Hydrological politics
I have just completed the first week’s training for a fascinating new research project that is looking into ‘knowledge controversies’ in flood risk modelling. The project is being led by three professors from Oxford, Newcastle and Durham and will be looking at case studies in Yorkshire and Sussex.
The science of hydrology lies at the heart of the politics and practices of flood risk modelling. It is a mature science dedicated to understanding the movement of water around the entire hydrological cycle. We social scientists were given an intensive crash course on the various components of this cycle by Stuart Lane, a passionate hydrologist with the rare skill of being able to communicate complex concepts to an inexpert audience.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that Stuart’s intro gave me a whole new way of looking at the landscape and tuning into its dynamics. Standing beside the River Arun in West Sussex, he brought the river and its catchment to life. He framed the system as an interwoven set of fluid fluxes obeying their own spatial and temporal rhythms. Pulses of rain falling upstream are conveyed down towards the sea, drawn by the force of gravity. On their way down their passage is attenuated – or held up – to varying degrees by the material landscape. Pulses from different tributaries meet and combine into a complex melody of fluid flows.
Back in the seminar room we learnt about the politics of hydrology and the disputes and controversies it both engenders and is called to resolve. In the ancient and intensively worked landscapes that characterise much of the UK, few rain drops pass to the sea without encountering some form of human intervention. People have been managing rivers for millennia – as sources of food and water; for navigation, drainage and irrigation; and, most importantly in the case of this project, to avoid flooding. The river systems in which most of us dwell are now intensively managed to apportion and costs and benefits of riverside living.
In these hybrid landscapes, hydrologists have replaced ancient sages and water diviners as the designated providers of the knowledge required to conduct the passage of water. They have developed sophisticated theoretical and numerical models of hydrological dynamics, which have made them central to the politics and economics of land management – there is both money and power in water if you know what it is going to do.
Generally speaking flooding is a natural process. Many of the areas we currently expect to live dry in would normally spend some time of the year under water if it weren’t for different human interventions. These come at a range of scales – from the drains that convert marsh into habitable land to the concrete levees and barriers that stop rivers from following their normal drift across and out over their flood plains. In different ways these technologies accelerate the conveyance of water through areas at risk and, in so doing, channel problems downstream.
Set against this hard engineering approach there is alternative paradigm of flood management practice growing that seeks to make space for water, designing ‘spongy’ landscapes with space to attenuate excess flows. Unpopulated and marginal areas can be set-aside to receive surges of water, providing storage that accommodates water that would otherwise flood downstream. This is still a marginal approach but it is one that is receiving increasing attention from various circles – including those interested in re-wilding landscapes, as well as those desiring more difficult and inventive engineering challenges.
In short, the politics of managing flooding lies in deciding how the rhythms of water should be conducted through a landscape. In an unregulated system those people with resources upstream could both retain and reject water as they desire, shifting whatever is excess down the valley. Those with money and land downstream can then barricade themselves in with concrete and steel funnels, passing the buck further on to those areas less able defend themselves.
Fortunately, we live in social democracy whose political ecology is less brutal. Instead, there exists a complex political assemblage of different interest groups jostling for their respective interests. Farmers argue for both better drainage and for the security of their most fertile land on the flood plain. Meanwhile, urban dwellers wish to keep their kitchens dry and to ensure their house can be insured. Debates over what to protect thrash out relative risk and the value of different areas and assets.
The problem for hydrologists is that the systems they study, model and try and predict are incredibly complex – they incorporate the intersecting dynamics of vegetation, weather patterns, agriculture and tides, to name but a few. These are processes that are very difficult to tune into and measure. Data is often scant, at the wrong scale or surrogate. If you speak to hydrologists in the lab or field they are full of uncertainty and are modest about what they know and can predict. However, the needs of policy-makers, businesses and pressure groups force them to produce definite knowledge. In their published accounts, much of their uncertainty is erased, buried behind confidence intervals and paramaterisation.
The project that I am part of is seeking to rescue this uncertainty and thus to open up the practices of hydrology, and in particular hydrological modelling to tease out the conditions under which knowledge is produced and decisions are made. It aims to explore different ways of witnessing the forms of environmental expertise that circulate in affected communities. It takes both the creativity and the uncertainty of hydrology to explore a different from of environmental politics.
Thanks for the post