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The purpose of this paper is to identify the tourism potential of natural and cultural heritage in historical irrigation canals by promoting social learning and providing digital tools to local and visitors.

This research is based on the EUWATHER project (JPI – Cultural Heritage, HERITAGE PLUS Joint Call 2015), through which new opportunities for eco-tourism and outdoor recreation as a driver for sustainable development of historical irrigation canals are provided. A case study from North-Eastern Spain, the Lower Ter area (in the Costa Brava), is analyzed. Heritage inventories and digital itineraries including the tangible and intangible cultural history of waterscape heritage have been co-designed with local communities and key stakeholders. Online data sets and Spatial Data Infrastructure (webpage and mobile app) are provided.

The project provides a manual for developing digital waterways heritage tours. For the case study, up to 118 heritage objects have been selected from 8 natural and cultural heritage categories according to their tourism potential. Three itineraries have been proposed to promote the tourism potential existing in the hinterland of the Costa Brava region.

The methods section and the main results obtained for the case study will be useful for professionals working in heritage institutions, rural development and sustainable tourism agencies.

The project provides two geo-based technologies: a digital platform (www.waterwaysexplorer.com) and a mobile app (Izi.travel) in which external users are able to collect relevant data and construct tourism itineraries from minor waterways with consolidated natural and cultural heritage. A Tool Box is provided for practitioners in order to help local communities and tourist organizations to create their own itineraries along minor waterways.

The authors report a study of heritage conservation linked to rural small-town regeneration in Aotearoa New Zealand. The purpose of this study is to answer the question: how, with limited local resources, do the residents and administrators of small settlements conserve historic heritage in the processes of rural regeneration?

This research is based on an analysis of physical heritage objects (buildings, artefacts and landscapes), associated regulatory arrangements, archival material, news media reporting, community group newsletters and photography. The authors use the river-side town of Rakaia and its environs in Te Waipounamu/the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand to answer the research question.

This research found that in a context of limited resources, volunteers, supported by small businesses and local and central government, can contribute positively to the conservation and interpretation of heritage as part of wider rural regeneration activities.

There is only limited writing on the links between heritage conservation, rural regeneration and the development of small towns. To advance the debate, the authors combine ideas about community-led heritage conservation and management with concepts drawn from rural studies, particularly the multifunctional rural space paradigm. This allows us to explore heritage conservation in a context of rapid rural change.

Sri Lanka, as an island located near the southern tip of India and the Asian Continent and in the core area of the South Asian Monsoon has developed its own unique forms of Hydraulic Civilization. Sri Lanka is covered with a network of thousands of man-made lakes and ponds, known locally as “tanks,” numbering more than 25,000. Some are in the functional mode and others still remaining abandoned type. Many are thousands of years old and almost all show a high degree of sophistication in their construction and design. Sri Lanka's tanks are fascinatingly distributed in the cascades of tanks one below the other conserving water and soil and most effectively, acting as buffers against droughts while giving due consideration to maintaining the ecosystem equilibrium.

In this chapter, the title theme of “Disaster by Design” is explored and justified. Even from early times, the Aral Region was subject to alterations of natural conditions due to human intervention, often deliberate and designed. After the final conquest by Russia, the region became a fixed colony as part of the Soviet Union, ripe for exploitation characteristic of the Soviet approach to nature broadly and to stigmatized areas specifically. The Aral region was selected for irrigated cotton and other cultivation even though the consequences for desiccation of the sea, desertification, and salinization were understood. The decision was so calculated that even a cost–benefit analysis was offered to show that the Aral fishery was worth but a fraction of the cotton potential. The destruction of the region was made possible by a Soviet system of central planning and peripheral control. The brief glimmer of hope for the region evidenced during glasnost was the only moment where the Aral's fate was not sealed. The outcome is a model of ecological disaster by design, an environmental injustice, and an indication of the abusive nature of authoritarian power.

Drawing on studies in flood-affected upland areas of Thailand and Vietnam, this chapter explores the complex interplay between collective, state and individual responses to disastrous flood events and subsequent mitigation strategies. Fieldwork was conducted between 2007 and 2009, employing a variety of qualitative methods, such as semi-structured interviews in flood-affected households, focus group discussions and narrative essays written by local people. Evidence suggests that farmers’ willingness to engage in flood mitigation is curbed by the common perception that flooding is caused by a bundle of exogenous factors. In the case study from Vietnam, state intervention in formerly community-based water management has alienated farmers from water governance and reduced their sense of personal and collective responsibility. Their lack of engagement in flood-prevention strategies could also be explained by the fact that their major cash crop was not affected by the flood event. In the Thai case study, where community-based water management remained largely unaffected by state influence, villagers agreed in a collective decision-making process to widening the riverbed after a severe flood, although this meant that some farmers had to give up parts of their paddy fields. Yet, following a second flood, these farmers opened up new upland rice fields in the forested upper watershed areas to ensure their food security, thus increasing the likelihood of future flood disasters downstream. We conclude that flood mitigation and adaptation policies need to consider (1) local people’s own causal explanations of flood events and (2) the potential trade-offs between collective action, state intervention and individual livelihood strategies.

