U.S. Department of Agriculture

This project examines community perceptions and decisions about climate science, economics, and policies associated with resilience strategies that address increasing water scarcity in the Southwest. Strategies to be evaluated include: investments in built infrastructure (e.g., reservoirs and pipelines); incentive-based risk-sharing agreements; and watershed ecosystem services. The project emphasizes how ecosystem services can buffer water impacts of climate change, as well as the potential for climate mitigation as a strategy to enhance water supply security. Project outputs will include a replicable method for co-producing resilient water-related climate adaptation and mitigation strategies, including scientific and economic evaluation. Potential outcomes include improved water supply reliability and cooperation on adapting to shortages for a regional economy that exceeds $3 trillion annually.

In response to prolonged drought conditions and declining storage capacity in Lake Mead, the Bureau of Reclamation called upon Colorado Basin States to develop new drought contingency plans to limit the draw-down of Lake Mead. Arizona’s Drought Contingency Plan calls for significant reductions in surface water supplies delivered to irrigated agriculture in Pinal County. This project considers the effects of these reduced water supplies on: crop production in Pinal county; Arizona dairy production and non-agricultural sectors in the Pinal County economy; and recreational demand around Lakes Mead and Powell. These surface water reductions may reduce the sustainability of agricultural production in Central Arizona.

Drought is a complex phenomenon that can vary widely over space to due to precipitation patterns and in time due to lagging impacts in slowly varying systems. These factors are magnified in the semiarid Southwest U.S., where extreme interannual climate variability, topography, and highly localized precipitation patterns (e.g., monsoon season thunderstorms) create highly varying hydroclimatic patterns in both space and time and subsequent drought impacts. Current climate monitoring networks across Arizona and New Mexico struggle to capture this variability and accurately portray potential drought conditions.

Complementary datasets, like remote sensing greenness, used in conjunction with existing climate data, offer the potential to monitor drought conditions across large landscapes with sparse monitoring networks. Several efforts, including online geovisualization tools to access raw normalized-difference vegetation index (NDVI or greenness) data and more formalized remote sensing-based drought monitoring tools like VegDRI, have been developed over the past decade. A new effort supported by a recent NOAA-SARP/NIDIS grant spurred the development of tool called DroughtView, which takes a slightly different approach in combining cutting-edge online geovisualization tools with derived remote sensing products targeted at detecting drought conditions. DroughtView builds on the success of its precursor, RangeView, which was developed with guidance from agriculturists and resource managers who need environmental monitoring data. The tools in DroughtView are used to monitor biweekly changes in land surface greenness conditions as a proxy for drought impacts at very fine spatial scales across the Southwest U.S. More information can be found at http://droughtview.arizona.edu

DroughtView combines geovisualization tools with remote sensing products to detect drought conditions. The DroughtView tool served as a key piece of information to help the National Resources Conservation Service, US Bureau of Land Management, and US Forest Service range managers determine drought conditions and Farm Services Agency drought disaster assistance eligibility. DroughtView is a web-based decision-support tool for computers and mobile devices that combines satellite-derived measures of surface greenness with additional geospatial data so that users can visualize and evaluate vegetation dynamics across space and over time.

University of Arizona Cooperative Extension and the National Weather Service (NWS) in Tucson have developed a working group focused on engaging the agricultural community of Southeast Arizona. The working group is assessing information needs, providing training opportunities and technical support, as well as conducting applied research and developing new and enhanced decision support tools. Main activities have included several training and needs assessment workshops, the development and maintenance of a listserv with more than 40 subscribers, and the development of new NWS forecast information visualizations and interfaces focused on frost and freezing events.

Resource managers face major challenges in developing medium- and long-term management plans considering the uncertainty arising from various climatic and socioeconomic factors. One approach to circumventing what can be a paralyzing level of uncertainty is Scenario Planning. This approach allows managers to “embrace uncertainty” and strategically prepare for a wide range of possible futures. In this project, we worked with the Cienegas Watershed Partnership to develop a set of scenario narratives, with specific scenario sets for each of four resource areas: Montane, Upland, Riparian, and Cultural. Participants were challenged to consider uncertainties and potential changes in climate, social, technological, economic, environmental, and political forces that are beyond the control of the Cienegas Watershed Partnership. Under the auspices of Scenario Planning, each resource group was able to consider and discuss future sets of conditions and management challenges that generally do not get a lot of attention.

Three newsletters were distributed to middle and upper management personnel across the various state and federal organizations that were involved in this project to keep them apprised of our progress.

Effects of climate change in arid regions include increased variability in water supplies and changes in water demand due to increased temperatures. These effects pose great challenges for water managers and water users in regions already facing water scarcity. Voluntary arrangements between agricultural water users and those seeking more reliable supplies for urban and environmental needs are an important regional adaptation tool. This guidebook series is intended to assist public agencies, non-profit organizations, irrigation districts, cities, and businesses with design and implementation of water acquisition programs to improve water supply reliability during drought and under climate change.

This project involves economic evaluations of the effects of actual and proposed climate change mitigation policies. It compares and contrasts state energy and carbon emission intensity and climate mitigation policies, seeking to examine how state resource endowments affect policy development and resource use. It also examines strategies to sequester carbon or reduce carbon emissions (particularly through adoption of renewable energy technologies).

This project examines the impacts of drought and climate change on climate sensitive sectors in the Southwest, focusing on agriculture, outdoor recreation, and tourism. Drafted a funded grant proposal on Economic Impacts on Drought on Agriculture, Recreational Tourism, and Rural Communities to a combination of NIDIS and the Arizona Department of Water Resources.

Persistent drought and climate change affect water and energy costs, and hence choices made by farms, cities and industrial water and energy users, as well as energy and water providers’ operations. This project examines potential climate change and variability adaptation strategies related to water and energy in the Colorado River and Rio Grande Basins, including northwestern Mexico. Researchers are investigating how climate influences the market price of water and developing a menu of water and energy supply reliability tools with guidelines for using these tools.

This project examines the potential for market mechanisms to facilitate voluntary reallocation of scarce water across different uses, specifically from agricultural to environmental purposes. It considers the scope for using reverse water auctions to obtain water for riparian restoration. This includes study of the economic theory behind reversed auctions as well as lessons from applications. It also examines the scope of the USDA Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP) to complement state and local programs for environmental water acquisitions.

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have access to proprietary data on prices and quantities of water market trades. A hypothesis of the CLIMAS research is that USDA data on crop rental rates can be used to assess what likely water transfer prices will be. We plan to collaborate in the coming year, combining data to test this hypothesis.