Climate extremes, water stress and collective management

Climate extremes, water stress and collective management: lessons from irrigation systems and transboundary rivers in three contested basins

Speakers: Dustin Garrick (Oxford University) and Sergio Villamayor-Tomas (Humboldt University)

Over 40% of the world population will live in river basins experiencing severe water stress by 2050 according to the OECD Environmental Outlook. This is not a distant challenge, however. Droughts, floods and rapidly growing demands already present ‘stress tests’ for semi-arid regions facing scarce water supplies and limited infrastructure to manage floods. Such disturbances unfold over different scales from the local to the global and span over short and long periods of time. This presentation presents theory and evidence about issues of scale, disturbances and policy responses in community-based and transboundary water management. Field work in Australia, Spain, and the US is used as the launching pad for a new collaborative project in the Rio Grande Basin along the US-Mexico border.