the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 25 Feb 2025
Shrinking Lakes, Growing Concerns: Exploring perceptions of lake level decline as a prism for understanding socionatural hazards
Abstract. Groß Glienicker Lake and Sacrower Lake are two lakes in the Berlin-Brandenburg region that are facing significant challenges due to declining water levels associated with climate change. A mixed-method approach was employed, incorporating ethnographic research methods, a household survey and stakeholder workshops, in order to elicit perceptions on social-ecological changes and challenges. The interaction of social-ecological structures with these perceptions was analyzed, as well as the willingness to act, both individually and collectively, to address the challenges. The analysis reveals that the hazard of lake level loss offers a prism through which diffracted social-ecological challenges become visible, thus facilitating an understanding of social processes that shape the definition of the hazard beyond ecological aspects and the path forward in governing risks adaptively. This understanding is based on perceptions of social-ecological hazards and the complexity of perceived responsibilities and willingness to contribute to managing risks. The analysis therefore sheds light on practical implications, in that focusing on pure technical solutions to maintaining or raising the water levels fails to orchestrate solutions to the social-ecological hazards.
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Status: open (until 14 Apr 2025)
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RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-475', Anonymous Referee #1, 18 Mar 2025
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General comments:
The paper is well written and focused. The results should be further developed and discussed on the basis of other socio-hydrological studies (on collective memory, decline of civilizations, governance and conflict over water use). Studies on water-scarce regions can help in the perspective of changing human desires. In particular, I would welcome more descriptive papers, but I must say that the results of this study are of local importance (the editor should take this into account).
Specific comments:
- How was the subjectivity of the researchers managed during the qualitative analysis? (add in the text);
- line 29 - check the concepts of hard-path to soft-path solutions (I think it would be interesting to add it to the work or quote it)
- Add legend to Figure 1;
- Line 107 - I missed historical information and quotes about the lakes (add);
- Line 170 - is it possible to show this socio-hydrological system in a figure/loop/map?
- Line 171 - what are the eight functions?
- Methodology - perhaps it would be interesting to show the paths through a flowchart;
- Linel 199 - it's worth noting that more than 40% answered that the quality of the water remained the same or they didn't identify anything, a percentage greater than the sum of a little and a lot;
- Line 203 - why have visitors increased?
- Were there differences in perception between different groups of interviewees, such as old residents versus new residents or people with different levels of education?
- Line 210 - characterize hydrology with historical data for the region (precipitation, evaporation, etc.) This could be added to the “study area” item;
- Line 256/257 - are there any federal/state/municipal public policies on land use and occupation or master plans?
- Line 297 - it would be interesting to present the number of cafés, restaurants and parking spaces in the area. The density of these services can influence the social perspective;
- Line 409 - I believe there may be a relationship with collective memory here. Please, if possible, link to this theme;
- Line 427 - Is it possible to make a loop figure with these identified interactions?
- Line 501 - I think the political bias could be explored further. How can the political spectrum influence the conservation policies of these lakes and the environment (for example, the city being run by a left-wing or right-wing politician)?
- Line 625 - Is it possible to add a paragraph of recommendations for the population, public administration or other researchers?Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-475-RC1 -
RC2: 'Reply on RC1', Ortwin Renn, 19 Mar 2025
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- The paper addresses an important issue of how local residents perceive the impact of climate change and what kind of actions they would prefer to cope with the present challenges.
- The paper uses a triangulation of methods (without using the word triangulation which was surprising to me) combining quantitative surveys, qualitative interviews, and stakeholder workshop results. In addition, they processed official documents of several water authorities.
- The introduction provides a clear and convincing argument for using quantitative and qualitative methods for assessing the public responses to a dramatic decline in water level associated with climate change. However, the introduction is quite long and often redundant stating the main messages several times.
- The theoretical concept of the study remains fuzzy. The authors seem to base their arguments on the social constructivism school of thought but oscillate between framing the issue in terms of “real” problems and “perceived” problems (Thomas Theorem). Some expressions in the text are complete nonsense: “In this context, the declared hazard of lake level loss shapes and is shaped by perceptions”. This sounds like magic: the water level can certainly not be changed by perceptions. What the authors probably try to say is that the assessment of water decline depends on how observers perceive and evaluate the physical changes that they observe. Later on, they introduce the concept of socio-natural phenomena which emphasize the coupling between natural dynamics and human perception. There is a vast tradition in the social sciences using the concept of socio-ecological systems which is based on the same line of thinking, but this popular concept is not mentioned in the paper.
- The methodology section includes an impressive list of research methods that have been used to assess attitudes, values, traditions and policy preferences. An interdisciplinary array of research traditions has been included in the study. (ethnographic, survey, stakeholder workshops) However, it was not quite clear to me which of the three research questions was addressed by what methods and how the results were integrated.
- The results section starts with an overview of what the authors learned about perception. This section is highly dominated by the survey results while the results of the qualitative interviews seems to be almost lost; at least the striking advantage of triangulation combining proportional results from quantitative data with more in-depth-results from the interviews was not adequately delivered. The second section on social structures was informative but confusing in terms of organization. Results from the surveys were mixed with background information on the politics and history of the area (which definitely belongs into section 2.1: Case study description), It also seems quite awkward to switch from perceptions to social history, to administrative governance and back to preferences. All information that is being presented is valuable, but it would need re-organization. I would place the history, the administrative arrangements and the social structure of the residents in the Case Study description and focuses on the empirical results in section 3.2 and 3.3. The description of the discrete choice experiment seemed like an add-on to the study and the relationship to the other results were only briefly mentioned on a rather superficial level.
- The discussion highlights the main results and tries to infer some major messages from the mixed method approach. This is well done in my view although, similar to the introduction, quite redundant and wordy. What I miss was a comparison of the results with similar studies or interpretative frameworks. The insights that residents are skeptical about newcomers which may challenge their privileges by overusing the finite pool of resources is a common theme in positional economics (F. Hirsh) or group theory in social psychology. The preference for low-cost policies is well documented in the literature on climate change adaptation (for example A. Diekmann). I would advise the authors to add a section on how their results fit into the present status of knowledge about the phenomena that they describe. Where do the confirm what is already known where do they add something new?
- The conclusions are partially redundant with the discussion. However, if the discussion is more focused on comparing the results with the literature, the conclusions can be kept as they are.
- The paper needs a thorough language editing (grammatical errors, misleading expressions, and awkward wording).
- In summary, the paper is a valuable contribution to the field of behavioral studies on climate change adaptation and includes an excellent combination of methods for reaching a convincing triangulation. However, it needs some revisions with respect to organization, precision and integration into the existing body of literature.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-475-RC2
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RC2: 'Reply on RC1', Ortwin Renn, 19 Mar 2025
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