Conference: Climate Resilience and Managing Water Resources

Water sits at the nexus of every human activity. Agriculture, power generation, transportation, public health, and industrial processes depend on consistent availability and quality of water resources. When these conditions are not met, significant disease, famine, and conflict can ensue.

But water resources are complicated, and water quantity and quality are not consistently distributed around the planet, causing water inequities. These disparities are only getting worse with ongoing climate change, and any disproportionately felt effects are likely to be amplified. If we are going to improve resilience to climate change, we need to improve water resource access, management, and equity.

Because water needs are ubiquitous and pervasive, there are no one-size-fits-all answers. We need a whole-of-society approach to addressing water resilience, and we don't really know what that is yet.

This project will convene a three-day Convergence Accelerator Workshop to bring sharper focus on existing research gaps in water resources. This workshop will bring together experts from academia, industry, government, society, and numerous other stakeholder communities to identify critical research gaps that may have been missed by previous narrowly focused efforts and will highlight high priority areas to be addressed in a further, larger program.

There will be particular focus on connections between the research community and extensive efforts on the operational side (such as at USDA and others) for maximum societal impact. In doing so, the workshop will galvanize the research community and build a network of partnerships between a wide variety of stakeholders, especially beyond academia. One of the main purposes of the workshop is to identify strategies and effectiveness of different approaches to climate resilience and water resources that will have societal impact in the next few years.

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.