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Climate change scenarios generated by general circulation models have too coarse a spatial resolution to be useful in planning disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation strategies at regional to river basin scales. This study presents a new non-parametric statistical K -nearest neighbor algorithm for downscaling climate change scenarios for the Rohini River Basin in Nepal. The study is an introduction to the methodology and discusses its strengths and limitations within the context of hindcasting basin precipitation for the period of 1976–2006. The actual downscaled climate change projections are not presented here. In general, we find that this method is quite robust and well suited to the data-poor situations common in developing countries. The method is able to replicate historical rainfall values in most months, except for January, September, and October. As with any downscaling technique, whether numerical or statistical, data limitations significantly constrain model ability. The method was able to confirm that the dataset available for the Rohini Basin does not capture long-term climatology. Yet, we do find that the hindcasts generated with this methodology do have enough skill to warrant pursuit of downscaling climate change scenarios for this particularly poor and vulnerable region of the world.

While we have always experienced variability in the availability of water across a variety of time scales, anthropogenic climate change will likely bring substantial additional effects on water cycles and water resource management, such as changes in timing, amount, and patterns of precipitation; decreasing snow packs; enhanced droughts; and more frequent and intense floods and storms, among others. Water management systems based on stationarity assumptions (i.e., that water and climate cycles remain within a certain range of variability) could be replaced by analytical and numerical strategies and techniques based on a nonstationarity framework, borrowing from understanding in geography and applied and physical climatology.\\n Again, not all tenure-track individuals or professional researchers need to engage in such work, but for those who do wish to engage in collaborative, problem-oriented research, alternative incentives are needed to evaluate, encourage, and reward such research.

Most research focusing on safe drinking water seeks to investigate the reasons that inhibit nearly 1 billion people in developing countries from having safe drinking water. Yet, there are still numerous communities in the United States without safe drinking water that often fail to enter into global water discourses. This study employed a political ecology framework to investigate and document the perspectives on drinking water of four very small (<100 households) community owned and operated water systems in Puerto Rico. Political ecology examines power-knowledge relationships between human groups across spatial and temporal scales, how these relationships influence and determine human interaction with the environment and, conversely, how environmental change shapes power-knowledge relationships. Through a series of 87 semi-structured interviews and community walk-throughs, I constructed profiles of each community’s unique system of water governance and management, customary practices of water rights, conceptions on the roles of various community members in participating in various aspects of the water system, community-developed knowledge systems on water quality and health, and dynamic community composition. I then contrasted and situated the communities’ profiles within the historical processes leading to the creation of the Safe Drinking Water Act and the current discourses on safe drinking water promulgated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and various state primacy agencies, such as the Puerto Rican Department of Health (PRDOH). These large-scale administrative and jurisdictional actors describe the failure of very small and small water systems to comply with the Act as being due to financial, technical and managerial limitations. The four communities I visited have very different perspectives on drinking water than the EPA or PRDOH. My research on safe drinking water in the United States points to deeper, underlying questions: Whose water governance? and Whose water knowledge systems? Those who determine the “causes” of certain communities’ non-compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act are able to set the policies and courses of action for solving the “problem”. However, when communities themselves have different conceptions of their drinking water “problems”, the solutions proposed by more powerful and “knowledgeable” actors frequently fail to move the communities into compliance. Through this study, I seek to expand the drinking water discourses in the U.S. to begin reconciling various water governance and water knowledge systems across scales and among actors.

Speed read Current efforts to use climate data for urban planning are being called into question Data must account for local conditions such as changing land use and development One way to do this is to embed climate scientists within government For climate data to be truly useful, scientists must work more closely with planners, says Sarah Opitz-Stapleton. Many of the programmes designed to improve urban resilience to disasters and climate change try to incorporate data — such as estimates of summer temperatures by 2050 or number of frost-free springtime days by 2030 — as a key element in science-based decision making. First and foremost, climate information providers such as national meteorological agencies need to work directly with decision makers.