At the turn of 2018 and 2019, a certain era in the history of Polish Internet came to an end. Most of the websites of rural tourism facilities hosted on free servers no longer exist; however, the very phenomenon has significantly distinguished itself in the promotion of rural tourism in Poland. The paper presents archaic websites or rural tourism facilities in Poland as digital cultural heritage assets. Its purpose is to propose attributes potentially indicative of content or phenomenon being part of digital cultural heritage.

In total, 211 websites of rural tourism facilities in Poland, hosted on free servers, were analysed. The study investigated digital artefacts, i.e. only the websites that no longer exist but whose archival copies are found at the Internet Archive (IA).

The structure of most websites of rural tourism facilities was based on tables. None of the websites were responsive. The graphics of 132 websites (65%) were never changed, with the oldest recorded copies dating back to 2001 and the newest ones to 2018. On many websites, components that are relatively rarely found these days were noted, e.g. “marquee”-type “floating” objects or online surveys.

The phenomenon of using free-of-charge hosting services by rural tourism facilities in Poland in the years 2004–2012 is part of the history of Polish Internet and an example of digital cultural heritage. Archaic websites of rural tourism facilities in Poland are digital artefacts but not all of them have cultural values. In total, three groups of attributes are proposed that can be important for determining whether a website, content or phenomenon can be considered digital cultural heritage assets.

In this chapter, we examine the consequences of the substantial diversion of water to irrigation in the Aral Sea region, the principle cause of the Aral Sea disaster. The purpose of this study is to understand the relationship of the two rivers feeding Uzbekistan to the water inflow into the Aral Sea and to economic productivity in agriculture. We find that because water consumption exceeds water formation, the prognosis for future growth in agricultural output is at risk. Uzbekistan and its neighbors need to address the upstream and downstream rights to water access for the Syr and Amu rivers. The solutions to our immediate problems can be found inside Uzbekistan. Improving water efficiency and water conservation is a necessary, economical option compared to other proposals.

This paper aims to uncover new factors that influence the spread of malaria.

The historical data related to malaria were collected from government agencies. Later, the data were cleaned and standardized before passing through the analysis process. To obtain the simplicity of these numerous factors, the first procedure involved in executing the factor analysis where factors' groups related to malaria distribution were determined. Therefore, machine learning was deployed, and the confusion matrices are computed. The results from machine learning techniques were further analyzed with logistic regression to study the relationship of variables affecting malaria distribution.

This research can detect 28 new noteworthy factors. With all the defined factors, the logistics model tree was constructed. The precision and recall of this tree are 78% and 82.1%, respectively. However, when considering the significance of all 28 factors under the logistic regression technique using forward stepwise, the indispensable factors have been found as the number of houses without electricity (houses), number of irrigation canals (canals), number of shallow wells (places) and number of migrated persons (persons). However, all 28 factors must be included to obtain high accuracy in the logistics model tree.

This paper may lead to highly-efficient government development plans, including proper financial management for malaria control sections. Consequently, the spread of malaria can be reduced naturally.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the agricultural practices in a drought-prone region of India in an effort to find out how science, technology and innovation (STI) measures can address the existing problems and help achieve sustainable solutions. This study has been planned with two specific objectives: to study the agricultural practices of small and marginal-holding farmers in a drought-prone region and to examine the opportunities for suitable interventions to mitigate the impacts of droughts. The study is based on primary survey conducted in Banda district of Bundelkhand region, Uttar Pradesh, India.

Empirical survey was done in eight different blocks of a drought-prone region of India using structured questionnaire. The questionnaire was pre-tested with a group of 12 farmers during a workshop through a pilot survey conducted during April 2017. Stratified sampling based on land holdings (small farmers having 1–2 ha of land, medium farmers having 2.1–5 ha of land and large farmers having more than 5 ha of land) and irrigation types (canals and tube wells) were utilised in different blocks of the district for selecting farmers in the surveyed villages.

Findings suggest that due to various reasons like change in climatic conditions, frequent crop failure, crop diseases and high cost of production, farmers have adopted certain crops which are not suited to their agro-climatic conditions. The paper recommends that farmer’s school or “on-farm training school” have to be initiated to integrate farmers’ traditional knowledge with modern knowledge systems with amalgamation of STI tools.

Uttar Pradesh is divided into nine agro-climatic zones; however, this study is focused on Bundelkhand and may be region specific, though the findings are important for other drought-prone areas.

The paper links the existing agricultural practices and further linking them with farmers’ socio-economic, cultural and environmental settings. Only 17.5 per cent of respondents owned any agricultural equipment due to high cost of farm tools, difficulty in taking equipements on rental basis and lack of sharing tools among the farmers.

This paper targets small and marginal farmers in the drought-prone region of India who face the dual shock of climate impacts and poverty. Adoption of modern agricultural practices and use of technology is inadequate which is further hampered by ignorance of such practices, high costs and impracticality in the case of small land holdings.

This paper has advocated for well-organised, efficient and result-oriented STI system to mitigate the adverse impacts of drought-prone agriculture. Farming community in drough-prone areas needs adequate investment, local-specific technology, better quality inputs, real-time information on weather and most importantly latest know-how for sustaining commercial and cost effective sustainable agriculture.