Water and Climate - A Necessary (and Obvious) Pairing

Ten years ago, Diego and I got a lot of questions about why we were starting a group to focus on climate change and water. Why something that is such a small niche? Why make those issues the focus of a whole organization? 

Even then, the question seemed odd to me, like someone asking an ancient scientist or explorer why it might matter if the earth was a sphere or totally flat. If climate change was altering the water cycle, then we had big problems, because we weren’t doing anything ten years ago to think about the implications of that situation. Even our efforts to be sustainable were probably making things worse.

Today, the idea of integrating water and climate doesn’t even seem prescient; it seems stupidly obvious. For most water problems, how can you separate these issues? Even in 2021, the space we occupy — even if we include the many for-profit adaptation consultancies — seems sparsely occupied.

The more important issue has always been quite simple: what are we going to do about water and climate as conjoined topics. A long list of answers for 2020 is here. But the most important answer is that, because of AGWA, we have a huge amount we can do and recommend, right now. That’s been the power of AGWA as a learning network, enabling connections between disciplines, regions, and institutions. Crowd-sourcing insights into tools and policies.

Thank you for a great year. And thank you for the year ahead, together.

John Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA