Decision support experiments and evaluations using seasonal to ...

The U.S. Climate Change Science Program
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tion, the Institute is specifically designed as an
experiment in how to remove barriers between
groups of researchers in different disciplines
and across the universities. The Institute’s
projects involve faculty members from more
than one of the universities, and all involve
true engagement with stakeholders. The faculty
is provided incentives to engage both through
small grants for collaborative projects and
through the visibility of the work that the Institute
supports. Further, the Institute’s structure
is unique, in that there are high level Associate
Directors of the Institute whose assignment is
to build bridges between the universities and the
three state agencies that are the Institute’s partners:
Water Resources, Environmental Quality,
and Commerce. These Associate Directors are
physically located inside the state agencies that
they serve. The intent is to build trust between
university researchers (who may be viewed as
“out of touch with reality” by agency employees),
and agency or state employees (whom
researchers may believe are not interested in
innovative ideas). Physical proximity of workspaces
and daily engagement has been shown
to be an ingredient of trust building.
A significant component of the Institute’s effort
is focused on: capacity building, training students
through engagement in real-world water
policy issues, providing better access to hydrologic
data for decision makers, assisting them in
visualizing the implications of the decisions that
they make, workshops and training programs
for tribal entities, joint definition of research
agendas between stakeholders and researchers,
and building employment pathways to train
students for specific job categories where there
is an insufficient supply of trained workers,
such as water and wastewater treatment plant
operators. Capacity-building in interdisciplinary
planning applications such as combining
land use planning and water supply planning to
focus on sustainable water supplies for future
development is emerging as a key need for many
communities in the state.
The Institute is designed as a “learning organization”
in that it will regularly revisit its
structure and function, and redesign itself as
needed to maintain effectiveness in the context
of changing institutional and financial conditions.
Case Study D:
Murray–Darling Basin—Sustainable
Development and Adaptive Management
The Murray-Darling Basin Agreement (MDBA),
formed in 1985 by New South Wales, Victoria,
South Australia and the Commonwealth, is an
effort to provide for the integrated and conjoint
management of the water and related land resources
of the world’s largest catchment system.
The problems initially giving rise to the agreement
included rising salinity and irrigationinduced
land salinization that extended across
state boundaries (SSCSE, 1979; Wells, 1994).
However, embedded in its charter was a concern
with using climate variability information
to more effectively manage drought, runoff,
riverine flow and other factors in order to meet
the goal of “effective planning and management
for the equitable, efficient and sustainable use
of the water, land and environmental resources
(of the basin)” (MDBC, 2002).
Some of the more notable achievements of the
MDBA include programs to promote the management
of point and non-point source pollution;
balancing consumptive and in-stream uses
(a decision to place a cap on water diversions
was adopted by the commission in 1995); the
ability to increase water allocations—and rates
of water flow—in order to mitigate pollution
and protect threatened species (applicable in
all states except Queensland); and an explicit
program for “sustainable management”. The
latter hinges on implementation of several
strategies, including a novel human dimension
strategy adopted in 1999 that assesses the social,
institutional and cultural factors impeding
sustainability; as well as adoption of specific
policies to deal with salinity, better manage
wetlands, reduce the frequency and intensity
of algal blooms by better managing the inflow
of nutrients, reverse declines in native fisheries
populations (a plan which, like that of many river
basins in the United States, institutes changes
in dam operations to permit fish passage), and
preparing floodplain management plans.
Moreover, a large-scale environmental monitoring
program is underway to collect and analyze
basic data on pressures upon the basin’s resources
as well as a “framework for evaluating
and reporting on government and community
Chapter 4