Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: The Development of Resilient Water Management Systems

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

As populations increasingly move from rural to urban areas, understanding how cities can develop resilient water management systems will continue to rise in importance. To understand the multitude of factors impacting resilience, relief and development organizations often examine adaptive capacity to assess the ability of contemporary countries and cities to respond to and prepare for increases in environmental variation. This project will assess the relationship between elements of adaptive capacity of a water management system that was used for centuries. Such relationships are most visible in the long term where one can observe changes that communities experience as population grows, political and religious regimes change, and the environment varies around them over centuries. In the course of this project, the researchers will also mentor undergraduate students and Cambodian archaeologists in a variety of archaeological field methods and spatial analyses, answering the call to improve STEM education. The archaeological case study, Angkor, Cambodia, was the center of the Khmer Empire for over 600 years (9th-15th centuries CE). During this time, the Khmers developed one of the largest and most complex water management systems in the pre-industrial world. For this project, Ms. Klassen will first develop a chronology of change in the urban layout of Angkor, to identify the nature and distribution of water infrastructure construction over time. Historical, spatial, and chronological data are now emerging that will be synthesized into a comprehensive and geo-referenced inventory of all known archaeological features within the Angkorian landscape. From this inventory, Ms. Klassen will assign features to time periods, then identify a sequence of change in the urban layout of Angkor. She will use geographic information system analyses to quantitatively and qualitatively assess six important elements of adaptive capacity (the amount of water harnessed by the system, investments in infrastructure, human capital, redundancy, equal distribution of resources, and innovation) for eight time periods. The relationships and trade-offs among the six elements will be used to better understand what makes systems resilient. Further, the results will be compared with the centralized vs. decentralized nature of the state during each time period to determine if and how the type of political regime impacts the resilience of the water management system.