Managing for Water Scarcity in the Western United States

The western United States is experiencing increasingly severe water scarcity challenges due to a combination of climate change-driven aridification and a history of institutionalized overuse, as well as a diversification of modern demands. Decision makers and water managers are seeking innovative ways to protect access to water and stretch dwindling supplies further than ever before. Addressing these challenges and promoting sustainable water management in the region requires more than a technical fix, however: it necessitates understanding how changing supplies and demands interact with various social, legal, and policy contexts. This talk will provide examples of research at this nexus than span locations and water source types in the western U.S.

In the first part of this talk, Dr. Perrone will discuss how stakeholder integration predicts protection from groundwater depletion. Integrating diverse stakeholders into water policies has been theorized to improve protection from losing access to water, but empirical evidence is lacking. Perrone and her colleagues evaluate more than 100 management plans, which are a new legal requirement in California as part of the state’s first comprehensive groundwater management legislation, to quantify how well stakeholders are integrated into plans and protected from groundwater depletion. Their analysis shows that the majority of plans do not integrate or protect the majority of their stakeholders, but when plans do integrate stakeholders, those stakeholders are more likely to be protected from depletion. Integration is especially important for marginalized groups in California, which depend disproportionally on shallow groundwater, resulting in heightened undesirable impacts when groundwater levels decline.

In the second part of this talk, Dr. Koebele will discuss a major upcoming water governance transition in the Colorado River Basin (CRB). The Colorado River provides water for 40 million people and supports a $1.4 trillion economy in the western U.S. However, historical overallocation and overuse, coupled with accelerating aridification and declining runoff, threaten water security in the basin. Moreover, the collaboratively developed guidelines that have been used to manage shortage in the CRB over the last two decades have recently expired, and the current policy process to develop replacement rules has stagnated due to high levels of conflict, creating substantial uncertainty for water managers and users alike. Drawing on data from 75 interviews with past and present policy makers in the CRB, this talk will provide insight into the shift from collaboration to conflict in CRB governance, factors driving current policy making stagnation, and potential consequences for water management in the coming years.

Bios
Debra Perrone is an Associate Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Debra integrates research methods from engineering, physical science, and law to inform water sustainability and policy; she uses a wide-spectrum of outlets to disseminate her research, including peer-reviewed journals, policy briefs, and interactive online dashboards. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of California, Debra was a postdoctoral research scholar at Stanford University. She received her PhD in Environmental Engineering at Vanderbilt University in 2014 and was awarded first honors as the Graduate School’s Founder’s Medalist. Debra received the Hydrologic Sciences Early Career Award from the American Geophysical Union (2022) and a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (2023).

Elizabeth A. Koebele is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she is also Affiliated Faculty in the Graduate Program of Hydrologic Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado-Boulder. Elizabeth researches and teaches about water policy and management in the western United States, with a focus on understanding the impacts of collaborative policy-making processes on governance and environmental outcomes in the Colorado River Basin. Her work has been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and others, including through an NSF CAREER award (2021). She also co-edits the scholarly journal Policy & Politics.

All seminars will be presented online live. Seminar recordings will be posted later. Please register in advance for all talks.

Co-hosts: Devon Kerins, University College Dublin; Bryn Stewart, Caltech; Marguerite Xenopoulos, Trent University, Canada; Margaret Zimmer, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Li Li, Penn State