WCS 3-Sentence Science

Social Relations and River Flows

November 22, 2019

CREDIT: JULIE LARSEN MAHER/WCS

Each year, Wildlife Conservation Society scientists publish more than 300 peer-reviewed studies and papers. “WCS 3-Sentence Science” is a regular tip-sheet — in bite sized helpings — of some of this published work.

Here we present work by WCS’s Mariana Montoya on environmental flow science.

1. The newly revised Brisbane Declaration and Global Action Agenda on Environmental Flows (2018) represents a new phase in environmental flow science and an opportunity to better consider the co-constitution of river flows, ecosystems, and society, and to more explicitly incorporate these relationships into river management.
2. Researchers synthesized understanding of relationships between people and rivers as conceived under the renewed definition of environmental flows, and present case studies from Honduras, India, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
3. The researchers call for scientists and water managers to recognize the diversity of ways of knowing, relating to, and utilizing rivers, and to place this recognition at the center of future environmental flow assessments.

Study and Journal: “Understanding rivers and their social relations: A critical step to advance environmental water management” from Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews-Water
WCS Co-Author(s): Mariana Montoya, Country Director, WCS Peru

For more information, contact: Stephen Sautner, 718–220–3682, ssautner@wcs.org.