Water Security and International Security

The links between water, energy, food, climate, and other challenging global and regional issues are increasingly clear. What is less clear is how those links can possibly be evaluated and explored in an integrated way that will permit effective responses to existing and future water-related threats. While the need for interdisciplinary and international cooperation is apparent, societies (and scientists) are notoriously bad at conducting this kind of research and implementing these kinds of solutions. A wide range of future water scenarios have been constructed over the past 20 years by different organizations, with different tools and intents. In some cases, these scenarios are meant to project existing trends into the future; in others they are ways of exploring the influence of alternative policy and technology options; sometimes they are meant to described preferred "positive futures." Rarely, however, have the complex relationships among drivers of different water scenarios been explored. This presentation will describe a recent international and interdisciplinary research effort to evaluate both the complex drivers of future water scenarios and to investigate the challenges of influencing or altering those drivers with effective policies. Some of these policies are traditional "water sector" policies, but others include efforts normally considered outside of water discussions, including energy, economic, agricultural, and demographic factors.