Catalyzing frontiers in water-climate-society research: A view from early career scientists and junior faculty

Changes in the availability and distribution of water have substantial effects on humans and the ecosystems upon which we depend. While we have always experienced variability in the availability of water across a variety of time scales, anthropogenic climate change will likely bring substantial additional effects on water cycles and water resource management, such as changes in timing, amount, and patterns of precipitation; decreasing snow packs; enhanced droughts; and more frequent and intense floods and storms, among others. The scientific community faces the challenge of helping societies plan for climate and water uncertainties in the context of complex and changing socioenvironmental processes such as multiple and competing water demands, population growth, land-use changes, and energy extraction and production. Meeting this challenge requires utilizing the strengths of diverse disciplines and working in synergistic collaboration with key stakeholders. In the spirit of this effort, a group of 27 junior faculty and early-career scientists, composed of social scientists, atmospheric scientists, and hydrologists, met in Boulder, Colorado, in July 2010 for a Junior Faculty Forum sponsored by NCAR (www.asp.ucar.edu/ecsa/jff/jff10.php). Expert presentations and discussions focused on adaptation of human societies and water systems to climate change. In this article, the members of this group present a synthesis of our ideas and recommendations for catalyzing scientific frontiers in use-inspired water–climate–society research. We realize that there are some who have been working on this intersection and deserve to be credited, but doing so is beyond the scope, word limit, and style of this article. To address this, we created a supplementary website, www.ral.ucar.edu/projects/wcs, which includes many of the seminal works across multiple disciplines that we encourage readers to visit for references and additional resources. We intend this site to be dynamic, and we invite readers to contribute to it via the “Submit a Resource” function in order to populate the site with what the peer community deems most relevant.