RAISE: Bringing Together Diverse Perspectives on Water

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Major knowledge gaps exist in STEM relating to water, including how and why climate change will impact water, how hydrological changes will differently impact different communities throughout the Southwest and elsewhere, and how Indigenous communities have addressed water issues, especially with regard to climate change adaptation and dispossession. But exploration of past and present-day environments and uses and understandings of water can provide critical information, transforming the ability to understand the processes impacting water and the relationship to water and various cultures in the long-term. Therefore this program will develop and braid together different strands of research from multiple disciplines as new windows into the regional impacts of rising greenhouse gas levels on the water cycle and climate. The research will be transformative in that it will examine and share diverse perspectives on the water cycle, including what water is and how people use, value, and steward it, how different fields and people approach questions about water in the context of environmental change, what different disciplinary and cultural perspectives are on water sustainability and histories in a region, and how these diverse perspectives on water inform the ways we think and communicate about environmental futures. Taken together, these multiple interwoven strands will help us construct a more comprehensive picture of how and why rainfall and evaporation have responded to climate change and will thus provide a means to evaluate climate model skill and representation, while gathering data on water issues, past, present, and future, facing Indigenous communities whose waters are in the region, and developing and piloting an inclusive science model.This proposal seeks to bring together and share diverse perspectives on water through convergence research, which is referred to as braiding knowledge, which will help navigate towards solutions that could address environmental challenges in the Southwestern United States. It also will represent a model for convergence research on water in other regions, and climate change more broadly, beyond this project. Knowledge of deep history, obtained through geoscience, ethnography, and archaeology, can inform science, support Indigenous sovereignty, and guide decision-making at tribal, regional, and national levels. Knowledge of community water values and needs can and should inform water management and science. Braided, this knowledge can support climate change adaptation. The specific goals of the project are:- To use novel interdisciplinary approaches to constrain how and why precipitation and evaporation rates respond to changing climate forcing in different regions of the Southwest.- To gather data on the water issues, past and present, facing Indigenous communities whose waters are in, or are conveyed to, the Los Angeles basin, and other regions.- To broaden participation through inclusive practices with the adaptation and assessment of a new inclusive science model to the geosciences and environmental science.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.