Quantitative datasets of societal value, technology and policy for human-water system modelling

Value, technology, and policy are three interactive societal factors affecting the willingness, capacity, and formal rules of human interactions with water. Existing human-water models generally neglect the dynamic and accumulated processes of these factors, failing to explain the societal causes of changes in water practices. Here we developed nine process-based quantitative datasets of Value-Technology-Policy regarding water. They contain 17,003 newspaper articles and 801 public submissions to reflect different water values, 1337 ancient technologies and 40,303 patents for water technologies, and 720 water policy documents at various spatial (national, regional, state, and river basin) and temporal (decades to hundreds of years) scales. A consistent, 4-step content analysis approach was adopted to identify, collect and manually code five key elements (processes) of value, technology and policy: the time (“when”), location (“where”), actor (“who”), theme (“what”), and perspective/tone (“what effects”). Inter-coder reliability tests were conducted to ensure the consistency and validity of the data. These datasets will contribute to more process-oriented understanding of societal factors for improved human-water system modelling in the Anthropocene.