Expanding Sociohydrology: Embracing Spatial Heterogeneity and Emerging Nexuses

This Research Topic is part of a series of article collections published within Frontiers in Water for the the 2nd International Sociohydrology Conference.

The other themes within this series are:
- Participatory and Just Governance: Empowering Local and Indigenous Communities
- Pluralizing Water Knowledge for Inclusive Water Governance: Meaning-making, Co-creation and Transdisciplinarity

- Comparative Sociohydrology Across Places and Scales: Aiming Towards Synthesis
- Mainstreaming Sociohydrology: Towards Designing and Implementing Management Interventions

Over the past decade, several scholars have explored the socio-hydrological dynamics emerging in flood, drought, agricultural, mountain, and global systems. More recently, socio-hydrology has increasingly engaged with public health and energy production challenges, as well as environmental justice aspects related to e.g. the vulnerability of marginalized communities, or uneven distribution of costs and benefits of water infrastructure. Concurrently, there is a need to complement the work on changes over time, e.g. long term dynamics generated by feedback loops, with more work on spatial heterogeneity, e.g. how sociohydrological crises, risks and, opportunities are distributed across social groups or sectors.

This theme focuses on studies that:
i) explore and navigate tradeoffs and synergies between different water users, e.g. in a nexus context such as the water-energy-food-environment nexus.
ii) engage with challenges around water quantity and quality, particularly where they link with public and environmental health issues (e.g. contamination outbreaks and biodiversity loss).
iii) unravel the heterogeneity of both social vulnerabilities and biophysical processes related with water quality (e.g. riverine pollution) and quantity (e.g. floods and droughts).
iv) investigate differential access to water resources, e.g. water injustice, as well as costs and benefits of interventions and their unintended consequences, e.g. exacerbating social inequalities

Keywords: Heterogeneity, Socio-hydrology, biodiversity loss, water resources, social inequalities

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.