Water in the West: An Interdisciplinary Reflection

Water is the life blood of the Western USA, and climate affects the way of life in the region. As the population and the economic activity in the Western USA have grown, the challenges of droughts and floods, and safe water provision for competing demands have come to the fore. Many people across the region are working on innovative ideas to address these challenges and to provide the appropriate historical and future context for the solutions. The Water in the West series aims to bring these perspectives together and to facilitate subsequent in-person dialogs to bring together a shared vision for appropriate, transformational change. 

The initial edition of six lectures by seven researchers explores how agriculture specifically, and other water uses, more generally, have changed in the past, and how they may evolve in the future given competing interests, drivers of efficiency and higher value uses; how infrastructure systems operation may change to deliver the higher value through changes in storage allocation and use; how the current and emerging risk profiles of users can lead to innovation in financial risk management through partnerships; how the long history of climate encoded in paleoclimate proxies provides lessons for water risk assessment; and finally, a treatise on the past and future of the Colorado River that knits much of the discussion together.