The U.S. water data gap: A survey of state-level water data platforms to inform the development of a national water portal

Water data play a crucial role in the development and assessment of sustainable water management strategies. Water resource assessments are needed for the planning, management, and the evaluation of current practices. They require environmental, climatic, hydrologic, hydrogeologic, industrial, agricultural, energy, and socioeconomic data to assess and accurately project the supply of and demand for water services. Given this context, we provide a review of the current state of publicly available water data in the United States. While considerable progress has been made in data science and model development in recent years, data limitations continue to hamper analytics. A brief overview of the water data sets available at the federal level is used to highlight the gaps in readily accessible water data in the United States. Then, we present a systematic review of 275 websites that provide water information collected at the state level. Data platforms are evaluated based on content (ground and surface water, water quality, and water use information) along with the analytical and exploratory tools that are offered. Wev discuss the degree to which existing state-level data sets could enrich the data available from federal sources and review some recent technological developments and initiatives that may modernize water data. We argue that a national water data portal, more comprehensive than the U.S. Energy Information Administration, addressing the significant gaps and centralizing water data is critical. It would serve to quantify the risks emerging from growing water stress and aging infrastructure and to better inform water management and investment decisions

Environmental Policy and Sustainable Development

With changing and mounting pressures on environmental resources due to economic and demographic developments, environmental policymaking is a wide and continuously growing field. The birth hour of modern environmental policymaking is the 1950s and 1960s, with the United States (US) as a pioneer country in adopting the first instruments for resource protection and combating pollution (Andrews 2006). Around the same time, environmental movements became visible in terms of mobilization and organization (Ruckelshaus 1985), although the origins and philosophical foundations of such movements date back to the fifteenth century (Kline 2011). Similarly, environmental economics, as one of the main instruments of environmental policy analysis, was acknowledged as a scientific field during the 1960s, although the economic analysis of environmental problems had been under way for at least two centuries before (Sandmo 2015). Since these early days of environmental policy, the topics and analysis tools have advanced greatly in order to keep up with new knowledge on environmental issues. The concerns of policymakers and scientists moved beyond resource protection and pollution to cover issues such as resource-use efficiency, problems with common-pool resources, renewable resources, intergenerational equity, and incorporating environmental issues into a wider understanding of sustainable development. Environmental policies were thus transformed from a simply command-and-control perspective toward efficiency-based reforms and later, the more recent issues of integrated approaches toward community and sustainable development (Mazmanian and Kraft 2009). The rise of ecological economics, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, has contributed to an increasing number of tools to address the broad issues of environmental policies. Ecological economics adopted a diversified perspective and broadened the neoclassical approach of environmental economics, leading to pluralism of approaches and policy tools (Venkatachalam 2007). Nowadays, environmental policy is a rich field of investigation and an integral part of public policy. This chapter introduces this field in relation to sustainable development. It outlines the key elements required to define environmental policies and briefly explains the history of issues related to sustainable development. Later, it explains the tools and instruments used as inputs into environmental policies. Finally, it discusses key terms and concepts for analyzing the process, performance, and impacts of environmental policies

The entity-process framework for integrated agent-based modeling of social-ecological systems

International audienceThe success of Integrated Assessment and Modeling of social-ecological systems (SESs) requires a framework allowing members of this process to share, organize and integrate their knowledge about the system under consideration. To meet this need and ease management of successful modeling processes, we present a conceptual framework for integrated agent-based modeling and simulation of SESs in the form of a formal “entity-process meta-model”, along with a distinction between three levels of models—conceptual, concrete and simulation—and characterization of the research question using indicators and scenarios. We then describe how to represent the structural and dynamic dimensions of SESs into conceptual and concrete models and to derive the simulation model from these two types of models. Finally, we discuss how our framework solves some of the challenges of integrated SES modeling: integration and sharing of heterogeneous knowledge, reliability of simulation results, expressiveness issues, and flexibility of the modeling process