Hydrological Problems and Environmental Management in Highlands and Headwaters
eBook - ePub

Hydrological Problems and Environmental Management in Highlands and Headwaters

Martin Haigh, Martin Haigh

Share book
  1. 208 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Hydrological Problems and Environmental Management in Highlands and Headwaters

Martin Haigh, Martin Haigh

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

This set of papers presents a description of the synthesis of hydrological problems and various environmental implications and management strategies for different highland and headwater regions of the world. Regions covered include the Himalayas, Russian mountains, Amazonia, and upland Wales.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on ā€œCancel Subscriptionā€ - itā€™s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time youā€™ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoā€™s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youā€™ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weā€™ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Hydrological Problems and Environmental Management in Highlands and Headwaters an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Hydrological Problems and Environmental Management in Highlands and Headwaters by Martin Haigh, Martin Haigh in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Diritto & Diritto ambientale. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351439725
Topic
Diritto
Edition
1
Introduction to Hydrological Problems and Environmental Management in Highlands and Headwaters
Martin J. Haigh Josef Křeček and G.S. Rajwar
This book is devoted to the search for environmental self-sufficiencies in highland and headwater regions. Its aim is one promoted by the founders of modern India who called upon communities to seek self-reliance and to develop ways of life which allow a harmonious, non-destructive balance with natural systems (Gandhi, 1969). The routes towards this condition may have been redefined by modern environmental managers, adapted both in technological and cultural terms, however, the search continues for systems of land husbandry, systems of environmental management, which are self-sustainable and which do not place a tax on the environment nor require subsidy from outside.
The problems of environmental management in highlands and headwaters are the problems of the periphery. Highland and headwater regions tend to lie at the margins of a nationā€™s economic heartland. Paradoxically, while such regions are often promoted as icons of national identity, they are also often among a nationā€™s least developed and most economically backward areas. They tend to be less densely peopled, remote, areas of wilderness and of steep unstable slopes. For these same reasons, highland and headwater regions often include the last great reserves of natural resources in a nation. Their contribution to a nation is often measured in terms of their resources of forest, pure water, minerals, wildlife, and for the tourism and leisure industries. The ā€˜purityā€™ of a natural environment in these ā€˜unspoiltā€™ areas often has a huge emotional significance for a nation which impacts even upon those who may spend no more than a few hours of their lives as tourists in such regions. However, frequently, these areas are also the last redoubt for minority nationalities and for cultures which are very different from those of the national mainstream. This can lead to problems of social and political unrest. The populations of these regions frequently feel that their well-being is being sacrificed for those of the ā€˜foreignersā€™ of the national core and this feeling is always resented.
Highland and headwater regions, then, lie on the front lines of economic exploitation for many nations. They also tend to lie on the front-lines of political and cultural conflict. Since, by definition, highlands and headwaters are the source regions for a nationā€™s water resources and since, normally, these marginal areas are the places where national boundaries meet, and sometimes overlap, highlands and headwaters have a significance which is far greater than either their internal resource potential or relatively small populations might warrant. Adverse changes in these areas can have very dramatic effects on both the environmental and political stability of a nation. Hydrological problems in the headwaters can change the patterns of flooding, sedimentation and river flow in areas hundreds of kilometres downstream. Problems of unrest on a nationā€™s borders can send shock waves that rock governments thousands of kilometres away in the nationā€™s capital.
In a way, headwater and highland regions present one of the greatest challenges to national administration. Superficially, they often appear economically backward and politically weak. They seem to be areas ripe for exploitation. However, they tend to be fragile in environmental terms and have an inherent political sensitivity (Haigh and Křeček, 1991). In sum, ill advised interference in such regions can have devastating environmental and political impacts (Johnson and Lewis, 1995).
These regions also present a great challenge for research scientists and those involved in environmental management. Highlands and headwaters are regions where modern environmental change may be very rapid. At the same time, they are places which have often been starved of investment in environmental research and monitoring, and places where research and environmental monitoring is often very difficult because of their isolated and/or complex terrain. Research institutes and universities are more often found in the large cities of a nationā€™s heartland than in the fastness of its mountains or headwater peripheries. The Headwater Control meetings are devoted to overcoming this poverty of scientific and environmental data. The Headwater Control meetings are, genuinely, about the sharing of advice and experience between environmental scientists and managers working in the highland and headwater regions of the ā€œThree Worldsā€. Almost uniquely, this group is neither an extension of American thinking nor is it the foster child of any United Nations agency.
