Doctoral Dissertation Research: Climate Change Effects on U.S. Water Resources Management

University South Carolina Research Foundation, Columbia SC

Investigators

Abstract

One of the great challenges and opportunities for the 21st century involve the physical effects of a variable and changing climate as well as human adaptation to that variability and change. This Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement project will address the potential for adaptation of water resources management at the river basin scale. The nature-society tradition within geography provides a multi-scale, integrated, and transdisciplinary platform for this investigation. The doctoral candidate will examine four basins (the Colorado, Platte, and Delaware rivers as well as the Everglades) in order to gain a diverse national perspective. Water resource managers need to proactively plan for current climate variability as well as future greenhouse-gas induced climate change to effectively and equitably allocate water resources among human and ecosystem needs. This may involve assessing and ultimately changing existing water use priorities as finite and variable delivery of water changes under increasingly complex human institutional, population, and environmental maintenance circumstances. The student will use qualitative methods, including observation, interviews, and questionnaires, to survey diverse basin stakeholders and water managers. Assessing climate change-motivated adaptations by water managers in the context of unique physical and human basin attributes is the ultimate goal of the project. The study will generalize from the specific cases to provide applicable lessons learned to inform more sustainable and equitable U.S. water management. This project is expected to provide a new contribution to scientific knowledge of climate change impacts by addressing how diverse water resource decision-makers determine water management adaptations in light of the uncertain impacts of climate variability and change on the basin scale. The project builds on an important and continually developing arena of applications regarding how water managers accommodate uncertain events and how those uncertainties influence the decision making of water managers and stakeholders. This research will improve the quality of decision making by providing a bridge between science and policy to inform applied environmental management. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.