Compendium World Heritage Irrigation Structures (2014-2022)
Author: ICID
Year: 2023,
Type: Special Publication, Format: e-version
Since the dawn of human civilization water has been an enabler of societal
development so much so that we started believing “Water is Life,” a common phrase
in most languages. And, life is multi-dimensional involving not only a physical aspect
but also economic, social, cultural, political, religious, and spiritual concepts. Early
human settlements emerged around natural water availability and continued to do so
for thousands of years. During civilization process the water bodies/scapes became
integral parts of human communities and societies and their economic, social, cultural,
political, religious, and spiritual activities. Historically, we have always assumed
that water is not a limiting factor for human development, however, as our numbers
grew from millions to billions, we started to see the finite dimension of water that
we now term as “water scarcity” and once a life-critical natural resource becomes
limiting our attention is diverted to its value, its use or misuse, its criticality to our
survival and its conservation. We have started feeling constrained and questioning
our early assumptions of infiniteness of water, and more importantly exploring ways
to overcome this scarcity as climate change coupled with over-stretched carrying
capacity of our ecosystem have exacerbated the human development situation.
Fortunately, water is now being discussed in many domains which have a diverse
worldview of water. Water is not owned by just one discipline of human existence, its
multi-dimensionality needs to be put in a holistic perspective facilitated by a dialogue
among the stakeholders having asymmetric knowledge contexts, capacities, beliefs,
socio-economic backgrounds, cultural and spiritual visions.