Guido Rianna

Primary Convener:
Guido Rianna, Fondazione Centro Euromediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici (CMCC)

As water systems face intensifying pressures from climate change, land use, and socio-economic demands, governance approaches must evolve to integrate complexity, cross-scale dynamics, and planetary limits. This panel explores how frameworks like the Planetary Boundaries and Nexus approaches [e.g., Water-Energy-Food-(Ecosystems) and/or explicitly including Health dimensions of the natural and human communities] can move beyond traditional models like IWRM and support actionable, multiscale water governance. Rather than proposing new paradigms, these frameworks offer operational perspectives to manage the interplay between local water demands and Earth system stability. Central to the discussion is how local safe operating spaces and fair share allocations can serve as interfaces between basin-level governance and global sustainability goals. The panel will address several interrelated themes: the capacity of nexus frameworks to support integrated and cross-sectoral governance; the relevance and limitations of the watershed as the primary scale of intervention; the challenge of synchronizing short-term operational management with long-term planning horizons including in the analysis also 'intermediate' seasonal and decadal scales; and the institutional and methodological conditions necessary to translate conceptual frameworks into practice. The ultimate goal is to foster a shared understanding of how to operationalize adaptive, scale-sensitive water governance consistent with the global biophysical limits.

Index Terms
1878 Water|energy interactions
1880 Water management
6309 Decision making under uncertainty
6620 Science policy

Cross-Listed:
NH - Natural Hazards
SY - Science and Society
H - Hydrology
GC - Global Environmental Change