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This chapter contributes to the understanding of coupled human-water systems by providing approaches to describing and categorizing the sociohydrological phenomena from the causative perspective, allowing comparison and integration among real-world case studies, thus helping to reduce water resources management dimensionality. It will do this through invoking the principles and practices of systems thinking, and in particular, through organizing the range of sociohydrologic phenomena into a small number of what are known as system archetypes. The use of archetypes serves the dual role of both diagnosing the causes and mechanisms of the generation of emergent phenomena, but also prescribing and testing system-level collective governance solutions to observed phenomena. 

This paper conceptualises droughts as socioecological phenomena coproduced by the recursive engagement of human and non-human transformations. Through an interdisciplinary approach that integrates political ecology, material geographies and hydroclimatology, this work simultaneously apprehends the role of politics and power in reshaping drought, along with the agency of biophysical processes – soil, vegetation, hydrology and microclimate – that co-produce droughts and their spatiotemporal patterning. The drought-stricken Ladismith in Western Cape, South Africa, is the instrumental case study and point of departure of our empirical analysis. To advance a materiality of drought that seriously accounts for the coevolution of biophysical and political transformations, we alter the spatiotemporal and empirical foci of drought analyses thereby retracing Ladismith’s socioecological history since colonial times. In turn, such extended framework exposes the agency of soil, vegetation, hydrology and microclimate and their metabolic exchanges with processes of colonisation, apartheid, capitalist and neoliberal transformations of South African economy. We argue that the narrow pursuit of profits and capital accumulation of the few has produced a fundamental disruption between nature and society which contributed to transform Ladismith’s drought into a socioecological crisis. Whilst advancing debates on materiality, we note two fundamental contributions to the study of drought. First, our approach makes hydrological accounts of droughts less politically naive and socially blind. Second, it develops a political ecology of droughts and socioecological crises more attuned to the materiality of drought. We contend that apprehending the materiality of drought and the active role of its non-human processes can further understandings of the workings of power and the production of socioecological injustices.

Droughts constitute some of the most urgent challenges that society must address. Due to anthropogenic pressure and human-induced climate change, future projections expect droughts to escalate and most heavily affect those who are socially, economically, and politically disadvantaged. However, the world still seems unprepared to face future droughts, much less address their unjust implications. As of today, it is difficult to foresee when and for how long droughts are likely to occur, not to mention what their impacts will be. One of the reasons for this impasse is that scientists have not yet fully grasped the socioenvironmental complexity of droughts. On the one hand, natural sciences tend to homogenize society into a unified whole and consider social processes as apolitical. On the other hand, critical social sciences have not yet appreciated the heterogeneity and multitude of the biophysical processes co-producing drought. In response to these research gaps, this chapter engages with both natural as well as social sciences as a way to account for the environmental and societal complexities of drought. Ultimately such an interdisciplinary approach claims to offer a more effective way to address future droughts, one that deals with the root causes of droughts rather than their symptoms.

As the adverse impacts of hydrological extremes increase in many regions of the world, a better understanding of the drivers of changes in risk and impacts is essential for effective flood and drought risk management and climate adaptation. However, there is currently a lack of comprehensive, empirical data about the processes, interactions, and feedbacks in complex human-water systems leading to flood and drought impacts. Here we present a benchmark dataset containing socio-hydrological data of paired events, i.e. two floods or two droughts that occurred in the same area. The 45 paired events occurred in 42 different study areas and cover a wide range of socio-economic and hydro-climatic conditions. The dataset is unique in covering both floods and droughts, in the number of cases assessed and in the quantity of socio-hydrological data. The benchmark dataset comprises (1) detailed review-style reports about the events and key processes between the two events of a pair; (2) the key data table containing variables that assess the indicators which characterize management shortcomings, hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and impacts of all events; and (3) a table of the indicators of change that indicate the differences between the first and second event of a pair. The advantages of the dataset are that it enables comparative analyses across all the paired events based on the indicators of change and allows for detailed context- and location-specific assessments based on the extensive data and reports of the individual study areas. The dataset can be used by the scientific community for exploratory data analyses, e.g. focused on causal links between risk management; changes in hazard, exposure and vulnerability; and flood or drought impacts. The data can also be used for the development, calibration, and validation of socio-hydrological models. The dataset is available to the public through the GFZ Data Services (Kreibich et al., 2023,https://doi.org/10.5880/GFZ.4.4.2023.001).

What role can a speculative political ecology play in (re)imaging urban futures of climate extremes? In recent years, narratives of dystopian futures of climate extremes have proliferated in geosciences, and across the media and creative arts. These anxiety-fueled narratives often generate a sense of resignation and unavoidability, which contributes to foreclosing the possibility of radically different political projects. In this article, we argue that these narratives conceal the coproduction of nature and society and treat nature as the problem, thereby locking futures into dystopic configurations. Political ecology scholarship can contribute to generate a politics of possibility by reconceptualizing the relations that constitute urban futures under climate extremes as socionatural. This, we argue, calls for a more experimental political ecology and new forms of theorizing. To this aim, we develop a speculative political ecological approach grounded on a numerical model that examines the potential of transformative change in the aftermath of extreme flood events in a capitalist city. Analytically, this opens a unique possibility of exploring urban futures beyond current trajectories, and how these alternative futures might transform vulnerability and inequality across urban spaces. From a policy perspective, we lay the foundations for a new generation of models that apprehend the role of power and agency in shaping uneven urban futures of climate extremes.