Headwater regions also challenge the normal scientific practice which produces specialists. The problems of highland and headwater environments are problems of environmental sensitivity. They do not rest easily in any particular disciplineā€”forestry, agriculture, hydrology, civil engineering, sociology, or politics. They are problems which require an integrated approach to the management of the landā€”the kind of integrated approach which today is associated with the phrase ā€˜sustainable developmentā€™, or more recently with the ā€˜better land husbandryā€™ movement.
However, the fact remains that there are few fora where environmental scientists from different disciplines routinely meet together, let alone meet in concert with planners, environmental practitioners, environmental managers and policy makers. The Headwater Control meetings remain almost the only international gathering where foresters, agriculturalists, environmental scientists and policy makers meet together as a matter of routine. Our federal conferences are promoted by a wide range of practically oriented international specialist associations, most of them non government organisations. Our meetings aim to unite the perspectives of the scientific researcher, environmental practitioner, and policy maker in a search for improved strategies for the management of threatened environments and livelihoods in highland, steepland and headwater regions.
The current major concerns of the Headwater Control conferences include:
ā€¢Ā Ā rebuilding the vitality of mountain environments,
ā€¢Ā Ā monitoring and reducing the environmental impacts of development in headwaters (especially the impacts of commercial forestry, tourism, road construction, mining, etc.),
ā€¢Ā Ā determining the characteristics of the hydrological regime in highlands and headwaters, especially with regard to the impacts of land use change, acid rain, climatic change, and the changing biological influences on the hydrological cycle,
ā€¢Ā Ā environmental monitoring in headwater environments and the collecting of the benchmark data which provide the basis for environmental action,
ā€¢Ā Ā erosion control and the management of steeplands water courses,
ā€¢Ā Ā the conservation and management of forest and water resources, and,
ā€¢Ā Ā the development and co-ordination of community action and community development for environmental improvement in mountains.
Aspects of all these activities may be found in the papers sampled for this book. Andrej Hočevar and L. Kajfež-Bogataj (Slovenia) examine the stability and dynamics of headwater ecosystems with regard to the potential of current climatic change. An introductory paper by G.S. Rajwar (India) highlights the challenges for environmental management in the Western Himalaya. Papers by Anatoly F. Mandych (Russian Federation) and Ramazan Saraci (Albania) produce benchmark analyses of hydrological process and sediment yield in headwater areas. Lenzi, Marchi, and Tecca (Italy) study the dramatic problems of debris flow dynamics in the Italian Alps.
AdĆ”m KertĆ©sz and DĆ©nes LĆ³czy (Hungary) and Jiang Tong (China) look at the problems of agricultural soil erosion and conservation. Stanimir Kostadinov (Yugoslavia) examines the local impacts of land use change on headwater lands while Eero Kubin (Finland) focuses on the effect of clear cutting, waste wood collecting and site preparation on nitrate pollution of ground waters.
Luiz Molion tackles the global consequences of the massive deforestation affecting Amazonia, while Josef Křeček (Czech Republic) describes the regional consequences of acid atmospheric deposition on mountain watersheds in central Europe. Vrhovec, Pristov, and Hočevar (Slovenia) offer a theoretical model for the deposition of air pollutants in an Alpine headwater. Chris Soulsby (United Kingdom) examines the interactions between acid deposition and the hydrological controls on the leaching of aluminium in upland Wales while Joseph Kerekes (Canada) describes procedures for monitoring acid deposition in two headwater lakes in Nova Scotia.
Further contributions to the technical problems of environmental monitoring are offered by Hans Schreier and colleagues (Canada) and by Maria Luisa Paracchini and Sten Folving (Italy). Collectively they evaluate the use of GIS, DTM and remote sensing technologies.
The social and political aspects of environmental management in highlands and headwaters are examined by Martin Haigh (England), who compares the perceptions of different pressure groups lobbying for environmental action in the Himalayan environment, and by Ted Napier (USA), who reviews the problems of implementing environmental conservation practices in the farmlands of Americaā€™s mid-west.
Three beliefs unite all of these works. This is the notion that the environment in headwater and highland environments is vulnerable to, and threatened by environmental change and human actions. The second is that something must be done to protect these environments. The third is that the solutions lie in the integrated environmental management.
Frequently, these ideas have been couched in terms of sustainable development. Sustainable development is defined as ā€œdevelopment that meets the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needsā€ (Brundtland, 1987:43). However, today, many will wonder if being sustainable is actually good enough?
