Event date:
Sep 22 2021 4:00 pm

Improving Water and Salinity Management using Social-Ecological Systems Research

Speaker(s)
Dr. Michael Mitchell
Venue
Zoom/Online
Abstract
Pakistan is amongst the most water-stressed countries in the world. For many of those making a living across Pakistan’s rural areas, these stresses are exacerbated by a complex interplay between waterlogging, increased salinity and groundwater over extraction. The extent of these scourges and their impacts vary considerably across space and time. Most attempts to redress the impacts on rural communities have experienced a low success rate, and have largely been unsustainable. The tendency to rely on technical solutions has been at the expense of learning how our social systems function on the ground, how our landscapes function as ecological systems, and how these two types of systems constantly co-evolve in response to the many and varied drivers of change in particular places. This lecture draws on experiences using social-ecological systems research in Australia and elsewhere to frame new approaches to improving water and salinity management in Pakistan. It will emphasize why such an approach to interventionist research needs to build from principles of transdisciplinary and co-inquiry, meaning that research users and beneficiaries become co-designers of the research purpose, delivery and outcomes. The newly established Australian government funded project “Adapting to Salinity in the Southern Indus Basin” will be used to expand on the prospects for these new approaches to research, and how we plan to put them into practice.

The Centre for Water Informatics & Technology at LUMS is pleased to announce the next talk of the "Best of Water Systems Research" seminar series. The talk will be delivered by Dr.  Michael Mitchell of Charles Sturt University, Australia. The talk is titled "Improving water and salinity management using social-ecological systems research". The session will take place at 4:00-5:00 pm PKT on Wednesday, September 22, 2021. For colleagues who have not yet registered for the seminar series, the registration link along with other details can be found at: https://wit.lums.edu.pk/BWSR2021.  

About the speaker: Michael Mitchell is a Research Fellow with Charles Sturt University’s Institute for Land, Water and Society (ILWS), and has a growing body of social research experience related to natural resources management. He is currently leading an Australian government funded project in collaboration with partner agencies in Pakistan to explore strategies for building adaptive capacity with people managing and living in salinity affected landscapes of the southern Indus Basin. From 2016 to 2020, Michael was employed on another Australian government funded project exploring how to improve farming family livelihoods in Pakistan by tackling groundwater over-extraction. He is currently teaching a subject on resilience thinking and sustainable development. His 2008 doctoral dissertation involved collaboration with Murrumbidgee Irrigation in NSW, focusing on the company’s efforts to improve its use of ‘triple bottom line’ reporting – i.e., reporting on its economic, social, and environmental performance.
 
About the seminar series: The “Best of Water Systems Research” is a webinar series initiated by The Center for Water Informatics & Technology at LUMS. While our companion webcast series “Aab Beeti” is geared towards generating public awareness and meeting leading practitioners and opinion makers in Pakistan’s water sector, this new series (BWSR) is primarily meant for discussing serious scholarship on water resources. The series celebrates distinguished works in water systems research and is aimed towards researchers, practitioners, and technical experts in water-related areas. The list of speakers majorly consists of individuals who regularly deploy quantitative data-driven methods & systems thinking and have earned recognition via peer-reviewed research in top journals. Also, many of the speakers may or may not have a direct interest in the Indus or South Asia’s other basins.

The talks are (mostly) delivered bi-weekly on Wednesday evenings. A tentative schedule for the webinars can be found at https://wit.lums.edu.pk/BWSR2021 which also includes recordings of past sessions and information on future speakers. A link for attending will be sent via email to the registered individuals. Colleagues who register once can attend all future talks without the need to register again.