Global Ethnohydrology Study

Description:
Water quality, scarcity and governance concerns are major global problems, impacting our health, economics and environment in many ways. As regions worldwide struggle to reconcile rapidly expanding populations with increasingly overburdened water supplies, the need to understand how people think about and react to water is critical to developing sustainable solutions. In the world’s water-stressed and water-richer areas, understanding local ecological knowledge (that is, what local populations know and perceive about their surrounding resources and ecosystems, including water) can play a role both in the assessment and management of water concerns, whether at the household level or in designing or implementing national and international policy.

The Global Ethnohydrology Study is an interdisciplinary multi-year, multi-site study that examines the range of variation in local ecological knowledge of water issues, also known as “ethnohydrology.” Using the same research protocol in each site, we apply a comparative approach to study perceptions of water issues in the context of such factors as increasing urbanization, water scarcity and climate change. Using the “cultural consensus analysis” technique, we examine questions such as: (1) Is there a shared core of cultural knowledge around water issues in each site? (2) Does cultural consensus around water issues vary across international sites? (3) What kind of people have low or high levels of cultural competence around water issues? and (4) How closely do lay people’s cultural knowledge of water issues match water experts’ understanding of these issues? The comparative approach is important, because it helps us discern both the particularities and generalities about how we all see and respond to water issues, local and global.

This transdiciplinary study was initiated in Phoenix, Arizona (United States), with funding from the United States National Science Foundation’s Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC) and Central-Arizona Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research Project (CAP LTER) programs. With the studies focused in Phoenix as its first phase, the Global Ethnohydrology Study has subsequently focused on examining cross-cultural understandings of water institutions, or the rules and norms used to distribute water, and water scarcity, including in relation to climate change. The research is now also being conducted in a number of sites in four ecologically, culturally and politically distinct world regions: tropical South America, North America, Europe and Oceania.

The project is now in a fourth phase, and in 2010 is focused specifically on questions related to how people think about and assess disease risks and health benefits of water. Sites in Africa, where zoonotic diseases are a major issue related to water quality, are being added. Undergraduate and graduate ASU students are collaborating in tool design and in data collection at many of the international sites.