In line with COP21 agreements, state-led climate change mitigation and adaptation actions are being undertaken to transition to carbon-neutral, green economies. However, the capacity of many countries for action is limited and may result in a ‘boomerang effect’, defined as the unintended negative consequences of such policies and programmes on local communities and their negative feedbacks on the state. To avoid this effect, there is a need to understand the policy drivers, decision-making processes, and impacts of such action, in order to determine the ways and means of minimizing negative effects and maximizing mutually beneficial policy outcomes. This book directly engages the policy debates surrounding water resources and climate actions through both theoretical and comparative case studies. It develops the ‘boomerang effect’ concept and sets it in relation to other conceptual tools for understanding the mixed outcomes of state-led climate change action, for example ‘backdraft’ effect and ‘maldevelopment’. It also presents case studies illustrative of the consequences of ill-considered state-led policy in the water sector from around the world. These include Africa, China, South Asia, South America, the Middle East, Turkey and Vietnam, and examples of groundwater, hydropower development and forest hydrology, where there are often transboundary consequences of a state's policies and actions. In this way, the book adds empirical and theoretical insights to a still developing debate regarding the appropriate ways and means of combating climate change without undermining state and social development.

Since the hydrological cycle is so intricately linked to the climate system, any change in climate impacts the water cycle in terms of change in precipitation patterns, melting of snow and ice, increased evaporation, increased atmospheric water vapor and changes in soil moisture and run off. Consequently, climate change could result in floods in some areas and droughts in others resulting in varying availability and the quality of water affects the quality of life, food security and also health security. This book examines the impact of climate change on water as well as health.

This book provides insights and a capacity to understand the climate change phenomenon, its impact on water resources, and possible remedial measures. The impact of climate change on water resources is a global issue and cause for concern. Water resources in many countries are extremely stressed, and climate change along with burgeoning populations, the rise in living standards, and increasing demand on resources are factors which serve to exacerbate this stress. The chapters provide information on tools that will be useful to mitigate the adverse consequences of natural disasters. Fundamental to addressing these issues is hydrological modelling which is discussed in this book and ways to combat climate change as an important aspect of water resource management.

National and global security can be assessed in many ways but one underlying factor for all humanity is access to reliable sources of water for drinking, sanitation, food production and manufacturing industry. In many parts of the world, population growth and an escalating demand for water already threaten the sustainable management of available water supplies. Global warming, climate change and rising sea level are expected to intensify the resource sustainability issue in many water-stressed regions of the world by reducing the annual supply of renewable fresh water and promoting the intrusion of saline water into aquifers along sea coasts, where 50% of the global population reside. Pro-active resource management decisions are required, but such efforts would be futile unless reliable predictions can be made about the impact of the changing global conditions on the water cycle and the quality and availability of critical water reserves. Addressing this wide spectrum of issues, a team of expert authors discusses here the impacts of climate change on the global water resources, the long-term resource management goals at global and local scales, the data requirements and the scientific and technical advances necessary to mitigate the associated impacts.

This comprehensive Handbook tackles the increasingly urgent problem of the impact of climate change on conflict and human security. It analyses the ways in which scarcity of resources leads to food, water and health insecurities, resulting in population migration. Featuring contributions from leading international scholars, chapters cover how these contribute globally to societal insecurity and violent conflict in a growing number of regions.

- Water resources management should be assessed under climate change conditions, as historic data cannot replicate future climatic conditions. - Climate change impacts on water resources are bound to affect all water uses, i.e., irrigated agriculture, domestic and industrial water supply, hydropower generation, and environmental flow (of streams and rivers) and water level (of lakes). - Bottom-up approaches, i.e., the forcing of hydrologic simulation models with climate change models’ outputs, are the most common engineering practices and considered as climate-resilient water management approaches. - Hydrologic simulations forced by climate change scenarios derived from regional climate models (RCMs) can provide accurate assessments of the future water regime at basin scales. - Irrigated agriculture requires special attention as it is the principal water consumer and alterations of both precipitation and temperature patterns will directly affect agriculture yields and incomes. - Integrated water resources management (IWRM) requires multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, with climate change to be an emerging cornerstone in the IWRM concept.

This timely Handbook on Digital Business Ecosystems provides a comprehensive overview of current research and industrial applications as well as suggestions for future developments. Multi-disciplinary in scope, the Handbook includes rigorously researched contributions from over 80 global expert authors from a variety of areas including administration and management, economics, computer science, industrial engineering, and media and communication.

This book illustrates the diversity of current geographies, ontologies, engagements, and epistemologies of peace and conflict. It emphasizes how agencies of peace and conflict occur in geographic settings, and how those settings shape processes of peace and conflict. The essence of the book’s logic is that war and peace are manifestations of the intertwined construction of geographies and politics. Indeed, peace is never completely distinct from war. Each chapter in the book will demonstrate understandings of how the myriad spaces of war and peace are forged by multiple agencies, some possibly contradictory. The goals of these agents vary as peace and war are relational, place-specific processes. The reader will understand the mutual construction of spaces and processes of peace and conflict through engagement with the concepts of agency, the mutual construction of politics and space, geographic scales, multiple geographies, the twin dynamics of empathy/othering and inclusivity/partitioning, and resistance/militarism. The book discusses the intertwined nature of peace and conflict, including reference to the environment, global climate change, borders, technology, and postcolonialism. This book is valuable for instructors teaching a variety of senior level human geography courses, including graduate-level classes. It will appeal to those working in political geography, historical geography, sociology of geographic knowledge, feminist geography, cultural and economic geography, political science, and international relations.

"The Oxford Handbook of Peacebuilding, Statebuilding, and Peace Formation offers an authoritative and comprehensive overview of peacebuilding, statebuilding, and peace formation. With contributions from over thirty distinguished and leading scholars, the Handbook provides a timely, engaging, and critical overview of conceptual foundations, political implications, and tensions at the global, regional, and local levels. It examines the key policies, practices, examples, and discourses underlining various segments of peacebuilding, statebuilding, and peace formation both as discursive formulations and as policy practices. Organized around four major thematic sections, the Handbook offers a state-of-the-art synthesis of the most pressing contemporary peace and conflict issues and charts new pathways for responding to transnational insecurities"--

Drought Challenges: Livelihood Implications in Developing Countries, Volume Two, provides an understanding of the occurrence and impacts of droughts for developing countries and vulnerable sub-groups, such as women and pastoralists. It presents tools for assessing vulnerabilities, introduces individual policies to combat the effects of droughts, and highlights the importance of integrated multi-sectoral approaches and drought networks at various levels. Currently, there are few books on the market that address the growing need for knowledge on these cross-cutting issues. As drought can occur anywhere, the systemic connections between droughts and livelihoods are a key factor in development in many dryland and agriculturally-dependent nations. - Connects the biophysical, social, economic, policy and institutional aspects of droughts across multiple regions in developing world - Analyzes policy linkages between government agencies, public institutions, NGOs, the private sector and communities - Includes a discussion of gender dimensions of drought and its impacts - Presents a multi-sectoral perspective, including the human dimensions of drought in developing countries