A Streams of Thought contribution by Nikolas Galli

The Italian Hydrology Days, the annual meeting of the Italian Hydrological Society (IHS, https://www.sii-ihs.it/), have taken place recently in Matera (Figure 1). In the context of a city that is a UNESCO world heritage also for its unique ancient water infrastructures, hydrologists from all of Italy and beyond have met to discuss the issue of complexity in water management, this year’s conference theme. The three days in Matera have also seen a strong contribution from the Italian branch of the Young Hydrologic Society (YHS-IT), not only to the local restaurants and bars’ businesses, but also to the conference’s activities.

For the first time, we were able to get a seat (brilliantly taken by Eleonora Dallan, kudos!) at the traditional round table the IHS organises during the Hydrology Days to bring together researchers, professionals and policymakers in the water sector (Figure 2). Just not to come unprepared, we had a side event on the first day of the conference, to discuss among us young hydrologists which points to bring to the table, with very interesting outcomes.

First, there is still the necessity to improve the ways in which we can create, manage and access data to inform our research. Improving institutional networks of measuring stations, pushing forward with the digitization of historical data (see for instance, in this regard, the SIREN project, https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/siren-project/siren–project), and integrating citizen science into the process are some of the main priorities in this sense.

Second, more technically, the issue of complexity implies an issue of scale not only spatial and temporal, but also across the transversal scale of the multiple actors in water-related phenomena, e.g. agriculture, energy, domestic users.

Third, in part deriving from and overarching the two previous points, we strongly felt the need, as a community, to improve our communication with practitioners, institutions, and communities. Typically, this issue is seen in the outwards direction: we know the need to improve the ways in which we transfer new scientific knowledge to non-academic contexts, beyond fancy figures and misinterpreted interviews. Instead, we want to put a strong focus on the bidirectionality of this issue: we need to learn better how to internalise the knowledge and the questions of those who in their everyday lives deal with the complex issues we try to study (you might say, we need to learn how to listen, but hey, that’s personal). Of course, this is not only on us as researchers, but, as transdisciplinarity has been steadily gaining importance in our field, we have to acknowledge our duty in fostering this bidirectional communication.

Retrospectively, we felt that the round table itself has plasticly exemplified this last issue. Significant synergies have emerged between the other participant’s interventions and the issues identified by YHS-IT, even if there was a shared sensation among us that the different points raised at the table could have converged further towards a constructive discussion. Indeed, it has been a great occasion to gain insight on how transdisciplinary discourses among different actors can be started, and how important they can be to effectively address complex water management issues, also in the face of the increase in frequency and intensity of hydrological extremes that we are observing.

This leads us back to the impressive number of high-quality contributions we have witnessed during the Hydrology Days, from flood risk to water management and droughts, from soil dynamics to data science in hydrology. As probably every year after this event, we go back home with the feeling of being part of a cohesive and vital community, with big challenges ahead, but also with big willingness, and potential, to move towards their solutions.

Book of abstract (in Italian): https://www.sii-ihs.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/book-1.pdf

About the author

Nikolas Galli received his MSc degree in Environmental and Land Planning Engineering in 2019 at Politecnico di Milano (Italy). He then spent six months in Paraguay, where he worked on mapping water resources and participative planning of rural-urban development in the Chaco area. He is now a researcher (RTD-A) in the Glob3science group at Politecnico di Milano, after obtaining his PhD in February 2023 at the same group with a thesis on the use of water scarcity metrics to explore conflictual instances of water use and design synergistic water use strategies. His main research interest are agro-hydrological modelling of water-energy-food nexus-based problems and solutions, conflictual aspects of water resources availability and management, and the public health implications of unsustainable food system practices, including deforestation, forest fragmentation, the livestock revolution and agricultural intensification.

LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikolas-galli-7806951a3/