Adapting to Climate Change: Facilitating Scientist-End User Interaction

1. WGA/WSWC/CADWR Climate Change Research Needs Workshop May 16-18, 2007 Irvine, CA Adapting to Climate Change: Facilitating Scientist-End User Interaction Katharine Jacobs Executive Director Arizona Water Institute

2. Arizona Water Institute A consortium of Arizona’s universitiesfocused on improving quality of life in Arizona and throughout the world through water research, education and technology… 400 water related faculty/staff 3 state agencies Public and private partners

3. Arizona Water Institute’s Structure: Executive Committee: Gov’s Office, ASU, NAU, and UA VPs for Research, Arizona Dept. of Water Resources Advisory Board Water Institute Executive Director Coordinators at NAU, UA, ASU AWI Assoc. Director, Arizona Dept. of Environmental Quality AWI Assoc. Director, Arizona Dept. of Water Resources AWI Assoc. Director, Arizona Dept. of Commerce

4. Water Sustainability Program ■ NSF/SRC Engineering Research Center for Environmentally Benign Semiconductor Manufacturing ■ NSF Center for Sustainability of semi-Arid Hydrology and Riparian Areas (SAHRA) ■ NSF Water Quality Center ■ Water Resources Research Center ■ Merriam-Powell Center for Environmental Research ■ Watershed Research and Education Program ■ Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals ■ Center for Sustainable Environments ■ Western Regional Center DOE's National Institute for Climatic Change Research ■ Central Arizona Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research ■ Decision Center for a Desert City ■ Global Institute of Sustainability ■ NSF Water Quality Center ■ Morrison Institute for Public Policy ■ Institute for the Study of Planet Earth ■ Office of Arid Lands Studies ■ NIEHS Superfund Basic Research Program ■ Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy

5. AWI Themes for 2007-2008 • Arizona Hydrologic Information System • Emerging contaminants and treatment technologies • Capacity building/ watershed support • Energy and water sustainability • Climate change/drought/ adaptation • Salinity management & technologies Lower Santa Cruz Replenishment Project

6. AWI Accomplishments • 18 ongoing collaborative projects with public and private partners; 4 internships; 7 faculty incentive grants • Partners include Intel, Salt River Project, Pima County, Metro Water District, the Navajo Nation, the Intertribal Council, the Nature Conservancy, the East Valley Water Forum, ADEQ, ADWR, ADHS, AGS, Gateway Community College, ESRI, Reclamation • Sponsored 10 workshops and conferences

7. Why is this so hard? • Institutional/legal/regulatory context • Laws, policies and rules • Regulatory limits on available options • Risk aversion and uncertainty, failure to recognize risk of NOT acting • Training, culture and precedent • Timing and resources • Investments in the status quo • Language and communication problems • Perceptions/politics

8. Knowledge-Action Systems for Seasonal to Interannual Climate Forecasting, NRC 2004 1) Problem definition that is collaborative but framed by users 2) Appropriate funding relative to mission 3) Long-term investments in capacity building Ingredients of Successful Knowledge Systems:

9. Knowledge-Action Systems for Seasonalto Interannual Climate Forecasting, NRC 2004 4) End to end systems that link user needs to scientific findings and: • Acknowledge the decision context, • Explain the underlying causal relationships, allowing users to manipulate data themselves, • Depend on innovators (early adopters) in establishing the connections, • Are tailored for specific users (sectors), • Maintain relationships (partnerships) over the long term

10. Knowledge-Action Systems for Seasonal to Interannual Climate Forecasting, NRC 2004 5) Boundary organizations and training of intermediaries to translate scientific results for practical use and framing the research questions from the perspective of the user, 6) Designed for learning rather than knowing; flexibility of processes; innovative and responsive; mechanisms for feedback; balance of stability and flexibility.

11. Reframing the Issue: Implications of Climate Change for Water Management • Need a long-term view of climate conditions. • The past is not an analog for the future; even long term and severe droughts of the past are not likely to frame future drought extremes • Lack of stationarity: implications for water management at multiple scales Stott et al. (2000)

12. Reframing Options: Scenario Development • Scenarios as engagement tools • Developing “scenario science” • As a stakeholder support product: improved regional scenarios • Integration across scientific disciplines – mechanism for interdisciplinary work and relevance to stakeholders ASU – Morrison Institute

13. Adaptation requires better information • Strategic design of monitoring programs focused on decision making at local and regional scales; • A new kind of monitoring focused on data management, real-time trend analysis, visualization, and communication with decision makers Salt River Project Monitoring Station

14. http://www.sahra.arizona.edu/wells/ AHIS: Accessible web-based information

16. Adaptation: Revise engineering assumptions • Re-evaluate engineering assumptions re: potential for more extreme events and longer-term droughts • Extremes could be of a different nature • Variability may be outside of the range of our experience • Abrupt changes may result in limited time to respond • Connect energy and water Central Arizona Project • Technological solutions: • conjunctive management, • desalination, • reuse, • weather modification, • expansion of surface storage, • integration of delivery systems

17. Adaptation: Increased use of forecasting tools • Improve understanding of climate drivers and variability at multiple time scales, including decadal scale • Produce better predictive information (based on probabilistic forecasts) Courtesy of Konstantine Georgakakos Improve linkages between large-scale climate models (GCMs) and local conditions through regional hydrologic models.

18. Adaptation: Need to define the limits of conservation • Improvements in efficiency are good IF • Avoid hardening of demand • Maintain a buffer for shortages • Limit environmental impacts • Water pricing, market mechanisms and tax incentives can target specific policy objectives: • Move supplies to higher value uses • Provide incentives for adaptation BUT need to consider equity issues, third party impacts, hardening of demand

19. Adaptation requires understanding and managing human-environment interactions • Interaction of land use change and sensitive ecological systems • Buffering capacity/assimilative capacity of ecosystems • Monitoring for rates of change and potential for crossing thresholds • Lag times • Cascading effects Janetos – Heinz Center Thresholds Study

20. Adaptation requires understanding and managing human-environment interactions • Water quality and quantity – eg reuse of wastewater impacts on aquifers and ecosystems, combined water and sewer systems • Flooding and sea level rise • Aging infrastructure and more extreme events • Growth

21. Adaptation: The Role of Social Science • Develop social science and economic inputs that drive scenarios • Define policy and institutional context • Focus on consumer behavior and political strategies • Develop incentives systems and finance mechanisms that encourage innovation • Help us communicate what we do and don’t know • Design consensus processes

22. Adaptation: The Role of Social Science • Encourage institutional change, within academia and government • Train people to do inter-disciplinary problem solving under real-world constraints • Facilitate long-term relationships between researchers and decision-makers • Develop synthesis products and mechanisms for evaluation and feedback • Provide context-specific analysis of vulnerabilities and adaptation options • Develop life cycle and triple bottom line analysis of alternatives

23. Adaptation Options – State/Regional Adaptation Support Centers • A network of state climate change and drought adaptation centers structured similarly to AWI to engage universities in the local and regional adaptation problems in their areas, but also allow for technology transfer across regions • Work within existing land and resource management programs on adaptation: NRCS, federal land management training programs, reinvent cooperative extension as “sustainability extension”

24. Observations • Every stakeholder has unique needs, interests and levels of sophistication • Integrated knowledge systems are more likely to succeed, but still depend on good leadership and integrators • Adaptation is an urgent need nationally and requires implementation at the local and regional level

25. Conclusions • The question for water managers is no longer whether climate change is happening. • The question is what are we going to do about it?