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The purpose of this paper is to estimate quick and low-cost processes for surface runoff potential on the basis of natural environmental attributes.

An approach based on the natural environmental attributes and on the Cook’s method was used for maximal peak flows of surface runoff, as well as for assigning weights to the considered attributes. Used attributes are as follow: steepness, bedrock (lithology), soil (texture, genesis, thickness, and permeability coefficient), drainage density, and favorable features to surface storage.

Using natural environmental attributes from previous available studies, adapted from different scales, the authors obtain a low-cost potential surface runoff chart, which can be useful for planning, impact and hazard analysis, and decision purposes in an area without large financial resources, like small communities in developing countries. Despite the common scarcity of data in these communities, often regional basic studies of soil and bedrock are available, making this kind of analysis possible.

The highlights are quick and low-cost procedures in characterizing the natural environment for planning activities, providing the basis for further detailing, which focus on solving local problems. This approach to runoff estimation allows for the definition of the criteria, considering the potential geodynamic processes. Thus, this kind of study may be very useful for land use planning in developing countries.

This paper aims to present a long-term research project to understand the nature and extent of degradation in a selected segment of the Colombo Flood Detention Area (CFDA) wetlands. It qualitatively explores the gradual process of change in watersheds and the wetland ecology affecting flood control services, thereby leading to full-blown disasters. It underlines the importance of protecting ecosystem health of urban ecological features for strengthening the disaster resilience of cities.

Through analyzing the long-term change of landscape level parameters, water-quality, vegetation and soil quality, the authors emphasize the potential of an outright ecological regime change and the effects on ecosystem services of the wetlands.

Colombo is a city surrounded by a large and interconnected system of natural wetlands that provides a valuable flood control service. The rapid and partly ad hoc urbanization in the past 15-25 years has caused a steady degradation in the wetlands that severely threatens the ecosystem services. It was found that the native, grass-dominated marshy habitat of the wetland is rapidly transforming into a habitat with shrubs and small trees (44 percent of the extent). Typical peaty soil in the marsh has also changed into a semi-mineral soil. Both changes result in a significant reduction in water-holding capacity of the wetland, thus increasing the flood frequency.

These ecological changes have undermined the effectiveness of the repeated cost-intensive engineering measures taken by the authorities to contain floods.

CFDA had not been studied previously in an ecosystem services and disaster resilience perspectives. The ecological and hydrological aspects have been studied separately without integration.

The interaction of urban cores and their rural hinterlands is considered from an ecological–economic perspective. The concept of ‘urban metabolism’ motivates discussion of urban dependence on geographic regions outside their borders for both sources of inputs and as waste sinks. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's 1989 Surface-Water Treatment Rule forces cities to consider the ecosystem services preserved by appropriate land-use management inside suburban and rural watersheds used for urban water supplies. A case study of New York City and its water supply from the Catskill–Delaware watershed system is used to explore these themes. Compensation from the city to watershed communities may be an effective way to motivate protection of those ecosystem functions. Both direct payments and investment in economic development projects consistent with water quality goals are reviewed as policy instruments.

The study aims to identify the evoked “sense of place” that the campus community attributes to a watershed area in a Malaysian higher institution, aiming to enhance their participation in watershed conservation. Central to this objective is the incorporation of the concept of a watershed as a place, serving as the conceptual framework for analysis.

This case study explores an urban lake at Universiti Malaya, Malaysia’s oldest higher institution. It uses diverse qualitative data, including document analysis, semi-structured interviews, vox-pop interviews and a co-production workshop, to generate place-based narratives reflecting the meanings and values that staff and students associate with the watershed. Thematic analysis is then applied for further examination.

The data patterns reveal shared sense of place responses on: campus as a historic place, student, staff and campus identity, in-place learning experiences and interweaving of community well-being and watershed health. Recommendations advocate translating these narratives into campus sustainability communication through empirical findings and continuous co-production of knowledge and strategies with the campus community.

The research findings play a critical role in influencing sustainable campus planning and community inclusion by integrating place-based frameworks into sustainable development and watershed management. The study recommends the process of identifying place-based narratives with implications for the development of sustainability communication in a campus environment.

This paper contributes both conceptually and empirically to the sustainable management of a campus watershed area through place-based thinking. It outlines a process for enhancing campus sustainability communication strategies.

