Natural and social aspects of global wildfire threats to water supplies

Wildfires are increasingly affecting water supplies in fire-affected regions around the globe, but researchers and policy-makers often fail to effectively anticipate the natural and social interactions that give rise to water security threats. Uncertainty exists about the implications of fire-affected freshwater resources for sustainable development, regional and national economies, and responsibilities of stakeholders involved in forest management or water governance. It seems that the root of this issue is a lack of information about the systemic spatial and temporal interactions among ecohydrology, hydrological services, socio-hydrosystems and global water supply. These four systems—we call them water domains—are closely connected, and a threat to one system may easily spills over into another, thereby triggering a cascade of adverse effects on water supplies. But here lies the problem: we are clueless about how wildfire impacts on water are dispersed and transferred from one location to another. Nonetheless, if we acknowledge that these four water domains are connected, the logical conclusion is that they must all, directly or indirectly, be included in large-scale water security risk assessment. In this contribution we discuss how to connect the dots between the environmental impacts and social aspects of global wildfire threats to water supplies. In doing so, we build a dynamic frame around the water security paradigm that includes socio-hydrologic considerations of wildfire impacts and their dependence on healthy-forest hydrological services.