“We have to ask ourselves, are we doing the right thing? Or are we using scientific information to do the wrong thing more precisely?”

—Roger Pulwarty (Director, NOAA National Integrated Drought Information System), NCAR Jr. Faculty Forum, July 2010

Changes in the availability and distribution of water have substantial effects on humans and the ecosystems upon which we depend. While we have always experienced variability in the availability of water across a variety of time scales, anthropogenic climate change will likely bring substantial additional effects on water cycles and water resource management, such as changes in timing, amount, and patterns of precipitation; decreasing snow packs; enhanced droughts; and more frequent and intense floods and storms, among others. The scientific community faces the challenge of helping societies plan for climate and water uncertainties in the context of complex and changing socioenvironmental processes such as multiple and competing water demands, population growth, land-use changes, and energy extraction and production. Meeting this challenge requires utilizing the strengths of diverse disciplines and working in synergistic collaboration with key stakeholders.

In the spirit of this effort, a group of 27 junior faculty and early-career scientists, composed of social scientists, atmospheric scientists, and hydrologists, met in Boulder, Colorado, in July 2010 for a Junior Faculty Forum sponsored by NCAR (www.asp.ucar.edu/ecsa/jff/jff10.php). Expert presentations and discussions focused on adaptation of human societies and water systems to climate change. In this article, the members of this group present a synthesis of our ideas and recommendations for catalyzing scientific frontiers in use-inspired water–climate–society research.

We realize that there are some who have been working on this intersection and deserve to be credited, but doing so is beyond the scope, word limit, and style of this article. To address this, we created a supplementary website, www.ral.ucar.edu/projects/wcs, which includes many of the seminal works across multiple disciplines that we encourage readers to visit for references and additional resources. We intend this site to be dynamic, and we invite readers to contribute to it via the “Submit a Resource” function in order to populate the site with what the peer community deems most relevant.

THE WATER–CLIMATE–SOCIETY NEXUS.

“We move water around to satisfy our needs in places we want to live. So, for adaptation, the places that we move water from, if they're vulnerable to climate change, we are also vulnerable.”

—Roger Pulwarty (Director, NOAA National Integrated Drought Information System), NCAR Jr. Faculty Forum, July 2010

Water is critical for all human and natural systems, from ecosystems and environmental sustainability to agriculture, food security, and public health, as well as to energy production and industry. Water is part of the fundamental dynamic, thermodynamic, and physical processes of the climate system, with complex nonlinear interactions and feedbacks across a broad range of spatial and temporal scales. Water is thus a primary nexus between climate and society, and the impacts of climate change on societies are likely to manifest most severely through impacts on water resources and societal responses to these impacts.

The anticipated hydrological, ecological, and societal impacts from climate change challenge a number of long-held assumptions in water resource management. Climate change science teaches us that long-term planning (e.g., decadal or longer) can no longer rely on the past as a primary predictor of future conditions (i.e., assumptions of stationarity must be replaced with considerations of nonstationarity). We are likely to see climatic and hydrologic conditions that are outside of our range of direct experience, even for short-term planning (e.g., days, months, a year, 5–10 years), and could ultimately shift to a new “normal” or baseline state. The uncertainties in climate change projections and impacts on social and ecological systems present profound scientific and planning challenges. One scientific challenge is to develop robust scenarios of future climate impacts on hydrology. Predicting human behavior adds layers of complexity to projecting future impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation to environmental changes. It also presents challenges as to how we organize the production of scientific knowledge on climate and water and its use in society.

Adaptation to climate change will require innovative, flexible institutional and organizational structures to meet the challenges presented by complex patterns of change. It will also necessitate overcoming the difficulty of integrating various worldviews and ways of knowing across disciplines and cultures. The heavy reliance on highly uncertain model outputs at scales relevant to decision making along with a broad array of management regimes from water to energy underpin this challenge. Climate change adaptation compels the need for a new relationship between society and science that drives advances across all disciplines. Historical analogues are often invoked to show the human capacity for such huge endeavors (e.g., the race to space, the Manhattan Project); however, the scale and pace of climate change on multiple time and space scales require a degree of unity beyond anything accomplished in the past. This is of greatest concern given the barriers that can cause inaction or resistance to proactive change in societal systems.

THE NEED FOR A BIGGER TOOLBOX.

A spectrum of research, from basic to applied to participatory, is needed to develop a dynamic and usable “toolbox” of innovative approaches, methods, and technologies that are truly integrative. Table 1 includes some of the frontiers in water–climate–society research that we see as vital to this enterprise. We must insure a balance of opportunities for research from myriad disciplines without prioritizing certain ones at the expense of others, which can otherwise lead to disciplinary “turf wars.” Using the example of optimizing water systems in the arid American West, alterations to water system design and operation might be implemented under a more robust, comprehensive adaptation strategy instead of outdated “command and control” top-down strategies that can either negate or conflict with smaller-scale ecosystem or community processes. Water management systems based on stationarity assumptions (i.e., that water and climate cycles remain within a certain range of variability) could be replaced by analytical and numerical strategies and techniques based on a nonstationarity framework, borrowing from understanding in geography and applied and physical climatology. This would necessarily involve water managers to integrate the science with real-world applications and expectations. Although disciplinary pieces have been and continue to be developed, a completely interdisciplinary, participatory framework to address nonstationarity is not currently available.

Table 1.

Scientific frontiers of water–climate–society science (see www.ral.ucar.edu/projects/wcs for additional details and frontiers).