Societal problems have impacted the northeast of the USA for various generations. This paper aims to analyse various sustainability aspects in the Hudson River watershed of New York by highlighting a temporal progression from environmental sustainability at the watershed level in the 1970s to growing concerns with more localized cross-border social and cultural sustainability in recent decades. We discuss an engagement with the Rapp Road Historic District and a documentary screening series as potential ways to eliminate racism and embrace diversity.

The research was based on fieldwork and classroom teaching conducted mostly since summer 2014. It included mixed methods combining document analysis and reviews with the examination of case studies, and the assessment of public policy priorities.

Formal training has to be combined with a substantial dose of realism, humility and motivation to recognize that what the authors teach and research in the community matters. Future learning experiences within a place-based education paradigm could include: Having students help devise urban rehabilitation strategies whilst suggesting integrative measures with the surrounding built and natural environments; students could also help improve public spaces in the neighbourhood; and finally, they could also help to strengthen the cultural identity of the district by augmenting urban design features endogenous to the African American community.

Opportunities could be further augmented with service-learning projects and programmes, internships and even full-time jobs for recent graduates in local community development organizations.

The study served to raise the community’s awareness of its own natural, ecological and human assets, and to create place-based real-world opportunities for students and faculty in environmental and cultural sustainability studies.

Environmental sustainability is discussed with the creation of the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area, whilst the public engagement with the Rapp Road Historic Association in the Capital Region of upstate New York, the identification of an emerging creative cluster in the Berkshires-Hudson region, and a documentary and discussion series on striving for diverse cities serve to demonstrate current concerns with social and cultural sustainability.

This study presents a comparative analysis of water quality data in an urban micro watershed to study the magnitude of impacts on the water quality parameters over the last decade. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the degree of deterioration using the water quality index.

Rapid urban growth without proper land use and occupation planning results in the overload of urban water resources. Therefore, a literature review was conducted on the research subject published in the dissertation databases of the Engineering Faculty of Ilha Solteira, which resulted in the selection of two dissertations on water quality in the Ipê Stream, Ilha Solteira – SP, Brazil. The results will be evaluated according to the Brazilian laws and regulations in force.

This study shows that pollution and degradation in the stream intensified during the study period, with the most impacted areas within the urban perimeter.

The increasing impacts underscore the need for efficient measures such as implementation of retention reservoirs, elimination of clandestine sewage connections and restoration of riparian forests.

This study highlights the need to monitor the water quality of streams in order to establish preventive and mitigating measures to avert the growing environmental impacts and to ensure quality water for future generations.

Cities and urban areas are increasingly becoming the settlement of choice for a majority of humans.

Many of the global environmental problems that we are now facing have their precedence and causes in the cities and urban areas we live in.

Lessons in understanding urban risk are now emerging – urban hazards and risk are predominantly human-induced, and exacerbate natural events. Various economic, social, and economic aspects compound the risks that urban residents face.

Urban lifestyles and resource consumptions can be directly or indirectly attributed to the many environmental consequences that we are seeing – both within the city, as well as the entire hinterland or urban watershed that it is located in.

As part of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES), a long-term ecological research project that conducts research in metropolitan Baltimore as an ecological system, scientists have measured the effect of urbanization on entire watersheds, such as Gwynns Falls, from headwaters to the Chesapeake Bay. In general, urbanization has buried many seasonal headwater streams and has contributed to the erosion of extant streams due to flashy urban storm runoff in what was a slow moving, beaver-dominated landscape (Elmore & Kaushal, 2008; Brush, 2009). This chapter fuses scientific ecological research in Baltimore with ethnographic evidence of human ecological technologies practiced in Northern Thailand. Anthropologist Shigeharu Tanabe studied one such ecological technology practiced for centuries in Chiang Mai called muang fai. More recently, a royally inspired community project of forest regeneration was successfully completed through small headwater dam building in nearby Lampang. The authors report on a recently conducted survey of the sites Tanabe documented in the 1970s and the results of the community reforestation project in relation to design proposals for three neighborhoods in Baltimore. The ecological research in Baltimore and the ethnographic research in Chiang Mai are integrated in this chapter to argue for new sustainable design practices in urban headwaters that combine ethnography, scientific monitoring, and design.

This paper aims to find the pattern of interaction of political actors in situations of tenurial conflict in the watershed through a review of cases of social conflicts of plantation villages around Siak watershed 2009-2014.

