Solving water management paradoxes requires a systems meta-model

Sustainable development is becoming increasingly urgent in the post-COVID recovery and climate crisis era. Despite this need, the water management scientific community is still deciding how to comprehensively represent and assess the role of humans within the hydrological cycle. An explanation may be found in numerous examples where water managers are often challenged when their decisions, policies, and interventions lead to a range of unintended consequences that cause increased pressures on the environment, which have been described by socio-hydrological paradoxes. If the paradoxes are seen as the main obstacles hindering sustainable development in the context of water management, then investigating their mechanisms and understanding logic may help us to reveal unintended system responses and define guiding principles critical for designing robust and sustainable water management plans. We analyse the socio-hydrological paradoxes from a systems perspective and assume that water management decisions and plans developed adopting a linear thinking and goals-focused approach are likely to neglect consequential effects which occur throughout the wider system. This definition enables us to rename the phenomena into water management paradoxes, which might be fundamentally related to systems’ complexity and unexpected behaviour arising from internal feedbacks along with external driving forces that generate nonlinear outcomes which are inconsistent with the expected results or responses from inputs and actions within the system.

To find solutions for the water management paradoxes, we hypothesise that they can be described in the context of three feedback mechanisms, which define the purpose of systems water management (SYWM) as coordination of development and water infrastructure with environmental management to improve the quality of life. We argue that the lack of consideration, integration and coordination of the SYWM meta-model loops will result in one of the water management paradoxes. As a solution, we propose three paradox archetypes that form the basis for guiding principles for systems water management. We suggest that environmental capacity indicators should be used in whole-system performance evaluation. The meta-model emphasises the need to better understand the baseline and development scenarios in the context of water neutrality, which is crucial for informing development decisions, including trade-offs in resource and infrastructure planning and operation. We encourage the use of a SYWM meta-model and proposed principles as a guide for analysing, modelling, and assessing human-water systems, thus creating an evidence base of case studies to demonstrate the meta-model’s applicability to solving water management paradoxes. In doing so, we hope to move towards the design of water systems that will support post-COVID recovery and enable long-term sustainable development.