This is Week five, Lesson one, Session B. And today, we're going to talk about how to form multi-scale grammars for water. In this session, we're going to learn how to form a water grammar. More concretely, I am going to try to translate the complexity of water into an effective non-reductionist analytical system for the analysis of the water metabolism. Let's recap a little bit. So, we have seen how integrated water resource management needs a systemic approach. We have seen that water is different from energy, that we need to involve the social and the ecosystem scale. That water is a flow and a fund in each of them. And that because of the changes, because of the number of dimensions that water has, the definition of water is going to change with the level of analysis. Let's go back to this scheme of the water metabolism. We were talking about how the societal and the ecosystem metabolism are related, and they actually constrained each other. Now, let's think about the social scale. We have a society. That society can be opened into, for example, households and paid work and within the paid work, we will have a number of economic sectors. The society might be part of a country, which is certainly involved in the international trade dynamics. This scale is the social scale. It's called the problemshed that we talked about in the lesson before. In this problemshed perspective, the water is used by societal funds. And we use societal funds to describe the levels of analyses. This is the scale that is the most commonly used for energy analysis in MuSIASEM. However, as we saw, the water analysis also need to include the watershed perspective, then natural, the ecosystem perspective. Think about our focal level, that will be the e/s or the social ecosystem, where we have not only the regional society, but we also have water funds. We have lakes or rivers. Those lakes and rivers belong with an ecosystem which is affected by the dynamics of the water cycle. Taking into account this other scale. These scale is what we would call the watershed scale. In here, the classification of water funds describe the level of analysis. So water is the system in this case. What we do in the underground for water analysis, is to choose the upper levels of the natural scale and the lower levels of the social scale. And then we will just move them and put them in the same line. These are the hierarchical levels which are represented in a MuSIASEM water grammar. What is the difference between a water grammar and other type of hydrological modeling? So hydrological models tend to be linear. You have the idea of a water extraction coming from water bodies. You have a certain water appropriation by the society which has been mostly studied by the water footprint. Then you have some spills on water bodies. In MuSIASEM however, we use a systemic analysis that combines the perspective of the water bodies and opens the black box of the society. Our arrows are not showing the flow of water coming from the ecosystem to the society and back to the ecosystem, we are actually showing the composition of the systems. The water bodies are a part of the ecosystem in the same way that a societal function, maybe agriculture, will be a part of the society. In each of these levels of analyses, we're going to be interested in measuring something different. For example, the society is interested in knowing how much water they are extracting from the ecosystem. That box, that social ecosystem focal level that I call in the picture, is what we call the interface. In the interface, we are going to check extraction and appropriation versus availability of water. However, when we're talking about social functions, what we are interested in talking about is how much water those functions are using. I'm not interested in knowing where the water was coming from. If I need water to irrigate tomatoes, the tomatoes don't care if the water is coming from the aquifer or from a river a far as the quality allows a good nutrition of the tomatoes. However, for the ecosystem is the other way around. A river doesn't care if the extracted water goes to irrigate tomatoes or to produce paper. What the river cares about is how much water you're taking from the river. If we expand that systemic approach, we see that in each of the levels we have important components. Imagine at the level of the society that we want to analyze how much water we are able to deliver to our users. A very important parameter here would be: How much water do I need to be delivered centrally by water utility services or by other types of water collection? Similarly, for the water bodies as I said before, I am going to be interested in knowing where is the water coming from? Maybe a river, surface water, maybe from an aquifer ground water, or is maybe soil moisture. Now, all these three compartments, all these three types of water bodies are filled by processes that happen within the ecosystem level: The rain, the runoff, the inflow, they all come to refill somehow or to supply water to the aquifers and the rivers and the soil. At the same time, the inflow and the rain are, let's say, formed by the dynamics of the water cycle. They are influenced by the dynamics of the water cycle. If we look at the right side of the table, we are going to see that each of the two types of water extraction that we're doing can go to the river to a number of users. I can see the agriculture, or the energy sector, other like manufacture sector, or even the consumers, the households, using different types of extracted water. Usually, agriculture tends to be rather decentralized. For example, in countries like Spain in some regions, while in other regions you have a heavy central system that supplies the water to agriculture. The water use within the economic sectors comes to fill societal needs. That is the consumption perspective. We could also see how much central water from an aquifer we need to fill our personal care needs. In each of these scale we're going to look, therefore, to different indicators of water. We are going to check the end water use for the consumption, the direct use for the production, the appropriation, and the extraction at the interface level, the focal level, between the society and the ecosystems. We are going to look at the recharge of the water bodies and the supply that the water cycle does to the ecosystems. In the previews, in two or three slides before I show you that for water we need two different scales. And the societal scale had also upper levels that include, for example, the international market. Those levels are also include in the MuSIASEM water grammars in a different arrow. In this line we see all the same compartments and different societal system. International trade will of course connect systems between the analysis. This is how a real grammar looks like with the numbers. And in this case, for example, we were not interested in the water inflow at the ecosystem level at e+1, we were just interested in knowing how much water the precipitation gave to aquifers and surface and the soil moisture. Actually, as we will see later, the Mauritius system is very much focused on the production of sugar cane for exports. That is also reflected in the line of the external social system. Concluding, a water grammar involves two analytical scales: The social and the ecosystem or the natural. The social scale, the human scale, is where we observe the problemshed. We will look at how much water the society needs to maintain their activities and we will perform the viability analysis. In the natural or the ecosystem scale is going to give us the watershed perspective. And is the one connecting the water bodies, the water funds: Rivers and aquifers, with the dynamics that guide the water through ecosystems and the main water cycle. Those scales, the human and the natural, put a constrain to each other. The amount of water that remains in the ecosystem is heavily influenced by the amount of water the societies are taking. And the other way around, the amount of water that the societies take and the type of water that the societies take it's also going to be constrained by the ecosystems. At each of these different levels of analyses, we are going to understand better the water metabolism if we use indicators that are suitable for that level. As we commented before, aquifers don't care what the water is used for, they care how much water is extracted from them. And in the same way, paper industries don't really need to know where the water is coming from.They only need to know how much water they're using.