In harmony with the Research Master Plan (RIP) of Riau University, the socio-political of Riau Malay society and the fundamental scientific pattern of Riau university, the development of the resources of area and waters and Malay culture, since 2001, the writer has conducted a study related to the issues of natural resources policy, especially oil palm in the era of regional autonomy and decentralization. This is in line with the umbrella of research developed by the University of Riau namely studying various aspects of natural resources (especially oil palm) and human resources of Watershed (DAS). The writer's review is; first, the dynamics of politics in relation to the issue of oil palm plantation policy in Riau. This study shows that there are many central policies when implemented at the local level including watersheds clashing with local interests such as forests and land ownership. Second, the writer has also reviewed the policy issues and problems of oil palm plantations in Riau watershed in 2000. This study shows there are many issues and problems formulated differently by different people.

Mapping and strategy are examined through the study of political strategies on oil palm plantations and use them to answer the following two questions: what kind of political model which can be used to manage the watershed conflict since regional autonomy is implemented. Economic factors are influential in mapping and management strategies for the emergence of tenurial conflicts in the Siak River Rivershed 2009-2014. The tenurial conflict management model of Siak rivershed, which is considered relevant, is a conflict-based model of cooperation with a partnership pattern between local government, watershed civil society and plantation business actors. The change of agrarian structure is directed to the effort to open the space for the accesibility of society in decision-making.

Some of these studies have not reached the tenurial conflicts in the watershed areas, especially Siak watershed. In fact, about 80 per cent of Riau province region consists of watershed. This becomes the originality and gap of this study with previous studies. This research was conducted further as an effort to synergize Riau's development policy with Riau University's research in harmony with RIP that was created and aimed to find the pattern of interaction of political actors in situations of tenurial conflict in Watershed through a review of cases of social conflicts of plantation around Siak watershed in 2009-2014.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze and discuss the application of buffer zones as an urban landscape heritage management tool, using Rio de Janeiro as the main case study, in order to inform urban regulation around the sites inscribed as World Heritage Cultural Landscape and disclose its relevance to link urban planning, cultural heritage management and sustainable development.

The methodological approach encompasses: conceptual framework – contextualization of heritage protection theory, focusing on landscape protection and buffer zones; discussion: cross-national comparative overview of buffer zones conceptual framework on the international heritage protection policy; historical background and spatial analysis, through GIS mapping, of local heritage protection policy, tracing its evolution through time; examination of prospects and challenges of this management tool, including strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, based on previous international, local experiences on natural and cultural heritage protection; and gathering of strategies for the implementation of buffer zones in local landscape management.

Core heritage sites and their buffer zones are integrated elements and act together to protect landscape significance and dynamic integrity (DI). In Rio de Janeiro, beyond the function of a caution zone, other important functions of landscape heritage buffer zones are to guarantee spatial and social connections of the protected sites, as well as the visual relationship between them and other significant urban landscape features. Strategies for the implementation of buffer zones in local landscape management should address the articulation of landscape protection governance; the conservation of visual, functional and structural identity quality and legibility and the monitoring of DI.

The methodology approach adopted in this study may also benefit from and foster further investigations, which could include the elaboration of a landscape management plan and an impact assessment inventory, refining the scale of study to the level of local watersheds, and a deeper examination of the popular cultural imprints within the World Heritage property buffer zone.

Strategies to the implementation of the Carioca Landscapes buffer zone include a gradation of protection and control of impacts according to the distance of the core sites (in the form of rings or layers). The buffer zone should help to preserve the character, significance, and DI of the protected sites and guarantee their spatial and social connections, as well as the visual and functional relationship between them and between other significant landscape features of the city. All those management strategies should be founded on the elaboration of a broad urban landscape management plan with the local society involvement.

In Rio de Janeiro’s specific case, bridging the vision of culture and nature as opposite poles and, transcending the social segregation through community involvement should certainly be among the main guiding principles to the application of buffer zones for supporting landscape sustainability. Therefore, the establishment of regulation criteria and parameters within the limits of the buffer zone must acknowledge that the (urban) landscape should carefully articulate the different social agent visions and local urban contexts.

The main contribution of this paper is to gather different visions of the role of buffer zones and disclose possibilities of conciliation between theory and practice concerning landscape protection, arguing for gathering natural and cultural heritage policies into the urban planning processes. Harnessed together, the suggested buffer zone implementation strategies may provide a proactive approach to Rio’s urban landscape protection and contribute to foster landscape sustainability and resilience. Although based on a specific case study, the adopted methodological approach may be transferable, with some adjustments, to other World Heritage properties, especially those located in urban areas under development pressures.