SuMaRiO

Eliciting and integrating stakeholder perspectives of land and water management in the Tarim River Basin, Xinjiang (SuMaRiO - Sustainable Management of River Oases along the Tarim River/China)

 

The Tarim River Basin is a hyper-arid region located in Xinjiang, northwest of China. The region has been plagued by immense environmental, ecological and economic problems. The overarching goal of SuMaRiO project is to support oasis management along the Tarim River under the condition of climatic and societal changes. SuMaRiO constitutes a multitude of hydrological, agricultural, ecological, and economic subprojects.

For the identification of sustainable management strategies, knowledge, problem perspectives, and values of various stakeholders have to be taken into account, while ecosystem services (ESS) need to be considered and optimized. The elicitation and integration of all these aspects can be achieved through a transdisciplinary research process.

The goal of the subproject to be executed at the Institute of Physical Geography is to support and enable transdisciplinary research of the relations between

(1) land and water management and ESS in the Tarim River Basin; and

(2) dust and heat stress management and ESS in the Aksu City, Xinjiang.

The core of the transdisciplinary research of the two problem fields is stakeholder dialogues. Stakeholder dialogues in the form of workshops will be designed and executed in a participatory setting at the Tarim Basin level and in Aksu City, respectively. The participatory processes will be supported by actor-based modelling (for Tarim Basin) and Bayesian Networks (for Aksu) tools. The methods of transdisciplinary research and stakeholder dialogue with regard to successful knowledge integration and social learning will be evaluated. The transdisciplinary research of the two problem fields are presented as follow:

 

 

1. Transdisciplinary research on land and water management in the Tarim River Basin

The semi-quantitative actor-based modelling (ABM) approach is adopted in this study for eliciting perspectives of various stakeholders (representatives of institutional actors) and understanding ecosystem services as well as integrating them into land and water management in Tarim River Basin. ABMcomprises (1) the modelling of problem perceptions of relevant actors (the development of ‘Perception Graphs’); and (2) the simulation of possible actions of the actors (scenario development) and the resulting development of key factors, with the ultimate aim of developing sustainable management strategies collaboratively.

For the development of Perception Graphs and scenarios, stakeholder dialogue of five workshops will be designed and conducted at the basin level (SDT) over a period of approximately 30 months. 15-20 representatives of water, land, forestry, agriculture, environmental protection sectors as well as farmer representatives will be invited to participate in the workshop series. The same representatives will also be interviewed individually. Throughout the stakeholder dialogue, the importance of ecosystem services (ESS) of land and water resources will be shared and the ESS will be identified and optimized using ABM. In this study, weights needed for the multi-criteria analysis will also be derived and delievered to other project partner, who is responsible for the development of an indicator-based decision support system for sustainable land and water management in the Tarim River Basin.

Research area: Tarim River Basin

Participants: Tuck-Fatt Siew, Mirigu Maimaiti, Petra Döll

Contact person: Tuck-Fatt Siew (tuckfatt.siew(at)em.uni-frankfurt.de)

 

 

2. Transdisciplinary research on dust and heat stress management in Aksu City, Xinjiang  

The overarching goal of this transdisciplinary research is to support the implementation of an integrated dust and heat stress management in municipalities of the Tarim River basin. In this problem field, Bayesian Networks (BN) as a participatory method for the joint definition of problems of experts and stakeholders, which can lead to the identification of a better, realizable management strategy in dust and heat stress management, will be applied and evaluated. For transdisciplinary knowledge generation and integration, stakeholder dialogue consisting of three workshops will be designed and executed in Aksu City (SDA). About 15-20 representatives of stakeholders, who will participate in the workshop series, will also be interviewed for the elicitation of their expertise. Knowledge on dust and heat stress management, mainly related to ESS of vegetation, will be integrated and scenarios of dust and heat stress, which show the effect of management options, will be computed through BN-supported participatory process.

The research on dust and heat stress management using the method of BN will be complemented by Transdisciplinary analysis of an integrated dust and heat stress management. In this transdisciplinary analysis, the particular case of the Tarim Basin how dust became an object of scientific research and of national, provincial and local action will be reconstructed. Subsequently, the state-of-the-art, future research priorities, fields of action for land use planning, urban and regional planning and concerned sector administrations will be identified.  

Research area: Aksu city, Xinjiang

Participants: Sina Frank, Petra Döll, Martin Welp

Contact person: Sina Frank (frank(at)em.uni-frankfurt.de)

 

 

The SuMaRiO project is funded by the BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research), FONA (Research for Sustainable Development) and Sustainable Land Management.

Project duration: 2011 - 2015

 

More information about SuMaRiO can be found at www.sumario.de