Wed. May 25, 2016 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM 301B (3F)

Convener:*Taikan Oki(Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo), Naota Hanasaki(National Institute for Environmental Studies), Murugesu Sivapalan(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Giuliano Di Baldassarre(Uppsala University), Chair:Naota Hanasaki(National Institute for Environmental Studies)

In the era of the Anthropocene, with concern about long-term climate changes, the time horizon over which strategic or planning decisions are made is also becoming longer. Under these circumstances, the interactions between the slowly varying boundary conditions of the Earth System, such as climate, vegetation, soil, and topography, with the fast varying hydrological processes, such as infiltration, evapotranspiration, and runoff, should be explicitly considered. In this context, the notion of co-evolution of interacting Earth System processes has recently sparked extensive research activities in the form of both detailed observations and modeling. In view of the expansion of the human footprint on Earth and its impact on the hydrological cycles, the co-evolution of hydrologic systems must extend beyond interactions among just the "natural" Earth System processes, and now must explicitly include the role of humans and human-social processes, and the complex dynamics resulting from their two-way feedbacks. Human induced changes, e.g., land use and land cover changes, and human interferences in the water cycle, technology and lifestyle changes, virtual water trade, changing human values and preferences, etc., must now be seen as endogenous to hydrologic systems. The interactions of coupled human-water processes across multiple time and space scales can give rise to the emergence of complex dynamics, including critical transitions, and will pose major challenges for sustainable water management. This session calls for a wide range of presentations on human-water dynamics: their interactions, coupling and co-evolution, on local, regional, national, continental, and global spatial scales, and on daily, annual, decadal, and centennial time scales, from observational, analytical, modeling, and management perspectives. The session will be truly inter-disciplinary and submissions from both Human Geoscience and Atmospheric and Hydrospheric Sciences are expected.