Society and Water
BRS is currently investigating how social theory can be used to help frame and guide the use of widely available national data sets to help unravel the complex relationships between agricultural communities and the resources they depend on to maintain their livelihoods. While community dependence and resilience are highly complicated multidimensional issues, the measures developed should provide a useful starting point to help advance our understanding.
An aspect of the work is to provide insight into those communities most likely to be impacted by changes to water access and use and those least able to adapt to and manage change. We hope this information will provide a range of opportunities for more targeted investigations that will help inform future policy and programme design and allow 'ground truthing' of the measures developed.
As yet, we have little understanding about the difference between general resilience at the community level - which might denote a capacity to manage most types of change - and resilience in a specific context, for example, resilience to reduced access to water. A related area that requires further investigation is the development of measures that indicate a capacity to manage change in the short term (e.g. health) versus measures that indicate community capacity to adapt in the long term (e.g. skills and qualifications that might signal human capital useful for adaptation).
A report describing the work outlined above, and maps depicting regional analyses of social resilience, community dependence on water and the susceptibility of communities to changes in access to water, will be made available on this page once our investigations are complete.