Adaptive Groundwater Governance and the Challenges of Policy Implementation in Idaho’s Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer Region

Globally, groundwater overdraft poses significant challenges to agricultural production. As a result, it is likely that new water management policies and governance arrangements will be needed to stop groundwater depletion and maintain agricultural viability. Drawing on interviews with state and non-state water managers and other water actors, this paper provides a study of a recent resource management agreement between surface water and groundwater irrigators in the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer region of Idaho. Using adaptive governance as our descriptive framework, we examine how groundwater governance arrangements emerge and are applied to mitigate the impacts of groundwater overdraft. Our findings suggest that adaptive governance, while not a stated goal of the agreement, may enable flexible and sustainable social and ecological outcomes. Our findings also indicate that this new governance arrangement creates a vacuum in enforcement authority that may prove challenging as the management agreement is implemented. These findings extend our understanding of the conditions necessary for effective adaptive governance of groundwater resources, and highlight the challenge of creating capacity for local resource managers as governance shifts from more bureaucratic to adaptive and decentralised arrangements

Towards Climate Justice: Examining Concern for Climate Change in Developed, Transitioning and Developing Countries

This dissertation is a comparative international study of attitudes towards climate change. Using multilevel models, individual level data from the 2005-2008 wave of the World Values Survey, and country level data from the 2010 Climate Risk Index and the World Bank, this research identifies the factors associated with concern for global warming and support for various environmental policies and behaviors in economically developed, transitioning, and developing countries. The first paper addresses an ongoing debate in environmental sociology about the extent to which concern for environmental problems is a result of the objective deterioration of environmental conditions or subjective values among environmentally-oriented individuals. Findings indicate that a country's recent experience with climate-related environmental disasters has little to no effect on concern for global warming. Some support is found for the subjective values explanation, especially in countries at the most advanced stage of economic development. The second paper frames climate change as an asymmetrical social dilemma and tests whether four distinct citizenship identities are associated with the odds an individual considers global warming a very serious problem. This study finds that identifying as world citizens and autonomous individuals increases the odds an individual judges global warming very serious, while identifying as national citizens or local community members has no relationship with evaluations of global warming. The third paper examines the impact of numerous measures of security/vulnerability on individual willingness to make environment-economy trade-offs. The data reveal that higher household incomes, residing in a country with higher per capita GDP, and higher rates of adult literacy are positively associated with prioritizing environmental protection over economic growth. However, residents of economically developing countries (or countries designated Non-Annex I by the Kyoto Protocol) are also much more likely to express willingness to donate personal income for the protection of the environment compared to residents of developed (Annex I) countries. The findings from these three studies have implications for sociological research on the relationship between economic inequality and environmental attitudes, the conditions under which international cooperation on climate is more or less likely, and the quest for climate justice

Ecosystems Services and Idaho Farmers

Farmers are stakeholders in ecosystems services because of their use of natural resources and economic and social influence. Farmers have an interest in the environment because it is vital to their daily life and work. The purpose of this research is to understand how farmers in southeastern Idaho perceive, value and use ecosystems services. We use data from in-depth interviews with thirty farmers in the area. Farmers describe themselves as good stewards of the land. They implement conservation practices to maintain soil quality and limit water. They also describe economic and social benefits of being farmers as a satisfying way to make a living and say that they want to be able to pass their farms onto their children. Farmers describe themselves as independent decision-makers. They are distrustful and cautious of federal and state governments, with concerns about over-regulation. They also express concern about maintaining their access to water and competition with other stakeholders

Economic Impact of Agricultural Water Restrictions in Southeastern Idaho

Across the arid West, climate change poses threats to agricultural water availability; in southeastern Idaho, stakeholders have attempted to preemptively address these and other water issues. In 2015, farmers and other stakeholders signed the Managed Aquifer Recharge Settlement Agreement (MARSA). While this agreement has provided safe harbor from water calls until 2020, farmers face significant water cut requirements, which may negatively affect their ability to remain profitable. As part of MARSA, groundwater users agreed to an average cut back of 12.9% of water previously used for irrigation. Understanding the economic impact of these cuts is essential to facilitating and supporting the adaptations needed for farm operations to remain economically viable. By analyzing interview data, this research aims to provide an initial understanding of the impacts of the water cuts on crop yield production and household income. Additionally, we identify factors that shape the level of impact experienced by individual farmers. We anticipate that factors such acreage owned and crop rotation will influence the level of impact that the agreement had on farmers, and that farmers will describe these intersections in interviews

