Towards integrated catchment management: increasing the dialogue between scientists,policy‐makers and stakeholders

The aim of the Hydrology for the Environment, Life and Policy (HELP) project is to strengthen the role and inputs of the scientific community in the integrated catchment management process. Water resources management in the 21st century requires a radical reorientation and an effective dialogue between decision‐makers, stakeholders and the scientific water community. This paper offers a skeleton worldview as a starting point for that dialogue by bringing together key issues as identified by water resource experts from different disciplines. Experiences from all over the world demonstrate the need for multistakeholder advocacy and the importance of compromise‐building mechanisms. Water law defines the rules of the game and provides a necessary framework for policy and its execution. However, there must be adequate social acceptance and active compliance, otherwise the formal rules and administrative regulation will not be perceived as legitimate and ultimately could prove ineffective. The challenge now is to create management systems where the formal decision‐makers interact with relevant members of the scientific community, users and other stakeholders for a coordinated approach that successfully orchestrates water uses towards internal compatibility. Integrated water resources management is essential for securing a proper overview of all the activities that depend on the same resource—the precipitation over the basin—and which are internally linked by the mobility of water from the water divide to the river mouth.     

Dialogue Abner Shimony–Shimon Malin

Malin proposes a solution to some of the conceptual problems of the foundations of quantum mechanics within the framework of Alfred North Whitehead’s “Philosophy of Organism”. Standard quantum dynamics, governed by the time-dependent Schr?dinger equation, does not provide for the reduction of superpositions of physical states and hence does not account for occurrence of observational data. If consciousness is invoked to explain the results of measurements, it would appear that quantum mechanics is given an anthropocentric interpretation. Reduction of superpositions is achieved without anthropocentrism, according to Malin, by accepting Whitehead’s ontology of “actual occasions”, which are protomental entities independent of and presumably antedating human beings. Furthermore, Whitehead’s philosophy has the great virtue of offering a plausible solution to the profound problem of relating minds to material systems. Shimony is sympathetic to Whitehead’s world view, but with the reservation that it leaves an immense unexplained and unexplored gap between the conjectured “experience” of actual occasions and the high level experience of the human mind.QUPON/QIPC Special Issue     

Common potholes in modeling solid–liquid reactions—methods for avoiding them

The reaction rate of a solid in fluids depends on the reactive surface area rather than its concentration. Even though, analytical techniques have been developed enormously during the past decades, the reliable quantification of solid surface areas during a reaction still remains a challenge. Due to this, still today indirect methods such as test plots play a key role in determining reaction mechanisms and kinetics. The modeling of solid–liquid reactions is a challenge as several assumptions and simplifications need to be made and distinguishing between different hypothesis is not always straightforward. The influence of the particle size distribution (PSD) and the change in the morphology of the solid phase during the reaction are one of the most crucial factors in determining the kinetics, as they are directly related to the quantification of the reactive surface area. Neglecting to consider these factors in modeling can cause misleading conclusions and wrongful parameter estimation with traditional methodology.Techniques for evaluation when it is adequate to use the traditional methodologies and when these factors need to be accounted for are provided in the current work. If the particle size distribution is close to the Gaussian distribution and if the particles are not very rough or porous, the traditional modeling practices can soundly be used. These properties are measured and quantified with the help of a variation coefficient (PSD) and a shape factor (particle morphology). It is demonstrated that how these factors influence the results obtained with traditional approaches. A practical technique for implementing the PSD into kinetic models by using the Gamma distribution is provided. Moreover, a method for taking into account different particle morphologies with the help of a shape factor and solid phase exponents is presented. The dissolution of gibbsite in NaOH is used as an example case. The methodology can be extended to unconventional changes in particle morphology during the reaction as well as different reaction mechanisms, e.g. product layer formation.