Abstract. The negative impacts of hydrological extremes, i.e. droughts and floods, are dramatically increasing in many regions of the world. In the Anthropocene, humans significantly impact (deliberately or not) the frequency, magnitude and spatial distribution of hydrological extremes. Meanwhile, humans also respond (formally or informally) to droughts and floods, as shown by demographic, policy and institutional changes often associated with the occurrence of extreme events. Hydrological studies have widely investigated human impacts on droughts and floods, while conversely social studies have broadly explored human responses to extreme events. Yet, the complex dynamics of risk resulting from their interplay, i.e. both impacts and responses, have remained poorly understood. As a result, strategies, policies and measures of water management (and disaster risk reduction) often lead to unintended consequences in the long-term or uneven distributions of costs and benefits.
Here I show recent research about the sociohydrology of floods and droughts. Interdisciplinary work has been based on the development and testing of sociohydrological models as competing hypotheses about the way in which humans impact, and respond to, hydrological extremes. System dynamics models have been developed and tested through empirical analyses of specific case studies as well as global investigations across multiple sites, taking advantage of the current proliferation of worldwide datasets. By integrating theoretical and empirical methods, we are starting to address the gap of fundamental knowledge about undesired dynamics of risk generated by the interplay between floods, droughts and humans. This unravelling of sociohydrological phenomena has an important role to play in informing policy processes and assisting communities, governments and private actors to reduce hydrological risk while meeting the Sustainable Development Goals, the societal grand challenge of our time.
Bio. Giuliano Di Baldassarre was born in L'Aquila (Italy) in 1978. After graduating summa cum laude at the University of Bologna (Italy), he took his PhD in Hydrology at the Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in 2006. He developed his academic career across Europe by working as a Postdoc at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol (UK) and, later, as a Senior Lecturer at UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education in Delft (The Netherlands). He moved to Sweden in 2014, and he joined the Department of Earth Sciences of Uppsala University as a Professor. He is also the Director of CNDS, Centre of Natural Hazards and Disaster Science, which brings together social, engineering and earth scientists from three Swedish universities to carry out inter-disciplinary research on disaster risk reduction (DRR). CNDS currently supports about 30 early career scientists, i.e. PhD candidates and postdocs, in three Swedish universities (www.cnds.se). Giuliano has been the recipient of international awards, including the Plinius Medal by the European Geosciences Union (EGU) and the Witherspoon Lecture Award by the American Geophysical Union (AGU).