Farmer adaptation to reduced groundwater availability

The sustainability of agriculture in the American West depends on the capacity of farmers to adapt to water resource constraints. Most US studies of agricultural adaptations measure farmers’ willingness to adopt various water use reduction strategies, meaning we have little empirical data on which strategies farmers implement and how these decisions impact their farms. We use survey data from 265 farmers in southeastern Idaho who, beginning in 2016, were required to cut annual groundwater withdrawals by 4%–20% to identify (1) the adaptation practices farmers implemented; (2) how reported crop yields and farm income were impacted; and (3) how adaptation practices varied by farm and farmer characteristics. We found the most commonly used adaptations were reduced spending, installation of more efficient irrigation systems or less frequent watering, and changing crop rotations. Farmers reported losing on average 7.6% of their yield and 8.4% of their income over the first two years of the water cuts. We found no systematic variation based on specific farm or farmer characteristics. Drawing on these results and prior research, we present a typology of adaptation categories intended to inform future research, allow comparisons to adaptation strategies elsewhere, and assist policymakers in designing effective policy interventions

Social Vulnerability to Irrigation Water Loss: Assessing the Effects of Water Policy Change on Farmers in Idaho, USA

In the Eastern Snake Plain of Idaho, increasing rates of groundwater extraction for irrigation have corresponded with the adoption of more efficient irrigation technologies; higher use and lower incidental recharge have led to increasing groundwater scarcity. This paper assesses farmer vulnerability to a water resource policy that responds to that scarcity by reducing availability of groundwater for irrigation by 4–20%. Using results from a household survey of impacted farmers, we examine vulnerability in two stages, contributing to theorization of farmer vulnerability in a changing climate as well as producing important regional policy insights. The first stage, multimodel selection and inference, analyzes the primary predictors of two forms of vulnerability to groundwater scarcity among this population of farmers. The second stage, a segmentation analysis, highlights policy-relevant variation in adaptive capacity and in vulnerability predictors across the population. Individual-level results indicate that key indicators of vulnerability include several dimensions of adaptive capacity and sensitivity. At the population level, we find that reductions in sensitivity may play an important role in reducing farmer vulnerability. Accelerating global environmental change will require agriculture in arid and semi-arid regions to adapt to shifts in water availability. As water resources shift, institutional contexts and policy landscapes will shift in parallel, as seen with the reduction in groundwater availability in our case study. These institutional shifts may change the face of adaptation and farmer vulnerability in unexpected ways. Our results indicate that such institutional shifts could lean on efforts to enhance farmer adaptive capacity or reduce farmer sensitivity as mechanisms for reducing farmer vulnerability to adaptation policy changes

Social-ecological systems influence ecosystem service perception: a Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) analysis

Facing the challenges of environmental and social changes, sustainable management of ecosystem services is a worldwide priority. The Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) approach provides a unique opportunity for promoting transdisciplinary place-based comparative research for social-ecological systems (SES) management. As part of the PECS-sponsored WaterSES project, we used four place-based SES research sites to analyze patterns in perceptions of ecosystem services. Our data come from about 1,500 face-to-face surveys conducted in southern Spain, the south-central Great Plains of Oklahoma (USA), and the Portneuf and Treasure Valleys, Idaho (USA). Specifically, this study aimed to (1) describe and compare perceptions of ecosystem services within and across SES sites, (2) explore how perceptions of ecosystem services vary among local respondents and by sociodemographic factors, and (3) evaluate the overall relationship between place-based SES contexts and ecosystem service perceptions. Our results revealed that cultural ecosystem services were the most highly mentioned among those surveyed across all four sites. However, we found differences in how ecosystem services were perceived among the four SES contexts. For instance, both, social (e.g., gender, education) and local ecological (e.g., land use and climate) characteristics play roles in influencing people's perceptions of which services are important. Overall, our findings suggest the relationship between people's perceptions of ecosystem services and their social-environmental context is complex, which highlights the value of the PECS approach for crafting more effective and inclusive landscape management strategies

Applying Place-Based Social-Ecological Research to Address Water Scarcity: Insights for Future Research

Globally, environmental and social change in water-scarce regions challenge the sustainability of social-ecological systems. WaterSES, a sponsored working group within the Program for Ecosystem Change and Society, explores and compares the social-ecological dynamics related to water scarcity across placed-based international research sites with contrasting local and regional water needs and governance, including research sites in Spain and Sweden in Europe, South Africa, China, and Alabama, Idaho, Oklahoma, and Texas in the USA. This paper aims to provide a commentary on insights into conducting future solutions-oriented research on water scarcity based on the understanding of the social-ecological dynamics of water scarce regions