Shafiqul Islam

When severe floods struck southeastern Bangladesh in August 2024, competing explanations emerged. Meteorological analysis revealed that extreme precipitation was exacerbated by the Madden‐Julian Oscillation and jet stream dynamics. However, alternative narratives proliferated on social media, particularly claims that India deliberately released water from upstream dams. This study synthesizes hydrometeorological data and social media analysis to examine the divergence between scientific evidence and social narratives. Despite hydrometeorological explanations, misinformation attributing floods to intentional dam releases gained traction because it aligned with existing sentiments in Bangladesh. While these narratives did not appear to materially impact disaster response in 2024, similar patterns elsewhere demonstrate the potential harm. Effective flood management requires aligning scientific data with narratives that motivate collective action. We argue that both India and Bangladesh face mutual vulnerabilities that give misinformation its power but can also facilitate cooperation. Drawing on the water diplomacy literature, we propose a pilot flood early warning initiative on the Feni and Gomati rivers, combining data sharing with community‐based outreach through locally trusted individuals and institutions, as a practical first step toward strengthening transboundary flood preparedness, countering divisive misinformation, and achieving a flood‐resilient system.

Key Points: The editors thank the 2025 peer reviewers

As sea level rise intensifies coastal risk, adaptation is often hampered by fragmented governance. While existing research has considered coastal adaptation governance from multiple lenses, there are few models that attempt to capture and quantify differences between adaptation outcomes under contrasting governance regimes. This study develops a highly stylized agent-based model of Boston Harbor to evaluate how three adaptation regimes—non-cooperation, voluntary cooperation, and a centralized regional authority—perform under varying assumptions about sea level rise, discounting, financing access, and flood variability. Results show that coordinated governance, particularly through a regional authority, can reduce cumulative damage and increase net benefits, although adaptation costs rise. However, these gains can be conditional: under scenarios with modest sea level rise or abundant financing, voluntary or uncoordinated adaptation may perform similarly. In some cases, we demonstrate how specific agents fare worse under cooperative regimes, especially in voluntary coalitions. Notably, governance structure, financing, and discounting explain more outcome variation than stochastic flood events—but a large share of variance remains unexplained, pointing to the influence of local dynamics and emergent behavior. Although representing coastal governance contains many uncertainties, these findings reinforce perceptions that regional solutions can help avoid significant damage from future flood events.

Chaotic dynamics are ubiquitous in many real-world systems, ranging from biological and industrial processes to climate dynamics and the spread of viruses. These systems are characterized by high sensitivity to initial conditions, making it challenging to predict their future behavior confidently. In this study, we propose a novel deep-learning framework that addresses this challenge by directly exploiting the long-term compounding of local prediction errors during model training, aiming to extend the time horizon for reliable predictions of chaotic systems. Our approach observes the future trajectories of initial errors at a time horizon, modeling the evolution of the loss to that point through the use of two major components: (1) a recurrent architecture (Error Trajectory Tracing) designed to trace the trajectories of predictive errors through phase space, and (2) a training regime, Horizon Forcing, that pushes the model’s focus out to a predetermined time horizon. We validate our method on three classic chaotic systems and six real-world time series prediction tasks with chaotic characteristics. The results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

The Water Diplomacy Handbook brings together guiding principles, processes, practical tools, and actionable insights for developing and strengthening cooperative processes to improve the governance and management of shared water resources. It addresses water challenges that resist universal solutions and emphasizes context-dependent strategies across transnational, subnational, and community scales. This chapter introduces two pathways to help readers navigate the handbook effectively. The first pathway, Working Together, guides readers based on their role in a water diplomacy process and the roles of other stakeholders, emphasizing the interactions among the knowledge, decision-making, resource, and impacted communities. The second pathway, What Matters and Why, organizes content thematically around key factors that influence the processes and outcomes of water diplomacy. These include flexibility and adaptability, the design and management of negotiated problem-solving processes, the influence of shared heritage and narratives, the role of divergent worldviews, and additional factors such as scale, uncertainty, metrics, trust and legitimacy, power asymmetries, and the impact of technology and infrastructure. By synthesizing both pathways, the handbook provides an accessible and adaptable structure that allows readers to quickly identify relevant chapters without requiring sequential reading. This dual-navigation approach makes it a valuable reference for practitioners, decision-makers, and researchers seeking to better develop and sustain cooperative processes over water.

This chapter introduces water diplomacy as an actionable approach to addressing water challenges in an increasingly interconnected world. While predictions of “water wars” from the 1990s have not materialized, growing pressures from climate change, population growth, and development have heightened the need for cooperative water management across physical, political, and social boundaries. When scientific certainty is limited and societal consensus is lacking, water diplomacy provides a way forward. Rather than prescribing generalizable solutions, this handbook presents water diplomacy as a process of building enduring relationships that foster collaborative, negotiated, creative problem-solving for mutual gains. Although direct state-to-state water conflicts remain rare, emerging challenges—such as unilateral actions, weakening global norms, and climate-driven uncertainties—demand a framework that synthesizes scientific rigor with negotiated problem-solving. This handbook offers that framework, combining conceptual insights, practical tools, and real-world case studies to support diverse stakeholders in navigating water-related negotiations and decision-making. Water diplomacy extends beyond transboundary disputes. It applies to any water challenge that requires cooperation among multiple actors and institutions, from local communities to national and international arenas, making it an essential tool for sustainable and equitable water governance.

