Sudden 'ecosystem flips' imperil world's poorest regions, say water experts

Science Daily: Modern agriculture and land-use practices may lead to major disruptions of the world's water flows, with potentially sudden and dire consequences for regions least able to cope with them researchers at the Stockholm University-affiliated Stockholm Resilience Centre and McGill University have warned. In a paper published April 1 in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Dr. Line J. Gordon of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Stockholm Environment Institute and Dr. Garry Peterson and Dr. Elena Bennett of McGill University argue that global water management has been focused too much on the "blue water" side of the hydrological cycle, neglecting the largely invisible changes humanity has had on so-called "green water."

"Blue water is the part of the cycle we can see, like streams and rivers," said Gordon, an assistant professor at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Stockholm Environment Institute. "This is as opposed to 'green water' in soil moisture, or evapotranspiration from plants, which agriculture can affect in significant ways." "Resilience" describes the capacity of social-ecological systems to withstand climactic or economic shocks, and to then rebuild and renew themselves. In their paper, the researchers look at the likelihood of that vital resilience being lost in the aftermath of catastrophic changes to the hydrological cycle that could be caused by agriculture and land-use practices….