Advancing the Use of Drought Early Warning Systems in the Upper Colorado River Basin

The largely rural Western Slope of Colorado encompasses much of the headwaters of the Colorado River, a critical regional water resource used to meet multiple demands across a landscape that is frequently subject to drought. Water managers and users in this region rely on snowpack as a form of seasonal water storage as well as an indicator of drought. Climate change projections indicate that the regional warming trend will continue, causing the snowpack to melt earlier and produce less runoff for the same precipitation input, and potentially reducing its utility as a drought indicator. Read more ...

Balancing Severe Decision Conflicts under Climate Extremes in Water Resource Management

Over the past several years there have been increasing calls for decision support tools in the area of climate and acknowledgement that changing extremes add to an already challenging decision environment for water managers. Recurring droughts, flood events, and concerns over extreme events in the future have created a strong interest among water managers in the Front Range of Colorado about how to plan in the face of these extremes. Traditional methods of identifying alternatives for water supply management may not fully capture the range of existing preferred alternatives, meaning that utilities may miss some of the solutions that appropriately balance among tradeoffs. Read more ...

Building a Network of VAR (Vulnerability, Adaptation, Resilience) Researchers in the Intermountain West

The intermountain west is home to many researchers who study aspects of climate vulnerability, adaptation and resilience. Most of us attend national conferences such as AAG, AGU, AMS and the like, and many of us work within specialized networks such as fire, water, forest ecosystems, and so on. However, building resilience to climate change is a goal that requires bringing together different perspectives and sectors in order to ensure that system linkages are considered at the regional scale. This project would be the starting point for building a sustained network for resilience that links researchers and practitioners engaged in knowledge-action research across the region. Our goal is to make visible and develop the researcher network that we would then build on in future years to create a more complete practitioner/researcher network for engaged research. Read more ...

Interactions of Drought and Climate Adaptation (IDCA) for Urban Water

This project, funded by the NOAA Sectoral Applications Research Program (SARP), examined how drought policies interact with both short-term drought and long-term climate change. It asked whether adjustment today or in the past leads to more resilient systems across climate time scales. The project focused on urban water systems across the US and how they responded to drought. Researchers then used a looked for patterns in those responses to understand how such drought policies prepare cities for the adaptation challenge of the future. Read more ...

Knowledge, Power and the Coproduction of Climate Information for Adaptation to Climate Change in Tanzania

Lisa Dilling, Meaghan Daly, Mara Goldman and Eric Lovell are conducting a project that aims to improve understanding of processes to effectively link climate information and adaptation at national and local scales in Tanzania. The approach is to explicitly recognize and examine the ways in which the varying epistemological traditions and relations of power among vulnerable communities, disaster management professionals, and climate experts influence the perceived value of climate information for improved early warning and climate adaptation. Read more ...