A note from AGWA's Deputy Executive Director

This essay is from the January 2025 AGWA Policy Newsletter.

First I want to wish you all a happy New Year! And to our friends celebrating the Lunar New Year - Gong hei fat choy! I wish you all a happy year of the snake.

2025 has started with a great deal of trepidation and uncertainty, especially for those of us working on climate and water issues in the United States. It will be some time before we fully understand the implications of the colossal restructuring of the U.S. government that is now underway, but it is very clear we are heading into uncharted territory.

Despite this challenge, AGWA's mandate remains very much the same. Our policy strategy is centered around embracing and managing uncertainty. How do we navigate new systems where the assumptions we once made are no longer valid? What new tools and approaches do we need to ensure the functionality of our environmental, economic, and institutional systems? And if those systems must transform to survive, how do we support that process to both reduce harm and increase long term wellbeing? These are not small questions and they do not have easy answers. Adaptation is a process that is never finished because change is continual.

There is no doubt that we are in a period of rapid and uneven change, which feels increasingly overwhelming. But I see in my work - and the work of AGWA's partners - real progress in developing the tools and strategies to meet this moment.

To give one example, in December we held a workshop with our partners in Brazil's national water and sanitation agency (ANA). As part of the meeting, we reviewed outcomes from the first phase of their work under the Water Resilience Tracker project. We had only been working with ANA for roughly eight months at that point, but during that time ANA had to contend with several national water emergencies, including unprecedented flooding in Rio Grande do Sul, wildfires in the Amazon basin, and worsening drought in the northeast.

Despite these challenges, their team not only worked diligently with us on the Water Resilience Tracker analysis, but independently took it one step further to start applying the Tracker to all their basin plans, to ensure that climate resilience is a key feature in their water management going forward. This process won't fix things overnight, but will hopefully help them manage multiple challenges, including shifting hydrologic conditions, in a more systemic and coherent way. 

I also want to stress that it is important to acknowledge and mourn what is lost in this process. I am by nature a hopeful person, but that does not mean I am not deeply distressed by the current trajectory of my country and our planet. I worry that the world my son will inherit is one that I cannot recognize. And yet I refuse to throw up my hands and passively accept the intolerable. I believe we can have a hand in shaping what comes next and it is there where AGWA's work can be most valuable. We have a lot of work still to do. 

Ingrid Timboe
Portland, Oregon, USA