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Updated
12 October, 2003
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Sustainable
Water Resources in the Next Century, with Special Reference to Global
Climate Change and the Western U.S. USGCRP Seminar, 18 November 1996 
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INTRODUCTION: Dr. Robert Hirsch
SPEAKERS: Dr. Peter H. Gleick
OVERVIEW
State of the World's
Water and Implications for the Western U.S.
As of 1990, nearly 2 billion
people worldwide lacked access to what the United Nations defines as
clean drinking water and adequate sanitation services. The lack of these
basic services leads to an estimated 250 million cases of water-related
disease annually, and between 5 and 10 million deaths, mostly of infants
and small children. Yet we are falling further behind in our race to
provide these services and, between 1990 and 2000, an estimated 900
million more people will be born in regions without access to adequate
clean water. In addition, agricultural production is constrained by
a lack of irrigation water or systems. Unless these problems are addressed,
human suffering in the future will worsen.
At the same time, nearly
half of the world's land area is in an international river basin and
most of these basins lack even the most fundamental agreements on equitable
water sharing. This greatly increases the risk of conflict over scarce
water. There are also signs that we are falling behind in the race to
provide adequate food for the world's growing population. The amount
of land per capita that is under irrigation is falling for the first
time in this century; this raises serious questions about our ability
to provide food for a world of 8 or 9 or 10 billion people, when we
cannot reliably do so for a world of about 6 billion.
While the United States
is relatively water-rich, the western U.S. is a water-scarce region
that is experiencing increasing competition for limited water supplies.
Over the next several years, difficult decisions will have to be made
about water allocations for agricultural production, urban development,
and environmental protection. At the same time, new concerns about global
climatic change and the possible consequences for regional water supplies
and quality are complicating the challenge of planning and management.
While the debate about global climate change continues, there is a growing
consensus that among the most significant impacts will be effects on
water resources and water management. To date, however, there has been
relatively little recognition of the potential for changes among water
agencies and planners.
Dr. Peter Gleick will offer
an overview of critical global and regional water issues, and place
them in the context of achieving sustainable water management in the
western U.S. in the next century.
Managing a Changing World:
A Personal Perspective
As a follow-on perspective,
Dr. James Shuttleworth will make the case that progress in global change
research over the last decade has brought about the realization that
at least some aspects of global climate change are likely to be manageable.
This suggests that it would be productive and timely to refocus research
within the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) so as to provide
an understanding of how to manage sustained development more effectively,
recognizing that the world's climate will change. He will argue that
the USGCRP is overly focused on predicting long-term change in the globally
averaged surface temperature, and that this is beyond the time horizon
of those managing sustained development for the future. Dr. Shuttleworth
will argue, therefore, that greater emphasis should be given to understanding
and predicting phenomena such as regional precipitation patterns and
characteristics. He will suggest that focusing research on predicting
likely changes in precipitation statistics over the next 30 years and
on predicting precipitation for the next 18 months would directly align
the USGCRP with sustainable development needs.
On the basis of these arguments,
Dr. Shuttleworth will propose that the USGCRP take the following actions.
First, develop predictions of the rate of changes in water resources
for the U.S. and the rest of the world. Second, encourage use of a planning
period for all U.S. water development projects that recognizes the relative
magnitudes of the predicted gradual change in regional precipitation
and the predicted short-term variability in precipitation. Third, define
as a policy goal maintaining the rate of global change such that the
human-induced change in precipitation remains small compared to natural
variability. Finally, refocus global change research on predicting the
variability and change in regional precipitation over the next 30 years.
Dr. Peter H. Gleick is Co-Founder and President of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security in Oakland, California. Dr. Gleick was educated at Yale University and the Energy and Resources Group of the University of California, Berkeley. He is a leading expert on global freshwater issues, environmental security problems, and the impacts of climatic change on freshwater resources. His research includes work on the sustainable use of water; water conflicts in the Middle East; water planning in California, the western U.S., and internationally; and the connections between water, population, and development. He serves on a variety of national and international environmental panels, including the Scientific Advisory Group of the President's Council on Sustainable Development, the Global Environmental Change Committee of the American Geophysical Union, and the Comprehensive Freshwater Assessment of the United Nations. Dr. Gleick received a MacArthur Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship in 1986 to study the impacts of the greenhouse effect on water resources, and a MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Fellowship in 1988 to explore the implications of global environmental changes with respect to water and international security. He currently directs programs at the Pacific Institute looking at the links between global environmental issues and international security, and at a wide range of water resources problems, including the sustainable use of water, basic water requirements for human and environmental use, water quality, and the history and nature of disputes over water in the Middle East and the western U.S. His book, Water in Crisis: A Guide to the World's Freshwater Resources, was published by Oxford University Press in late 1993.
Dr. W. James Shuttleworth is an internationally recognized expert in the theory and modeling of land surface-atmosphere interactions. Over the last decade, he has led two major Anglo-Brazilian field experiments in the Amazon basin. As member and then Chair of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program/World Climate Research Program (IGBP/WCRP) Joint Working Group on Land Surface Experiments, he coordinated large-scale, multinational field experiments in France, Spain, and the Sahel. His current interests include research into the improved representation of land surface interactions in general circulation models and, in particular, on developing methods to assimilate remotely sensed soil moisture into hydrological models and on using remotely sensed data to improve the description of mixed vegetation. He is presently engaged in collaborative research projects with both the National Center for Environmental Prediction and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting to improve weather and climate prediction, and to facilitate the interpretation of predictions in water resource applications. Dr. Shuttleworth obtained his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from the University of Manchester (UK) where, in 1993, he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree in science. He later served as Head of the Hydrological Processes Division at the UK Institute of Hydrology. Since 1993, he has served as Professor of Hydrometeorology at the University of Arizona. He is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, the Royal Meteorological Society, and the European Geophysical Society. Professor Shuttleworth serves on the National Research Council (NRC) Committee on Global Change Research and on the NRC's Global Ocean-Atmosphere-Land System Panel. He is active in the IGBP as Focus Chair in their core project "Biospheric Aspects of the Hydrological Cycle," and in the WCRP as leader of the research initiative on Coupled Hydrologic-Atmospheric Models within the Global Energy and Water-Cycle Experiment Continental-Scale International Project.
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