Cooperative Agreement for CESU-affiliated Partner with Californian Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit

The US Geological Survey Water Mission Area (WMA)’s Integrated Water Availability Assessments (IWAAs) is offering a funding opportunity to a CESU Partner for research in delivery of assessments of water supplies for human and ecological needs, identification of factors that influence water availability, and identification of potential implications for future water availability to multiple uses and users. To that end, understanding how socioeconomic and policy drivers interact with hydrologic and climate processes and scenarios is essential for providing relevant information to decisionmakers in an increasingly complex, interdependent, and uncertain world. A hydro-economic analysis of how water is used for irrigated agriculture, and what the implications are for local communities and for the region’s food system, can help to better inform these tradeoffs. This work seeks to extend water use modeling capabilities to better characterize and integrate the dimensions of governance, economic incentives, and socioeconomic consequences that are currently omitted in traditional water use modeling.