Human activities significantly impact the terrestrial hydrological cycle – with effects that show to be much larger than the change in climate in parts of the world. Increasing demands for food and water, associated with socioeconomic and population growth, are expected to further increase the human impact on world’s fresh water resources and are foreseen to further amplify hydrological extremes. At the same time, global policy goals (like the sustainable development goals) force decision makers to consider integrated solutions that deal with possible trade-offs between hydrology and society. Coping with such challenges requires a profound understanding of the hydrological cycle and of the often complex and dynamic human-water interactions.

Over the past decades, significant progress is made in the hydrological community to incorporate human activities (like reservoir operations, water demand modelling, ground water use, agricultural land management practices), as well as their impacts, in hydrological models. At local and catchment scales we have observed the implementation of human-water models to analyse the impact of groundwater abstraction and local reservoir management on groundwater levels and water availability. At global scales, modellers have tried to mimic the interaction between food-water and energy, by simulating for example irrigation demands and reservoir operations.

As a community, we only just started to analyse the impacts that these man-made changes on the hydrological regime have on, for example, our dependency on reservoirs in times of hydrological extremes. Further model improvements are needed in integrating the full suite of feedback linkages that exist between hydrology and society and vice versa. This requires the incorporation of a more realistic representation of behavioural dynamics as they determine societal responses to hydrology and thereby steer pathways of socioeconomic development and future water demands. Quantitative, spatially explicit models that are capable of integrating these behavioural aspects in the hydro-economic context are required here.

In this session, we address recent advancements related to the implementation of behavioural dynamics in hydrology and how they can contribute to integrative solutions to the Food Water Energy nexus. We invite methodologically oriented contributions focusing on the human-hydrological systems in times of extremes (floods and droughts), discussing the pros and cons of merging such frameworks; policy-oriented contributions that discuss the added value of human dynamics in hydrological models for decision making, for example regarding the management of fresh water resources. We also encourage contributions that illustrate practical examples in case studies, from local to global scales.