Urban Water Ecosystems in Africa and Asia: Challenges and Opportunities for Conservation and Restoration (Earthscan Studies in Water Resource Management)

This book examines urban water ecosystem management and restoration through selected case studies in Asia and Africa. Employing a socioecological approach, this volume presents insights on the interlinkages between water, humans, and environmental conservation in an urban context.

Topics include human health risks, population displacement and migration, water pollution, water scarcity, flood management, water infrastructure, afforestation, and the effects of climate change. Case studies are drawn from a variety of countries in Africa and Asia, including China, Japan, India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Kenya, Malawi, and Tunisia, which demonstrate a wide range of different challenges, and opportunities. Overall, this book argues that to better manage urban water resources, there needs to be a shift from urban water management to urban water ecosystem management. This shift needs to acknowledge the complex biophysical and socio-political dimensions of water ecosystems.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of water resource management, ecosystem services, urban studies, environmental conservation and sustainable development.

Shamik Chakraborty (PhD) is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Advanced Sustainability Science, University of Toyama, Japan. Prior to this he worked as a Lecturer at the Sustainability Co-creation Programme at Hosei University, Japan. He has also served as a JSPS-UNU postdoctoral fellow at the United Nations University, Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS), and as a visiting research fellow at the Integrated Research System for Sustainability Science (IR3S) (presently, Institute for Future Initiatives) at the University of Tokyo. As a human geographer, he is interested in studying human-environment interactions from a social-ecological systems perspective. He has worked with the concepts of social-ecological systems, local ecological knowledge, and ecosystem services in different ecosystems in Japan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Amit Chatterjee (PhD) has a combined experience of more than one and half decades in teaching, research and industry and is presently an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India. His research interest includes urban sustainability, land and environment. Dr. Amit has completed successfully a number of collaborative research and consultancy projects, including those on Urban Co-benefits (UNU-IAS, Japan), Urban Missions in India-targets, performance and linkages to UN-SDGs (GIZ), Politics of Care in Pandemic Time (UCL’s Global Engagement Funds), Urban Biodiversity (UNU-IAS, Japan), Shelter for All under Design Innovation Centre (Govt. of India).

Pankaj Kumar (PhD) is working as a senior policy researcher in the field of water resources and climate change adaptation at the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES), Japan. Prior to this, he worked as JSPS/ UNU-IAS postdoctoral fellow in United Nations University, Institute for Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS), Tokyo; for more than three years. His research work focused on socio-hydrology, water security, hydrological simulation and scenario modelling, and water-health-food-energy nexus, a transdisciplinary work aimed to give policy relevant solutions to enhance community resilience to global change and a sustainable development of water environment and human well-being. In addition, he is actively engaged in capacity development on various numerical tools used for water resource management, intended for local government officials and relevant stakeholders in different Asian countries. He has work experience with different global assessments like IPCC, IPBES and GEO as Chapter scientist and lead authors respectively. He has several peer reviewed articles (>170) in high impact factor journals, one authored book, one edited book to his credit.