View Table

A common barrier to interdisciplinary work is the simple fact that disciplines often hold different points of view or entry points into problems, define concepts differently, and have conflicting priorities and scales of analysis. As an example, consider use of terms such as “small scale” and “large scale” that can exist even within disciplines, such as the time and spatial scales of weather phenomena versus longer-term, larger-scale processes of climate. Therefore, a first step in interdisciplinary work is to assure use of shared concepts or, where that is not entirely feasible, to offer explicit explanations of the language that is used by each discipline. To define the language we use herein, adaptation means a process and/or an outcome of decision making that results in the fundamental, long-term systemic change of a social system in response to or in anticipation of climate variability or change. Adaptation assessment includes understanding the vulnerability of systems to suffer harm from climate variability and changes to hydrological cycles and water resources. It also examines adaptive capacity, which implies the potential of a system or population to modify its features and behavior so as to better cope with existing and anticipated climatic stresses.

Climate change adaptation assessment necessarily implies working within a context of decision making and human responses to change. Water–climate–society adaptation research requires an interdisciplinary, problem-oriented focus by the very nature of the questions involved. For example, understanding how water and populations in the western United States might respond to climate change implies that climatologists, hydrologists, social scientists (and other scientists and engineers), and stakeholders must all address pieces of the problem in an iterative and ongoing fashion. We know, for example, that the Colorado River Basin “Law of the River” compacts were negotiated in a relatively wet time period and when society did not understand or have data on long-term climate trends to place early twentieth-century streamflow amounts into perspective. Despite our best efforts, we still see a chasm between scientific understanding about anthropogenic climate change risks and water resource management and governance in the western United States. This multifaceted and complex problem has catalyzed efforts in academia (e.g., the Western Water Assessment at CU Boulder: http://wwa.colorado.edu); the federal government (the Bureau of Reclamation Colorado Basin Study: www.usbr.gov/lc/region/programs/crbstudy.html); and nonprofits (e.g., Carpe Diem West; http://carpediemwest.org), to name a few, who are evaluating various aspects of the same water–climate–society problem. Yet, truly interdisciplinary, integrated social-natural sciences adaptation research is on the periphery at best, and at worst it is nonexistent.

While the study of climate-change adaptation is now several decades old in some corners of academia (e.g., in human geography, economics, political science), connecting this science to practice is in its infancy when viewed on a societal scale. The array of adaptation literature that exists offers specific recommendations and case studies, but also warns of those adaptation models that fail when disconnected from context and social and policy priorities (which is, unfortunately, the rule rather than the exception). When we are working with common definitions and understandings, physical and social scientists can better address problems of adaptation and vulnerability. However, the level of support and capacity for such interdisciplinary efforts lags behind the need. Within academia, where there is considerable potential for pursuing transformative, interdisciplinary work, it may be a “risk” for early-career academics and scientists to pursue such work, given the need to cross disciplinary (and often departmental or programmatic) boundaries. This problem also applies to the difficulty of funding agencies or sponsors finding appropriately qualified reviewers of interdisciplinary proposals, as well as journal editors who must find reviewers who are knowledgeable in various disciplines. Increasingly, interdisciplinary proposals and journal submissions are reviewed by people who are likely very competent in their respective fields, but perhaps do not have the cross-disciplinary understanding to provide fair and/or substantive critiques of submissions outside their purview. In our view, a question that needs to be addressed is: What can be done to move past such institutional barriers?

THE PATH FORWARD.

There is a clear need to engage in interdisciplinary research in order to address complex issues related to water, climate, and society. This in itself is not new, and yet many barriers remain for early career academics that inhibit engaging in such efforts. The infrastructure of our research institutions, such as university departments, funding programs, and government and nongovernment research organizations, often do not readily facilitate researchers to work collaboratively or develop a basic understanding of the theories and methodologies of other disciplines. Compounding this problem is the challenge of identifying avenues and outlets for conducting applied research within academic settings (such as is found within industry and other partnerships).

For those wishing to engage in collaborative, interdisciplinary research that addresses pressing societal problems, how do we break disciplinary and institutional inertia and move forward? The appeal of interdisciplinary research between climatologists, hydrologists, and social scientists is attested to by the cutting-edge ideas and work of the NCAR Junior Faculty Forum participants and speakers and the new and innovative water–climate–society initiatives that are already underway at universities and institutes in the United States and elsewhere (many examples are included in Table 1 and the supplementary website). However, the sustainability of these efforts is part of a much needed—yet slow to transform—culture change. The lessons learned from successful previous interdisciplinary initiatives can guide subsequent projects. Based on forum participants' experiences, we have compiled four general suggestions for tackling the applied and interdisciplinary realm of water–climate–society research challenges.

OUR VIEW IN CLOSING.

In summary, we believe that meeting the challenge of adapting water resource management and governance to climate change requires exploring new frontiers of science necessary to inform and guide policy and decision making. To advance these new frontiers requires judiciously removing organizational and institutional barriers that impede interdisciplinary, participatory research with key stakeholders and decision-makers. It entails creating new incentives and structures that promote productive, ongoing, collaborative relationships between scientists and decision makers. Building resilience and adapting to climate variability and change will take focused time and effort along with evaluation and reflection as we collectively learn more about the effectiveness of our actions and policies to mitigate and adapt to climate changes. The nature of water–climate–society problems is dynamic, and so we must also evolve in our pursuit of knowledge and in the conduct of science to respond to the challenge.