In his review of the condition of the mountains in the Mediterranean region, McNeil (1992) shows how ecological and economic change may destroy the headwater environment and way of life. First in the Christian Mediterranean then in the Islamic nations, population overshot the carrying capacity of the headwater and highland regions. The result has been deforestation, soil erosion and population decline. Depopulation caused field abandonment, the collapse of agricultural terraces and the destruction of irrigation works. Pressures from external markets meant that distant demand could be focused with destructive effect. In case studies of villages in five mountain ranges: Taurus, Pindus, Lucanian Apennianes, Sierra Nevada/Alpujarra and the Rif, McNeil shows how the mountain way of life changed little before 1800. In the 19th Century, economic changes brought fleeting prosperity to some areas but this was based on easily depleted natural resources or an easily deflected trade route and it added popular warfare to the scourges of the environment. Massive deforestation between 1800 and 1950 was due to migration into the mountains. Consequent population pressure produced acute hardship and emigration by ecological refugees. The mountains carry the scars of environmental degradation from the distant history but more dramatically from recent times.
Looking forward, McNeil is pessimistic about the prospects for environmental protection in mountains and much impressed by their function as refuges for insurgency. He agrees with our conferences that societies which persist in such marginal and fragile headwater environments do so only through careful land husbandry. However, nowhere have mountain peoples devised systems of human ecology that have preserved a durable harmony or balance with nature. To date, only low population densities have preserved mountain environments (McNeil, 1992). This is no longer an option.
Certainly, being ā€˜sustainableā€™ is very much better than being unsustainable but this estate remains very far from ideal. Systems which are sustainable have to be sustained. This implies a conscious input, an act of additional and of sustained intervention. This point is more than an academic splitting of hairs. It has important implications.
The world is full of illustrations of sustainable land management in mountains, irrigation channels, agricultural terraces, and roadways (Pereira, 1989). Provided these engineered structures are sustained by repair and maintenance, they will last for a very long time. Equally, if they are neglected, for even a few years, they will fail. Terraces in northern Yemen and the Himalaya, the drains and channels of the reclaimed surface mine disturbed lands of Europe, all provide celebrated instances of the catastrophic land degradation which may result when maintenance is withdrawn.
Equally, there are buffer strips, grassed waterways, contour cultivation and conservation tillage practices which may be deployed for the sustainable cultivation of erosive soils and steep slopes. However, these practices create the impression that such sites can and should be cultivated. When the tradition remains, but the practices are forgotten, overlooked for a couple of years, or disturbed by civil instability, major problems can result.
So, sustainability is not enough. Ultimately, best practice land management must involve strategies and land uses which are self-sustaining. This means practices that do not require additional conscious intervention to sustain them and practices which, even if they are discontinued, will cause no additional penalty against the land. The best kind of land husbandry is that which minimises the necessity for conscious soil conservation.
Of course, no-one ever suggested that such a goal is universally attainable. Environmental managers are summoned, usually, in situations where the land is being badly managed. Soil conservationists are more often employed where soil has already been damaged and must be repaired than to protect soils which have yet to be damaged. Foresters and hydrological engineers more often find work in situations where societies wish to use land in a potentially damaging fashion than where they continue a tradition of living in harmony with nature. This situation is unlikely to change.
Nevertheless, these conferences and their supporters devote themselves to the search for a particular holy grail. This is the search for systems of environmental management and utilisation which are self-sustaining, and where nature and society coexist and coevolve in a harmonious balance. The fact remains that best practice environmental management, best practice land husbandry, is self-sustaining, not merely sustainable.
REFERENCES
Brundtland, G.H. 1987: Our Common Future. Oxford.
Gandhi, M.K. 1969: The Voice of Truth. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust.
Haigh, M.J. and Křeček, J. 1991: Headwater management: problems and policiesā€”special feature. Land Use Policy 8(3): 191ā€“205.
Johnson, D. and Lewis, L. 1995: Land Degradation: Creation and Destruction. Oxford: Blackwells.
McNeil, J.R. 1992: The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History. Cambridge University Press: Studies in Environment and History.
Pereira, H.C. 1989: Policy and Practice in the Management of Mountain Watersheds. London: Belhaven Press.
Headwater Ecosystems: Their Stability, Productivity, System Dynamics and the Role of Climate Change
A. Hočevar and L. Kajfež-Bogataj
ABSTRACT
The impacts of agricultural and forest farm production are evaluated through an analysis of the flows of mass and energy into, and out of, the headwater ecosystem. The interactions between economic outputs from the system and inputs from air pollution and climate change are assessed in terms of their influence upon the resilience and stability of ecosystems.
Keywords: Headwater ecosystem, stability, system dynamics, climate change.
INTRODUCTION
Presenting an overview of headwater ecosystems studies regarding their stability and productivity is a very difficult task. This presentation will try to elucidate only a few of the headlines which one has to keep in mind.
First, we should answer a very important question: Why do we worry about headwater ecosystem studies? The answer is a very straightforward one: Its findings have great scientific value and great practical value, as well. Human managed ecosystems should be managed properly to ensure their stability in the long run, regardless of whether they are agricultural or forest, long existing or newly created, and taking into account their resilience to climate change. The aim...

Table of contents