Re-Envisioning Land and Water Resources Management to Achieve a Secure and Equitable Water Future

Achieving a secure and equitable water future is a challenge worldwide due to increasing municipal and agricultural water demands, inequities associated with existing water distribution systems, and the changing climate. Increasing variability in precipitation patterns is evidenced by unprecedented droughts and floods in many regions. These recent climatic disasters highlight obsolete and failing water infrastructure in well-developed nations, while spotlighting the extreme vulnerability of communities in less well-developed regions. Efforts aimed at increasing resilience to these disasters must be undertaken more holistically than in the past if they are to achieve the multiple benefits needed to achieve water security. For example, traditional flood control measures can inhibit our ability to capture flood waters for aquifer recharge, missing an opportunity to increase water supply reliability. Similarly, managed aquifer recharge may inadvertently cause pollution of domestic water supply wells, thereby increasing reliability at the expense of disadvantaged rural community well users.
Water security is essential for human livelihood, economic growth, and biodiversity, and achieving a state of security that is equitable is a challenge worldwide. With the changing climate, increasing municipal and agricultural water demands tend to exacerbate pre-existing inequities in many of our current water resources systems. Resource agencies and stakeholders in these regions must strive for water security, reconciling increasingly variable supplies (droughts and floods) with inequities between communities. In this Research Topic we welcome assessments that discuss transformational approaches needed to address deeply interconnected security risks of flood, drought, and water quality degradation more holistically in socio-culturally accepted ways. We encourage necessary climate actions identified and tested through transdisciplinary approaches aimed at understanding and projecting floods and droughts, improving water governance and policy, managing water and land resources, and engaging communities in planning and implementation. In this collection we welcome perspectives from researchers, as well from resource agencies and stakeholders that find equitable solutions to these multi-objective socio-environmental problems. Such solutions are likely to point to new land management schemes that can increase water security while decreasing socio-economic and health disparities.
The purpose of this Research Topic is to provide a venue for current research approaches, outcomes, and perspectives relevant to the theme of achieving a secure, sustainable, and equitable water future. Research articles and approaches spanning the natural sciences, social sciences, and engineering are welcome.
Specific topics may include but are not limited to:
-water security issues in the context of climate change;
-water resources modelling and management;
-managed aquifer recharge;
-assessing water stores and fluxes;
-hydro- and agro-economics;
-water trading;
-smart irrigation;
-environmental justice;
-ecosystem conservation and restoration;
-climate action workforce implications.