Four members of the Riparian Resilience team, Dr. Mitchell Pavao-Zuckerman, Dr. Tom Meixner, Lily House-Peters, and Robin Lewis, traveled to Phoenix, Arizona on March 12 to lead an exciting, interactive panel session at the 2011 Resilience Alliance Meeting.We had a great turnout with nearly 40 people present for the presentations and 20 people who remained for the second hour to participate in the interactive activity. The first 45 minutes of presentations outlined the project goals and context, the ecohydrological dynamics, the social and institutional dynamics, and the modeling approaches for system coupling and the metrics to assess resilience in the bi-national San Pedro watershed. Then participants were divided into 5 groups of stakeholders (federal land agencies, military base representatives, conservation NGO's, urban developers, and the USPP consortium) to tackle contentious issues in the basin, namely climate change and water scarcity.
During the discussion portion of session, the following information was shared by each group:
1. Federal Land Agencies
- In thinking about how we would approach the problem, “we all went towards our disciplines”
- The scientists/modelers in the group stressed identifying tipping points, climate impacts, and using models
- The policy-focused researchers in group put more stress on endangered species
- Legislation and noted that the ESA is not an adaptive law; instead it tries to maintain the status quo.
- Work with Bisbee and Sierra Vista on recharge and decreasing water use
- Keep the military base, it prevents further urban development
- Work on problems that arise from decreasing precipitation due to climate changeconnect with communities – be an example for them, share the best practices that are around
- More intense flood events – re-defining the flood plains – what can be done to decrease problems from flooding
- Decrease in summer demand from agriculture/ranching BUT increase in winter urban demand – one idea is to recharge the increased summer water for use when winter
- Demand is up and precipitation is down– helpful also for the willows and other groundwater dependent plants
- Save the world
- Raise awareness of water and ecosystem conditions – generate culture around the issues –focus on education and increasing public knowledge
- Work together with other institutions – govt. agencies – establish regulations to meet benchmarks for water conservation – how can we achieve these benchmarks through collaboration?
- Resource inventory – identify the biodiversity hotspots that should be prioritized and protected – encourage participation of citizen scientists – establish research agendas with the community to increase knowledge and monitoring of the water conditions and to better understand the ecological dynamics of the vegetation communities – more monitoring!
- Work with developers to stress low-impact development – ex. stormwater management
- We want to build cities! – but it is negotiable HOW we develop those cities
- How do we design/build/advertise water-efficient development?
- Use the best practices for conservation that have been developed at the Fort and scale them for urban/suburban development – BMPs
- We have to attract buyers– attract a certain type of retirees who will become part of a community around water conservation (ex. Green Oldies)
5. USPP Stakeholder Consortium:
- Each agency may not know how much of the resource (ex. water, land) that the other agencies are responsible for – make water usage among agencies transparent – then can model the impacts of the drought and flooding – so that the holistic condition of the SES can be understood
- Have to tell the public the outcomes – not exactly how much water to stop using, but the overall impact on the system has to be told in a compelling way.
- Provide alternatives and strategies
- Land use change may be more of a critical factor than climate change! May want to focus more on the short-term impacts of land use change rather than climate change
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