Climate change-related drought risks are intensifying in many urban areas, making stakes particularly high in contexts of severe vulnerability. Yet, how social power, differential agency and economic visions will shape societal responses to droughts remains poorly understood. Here, we build a social-environmental scenario of the possible impacts of an unprecedented drought in Maputo, which epitomizes a Southern African city with highly uneven development and differential vulnerability across urban areas. To build the scenario, we draw on theoretical insights from critical social sciences and take Cape Town (2015–2017) as a case-in-point of a locally unprecedented drought in Southern Africa. We show that future droughts in Southern Africa will probably polarize urban inequalities, generate localized public health crises and regress progress in water access. Climate policies must address these inequalities and develop equitable water distribution and conservation measures to ensure sustainable and inclusive adaptation to future droughts.

Over the past two decades, more than 80 metropolitan cities across the world have faced severe water shortages due to droughts and unsustainable water use. Future projections are even more alarming, since urban water crises are expected to escalate and most heavily affect those who are socially, economically and politically disadvantaged. Here we show how social inequalities across different groups or individuals play a major role in the production and manifestation of such crises. Specifically, due to stark socioeconomic inequalities, urban elites are able to overconsume water while excluding less-privileged populations from basic access. Through an interdisciplinary approach, we model the uneven domestic water use across urban spaces and estimate water consumption trends for different social groups. The highly unequal metropolitan area of Cape Town serves as a case in point to illustrate how unsustainable water use by the elite can exacerbate urban water crises at least as much as climate change or population growth.

Political ecology has already engaged with emotions in order to reveal the intimate, unconscious and unexplored power dynamics which characterise patterns of water use and control. Similar explorations have mostly focused on the emotional struggles of structurally disadvantaged people rather than on the emotions of those with privilege: the elite. This oversight becomes problematic when it conceals disproportionate shares of power and the implications that such power has on the sustainable use and just distribution of water resources. The 2018 water crisis which affected Cape Town’s metropolitan area constitutes the empirical context of this paper, which sets out to address the aforementioned research gap. Focusing on the elite’s emotional responses to Cape Town’s drought and subsequent water crisis, this paper seeks to advance political ecology’s understanding of urban water crises by retracing the emotional geography of Cape Town’s most privileged urban dwellers. In particular, this work leverages the concept of subjectivity to explain the way emotions are constructed and come to materially and discursively reproduce historical power dynamics. These findings reveal that fear, anger, and a sense of pride felt by wealthier Capetonians results from and perpetuates the privileged conditions of those elite. Rooted in colonial and apartheid past, Capetonians’ privileged emotions end up perpetuating the main causes of the water crisis and eventually excluding the most disadvantaged inhabitants from future use and control of water resources. Ultimately, by connecting with privileged emotions, it is possible to challenge certain subjectivities and create space for more just and sustainable urban-water imaginaries.

Human activities have increasingly intensified the severity, frequency, and negative impacts of droughts in several regions across the world. This trend has led to broader scientific conceptualizations of drought risk that account for human actions and their interplays with natural systems. This review focuses on physical and engineering sciences to examine the way and extent to which these disciplines account for social processes in relation to the production and distribution of drought risk. We conclude that this research has significantly progressed in terms of recognizing the role of humans in reshaping drought risk and its socioenvironmental impacts. We note an increasing engagement with and contribution to understanding vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation patterns. Moreover, by advancing (socio)hydrological models, developing numerical indexes, and enhancing data processing, physical and engineering scientists have determined the extent of human influences in the propagation of drought hazard. However, these studies do not fully capture the complexities of anthropogenic transformations. Very often, they portray society as homogeneous, and decision‐making processes as apolitical, thereby concealing the power relations underlying the production of drought and the uneven distribution of its impacts. The resistance in engaging explicitly with politics and social power—despite their major role in producing anthropogenic drought—can be attributed to the strong influence of positivist epistemologies in engineering and physical sciences. We suggest that an active engagement with critical social sciences can further theorizations of drought risk by shedding light on the structural and historical systems of power that engender every socioenvironmental transformation.

Droughts and water shortages constitute some of the most urgent challenges that society must address. Due to anthropogenic pressure and human-induced climate change, future projections expect droughts to escalate and most heavily affect those who are socially, economically and politically disadvantaged. However, the world seems still unprepared to face future droughts, much less to address their implications. As of today, it is still difficult to foresee when droughts are likely to strike, for how long, and in particular, what their impacts will be. One of the reasons for this impasse is that scientists have not yet fully grasped the socioenvironmental complexity of droughts. To account for such complexity, this thesis combines sociohydrological and critical social sciences. This interdisciplinary effort contributes to better understand why droughts occur and manifest themselves the way they do. Specifically, the thesis aims to apprehend the production and distribution of drought risk over time and across space by (a) unravelling the socioenvironmental processes that over time reshape drought hazard along with (b) revealing the way certain socioenvironmental processes redistribute drought vulnerabilities across space. This thesis shows how different temporal and spatial scales expose distinctive socioenvironmental processes which are entangled with the production of drought hazard and vulnerabilities. The city of Cape Town and Ladismith’s agricultural area in South Africa provide the empirical basis for such analyses as they both witnessed extreme droughts which unfolded as water crises experienced unevenly by their respective populations. The thesis finds that rather than society as whole, power dynamics and social inequalities are much more adept at explaining the way humans unsustainably and unevenly reshape water systems, thereby transforming droughts into water crises. All too often, water consumption by privileged social groups exerts unsustainable pressure on the local hydrology, thereby constituting a serious threat for the long-term sustainability of urban or rural water systems. Power imbalances are amongst the driving mechanisms that determine what human-water dynamics will be sustained over time. As a result, to better understand the production and distribution of drought risk it is necessary to focus on the political economic processes that produce such injustices. Whilst doing so, drought scholars should always account for the agency of non-human processes and their entanglements with power dynamics. Ultimately, if as humans we cannot tame the agency of biophysical processes, we have, at minimum, the responsibility to address the political-economic systems and power dynamics that produce unjust and unsustainable socioenvironmental transformations.