The Routledge Handbook of Water Diplomacy is a comprehensive guide to understanding and practicing water diplomacy – a framework for building relationships, negotiating shared interests, and managing complex water challenges across physical, political, and societal boundaries. In an era marked by rising scarcity, deepening uncertainty, and growing geopolitical tension, this timely volume offers actionable insights for negotiated problem-solving grounded in both scientific understanding and diplomatic skill. Moving beyond abstract theory and technical fixes, the Handbook introduces a dual-pathway structure designed to meet the diverse needs of its users. The “Working Together” pathway invites readers to engage with water diplomacy through the lens of their roles, whether as professionals, decision-makers, funders, researchers, or affected communities. The “What Matters and Why” pathway highlights key thematic dimensions, including process design, adaptive learning, trust-building, divergent worldviews, and the management of uncertainty. Together, these pathways guide readers through a wide range of case studies, from transboundary river basins to subnational disputes and community-scale water systems, demonstrating how water diplomacy can resolve conflict, enable cooperation, and support adaptive, context-sensitive 'learning by doing' under conditions of complexity and change. Whether addressing a transboundary dispute or a local allocation challenge, this book provides guiding principles, practical tools, and real-world cases to support water solutions that are scientifically credible, socially inclusive, and politically feasible. The Routledge Handbook of Water Diplomacy serves as an essential reference volume for students and scholars of water diplomacy, water governance and water resource management, as well as for policymakers and water professionals who are seeking actionable insights into the nuanced challenges they encounter as they work to promote a more sustainable and equitable water future. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY- NC- SA) license.

The most pressing water challenges of our time are complex, crossing natural, societal, and political boundaries. These challenges cannot be adequately addressed through traditional, reductionist approaches that rely solely on metrics like water scarcity or global crisis narratives. Water diplomacy responds to this complexity by offering a principled and pragmatic framework that fosters enduring relationships across scales and sectors. Rather than focusing solely on conflict resolution, water diplomacy plays a threefold role in mitigating conflict, incentivizing cooperation, and operationalizing adaptive governance. Case studies such as Sukhomajri, the Great Basin, and the Sava River illustrate how water diplomacy can be applied at community, subnational, and transnational scales. This chapter introduces seven key propositions that guide readers throughout the handbook, offering a structured approach to navigating the nuanced world of water cooperation and governance.

Water diplomacy acknowledges the absence of universal solutions to complex water challenges. Instead, it offers core principles: respecting scientific facts, employing collaborative problem-solving processes, recognizing enabling conditions, practicing adaptive learning, and embracing principled pragmatism. In our epilogue to this handbook, we propose three actionable insights: making a distinction between quantifiable uncertainty and value-based ambiguity, acknowledging the importance of institutional differences in water diplomacy processes and outcomes, and, likewise, the imperative of understanding how and why context matters in a particular case. Rather than prescribing solutions, water diplomacy provides a flexible framework that balances scientific rigor with social and political realities. Looking forward, the handbook calls for a “Decade of Water Diplomacy” focused on cooperation, emphasizing that success in water governance requires building relationships that enable stakeholders to accept shared decisions even when imperfect.

This study presents a conceptual framework to analyze water management cases as an evolving process of a coupled system. It examines the evolution of interactions of system elements (variables, processes, actors, and institutions) of a coupled natural and human system using Sukhomajri as a case study. Although this case study is widely cited as evidence of the initial success and later failure of the Integrated Water Resource Management paradigm, our argument here is that the evidence for the judgment of success or failure is premature and can be interpreted and understood differently. We show how phase changes in system dynamics – from simple to complicated to complex – are manifested in this case study over time. The proposed conceptual frame of phase changes is used to identify the processes and practices that took place in managing water problems in Sukhomajri. The study identifies how the processes that arose in different phases were managed or neglected as well as the interventions that either facilitated, hindered, or misinterpreted the emergent nature of a coupled system. The analysis is divided into three sections. We begin by establishing the conceptual frame of the analysis as an evolving coupled system and then illustrate the evolution in the processes and practices of natural resource management in Sukhomajri. We show some consequences of not fully appreciating the formulation and implementation of different intervention strategies as an evolving process with emergent properties. It shows how the meteoric rise and fall of the effectiveness of Sukhomajri may be related to (mis)understanding and (mis)alignment of different management interventions as the system evolved and phase changes occurred. Finally, we discuss and connect the evolving dynamics of Sukhomajri with some of the water diplomacy concepts, ideas, challenges, and tools discussed in this handbook. From an operational perspective, a key takeaway lesson is to recognize the evolving nature of coupled system dynamics as different interventions are implemented and monitored. Additionally, we urge practitioners to pay particular attention in identifying and implementing interventions as phase changes occur – from simple to complicated and to complex systems – to remain adaptive in ensuring desired outcomes.