CAREER: CAS-Climate: Socio hydrology to link climate change and its societal impacts

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Water mediates the relation between climate change and its most dramatic societal impacts, including food shortages, migration, and conflict. Yet, questions remain about how specific changes in rain patterns can cause excess or insufficient water with the potential to beget such crises. There is poor integration between disciplines studying the causes and societal impact of climate change. Climate variables are often directly used as proxies for water availability in climate impact studies, thus missing the important role of hydrology in dampening (or amplifying) the effect of climate change and shaping people's response to it. This project develops the theoretical, empirical, experimental, and educational tools necessary for hydrology to be properly leveraged to understand — and mitigate — the societal impacts of climate change. These new tools incorporate four key hydrologic characteristics of climate-related crises that are not currently simultaneously addressed: local scale, non-stationary drivers, human- water feedback, and data-scarcity. The project provides interdisciplinary training for one graduate and nine undergraduate students and creates valuable education and outreach material (including a web-based simulation game) for easy use by researchers, policy makers and community educators outside of hydrology. In the theoretical realm, the project clarifies the effect of irrigation withdrawals on changing flow regimes by incorporating human- water feedbacks into a widely used process-based probabilistic model of catchment-scale water storage dynamics. In the empirical realm, the project introduces statistical tools to leverage natural experiments for causal inferences in observational studies. This allows hydrological changes in data-limited regions to be attributed ex-post to their natural and anthropogenic drivers. In the experimental and educational realms, the web-based simulation game will serve as an experimental platform to determine the relationship between the properties of hydrological change and water users’ response to it. The game will simultaneously serve as an open platform to integrate research, outreach, and education at scale. It will be leveraged for high school and undergraduate education and used to support climate preparedness training for water and policy professionals in the US and abroad.This project is jointly funded by the GEO/EAR Hydrologic Sciences Program and the SBE/BCS Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences Program, with additional support from the Directorate of Education and Human Resources.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.