthened. It has also been linked with many other issues and attitudes. That means increasing empathy in an effort to promote better decisions about water systems could contribute to solving other problems as well.
“Empathy may not be the solution, but it’s a solution,” says Baird. “It can change how you think about the world, and what I appreciate about empathy as a focus is that it sets us in a positive frame of mind instead of always focusing on the challenges or barriers.”
Building on these findings, Baird and her team have done a meta-analysis of studies on empathy interventions. The analysis, which is currently in review, will help determine which interventions are most effective, and which could be used to build empathy specifically around water resilience. The results could mean a promising new strategy for creating a more sustainable future for everyone.