Christopher A. Scott

Pennsylvania State University | Penn State · Department of Ecosystem Science and Management

Although the impacts of dams on the environment and human populations have been widely documented, many developing countries continue constructing large dams. In Mexico, impact studies have neglected to analyze downstream effects of dams. Thus, we analyzed land use and land cover (LULC) changes downstream of El Molinito dam, constructed on the Sono...

Mountains are highly significant regions in the context of climate change and sustainable development, at the intersection of accelerated warming and a large population depending directly or indirectly on them. They are regions of high biological and cultural diversity and provide vital goods and services to people living in and around mountain reg...

Understanding spatial and temporal variations of rainfall is crucial for the ongoing and future socioeconomic and infrastructure developments in the Indian Himalayan region. However, despite such importance, the studies on rainfall distribution, variability and trends are limited and rare in the Uttarakhand Himalayan region. To bridge the gap, this...

Most governments in developing countries do not invest enough to treat wastewater, therefore, the farmers use untreated wastewater for irrigation. The positive aspects of such irrigation are a reliable and year-round water source, little or no spending on fertilizer, less pumping cost than with groundwater, an increase in soil organic matter, and g...

Rangelands are complex social-ecological systems (SES) commonly used to support ranching and other agrarian livelihoods. Common to Earth's drylands, rangelands are susceptible to drought, desertification, and land degradation from both climatic and human activities. In the arid Americas, ranching communities are often located in watersheds and rely...

Developing run-of-the-river (ROR) hydropower can pose a sustainability paradox. The paradox can occur when countries prioritize hydropower development to achieve national-level sustainable development targets while failing to include project-affected communities in planning processes. This research developed a comparative study examining the ways s...

Over the last decade, water security has replaced sustainability as the key optic for thinking about how we manage water. This reframing has offered benefits (including clear recognition of the link between humans, the environment and the right to water) and also posed challenges (the tendency in some quarters to interpret “security” solely in term...

The semiarid region of Northeast Brazil is characterized by recurrent drought episodes. The magnitude of drought events may be assessed using standardized climate indices (SCIs) based on hydrometeorological variables, including precipitation, evapotranspiration, soil moisture, and streamflow. Drought monitoring may be improved using the concept of...

Precipitation over the southern rim of the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR) mainly occurs due to two dominant synoptic weather systems: Indian winter (IWM: December, January, February) and summer monsoon (ISM: June, July, August, September). The genesis and evolution of these systems are extensively researched. Additionally, geographical location, sea...

Innovation in urban water systems is required to address drivers of change across natural, built, and social systems, including climate change, economic development, and aged infrastructure. Water systems are complex socio-technical systems that interact with biophysical systems to supply and reclaim water. We present a vision for enhancing urban w...

The last decade has witnessed rapid progress in energy cooperation between the countries of the BBIN (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal) sub-region. Cooperation has been bilateral, with each of the countries entering into separate energy development and trade agreement with India, broadly similar to the water sector where national governments eng...

Achieving water security for humans and ecosystems is a pervasive challenge globally. Extensive areas of the Americas are at significant risk of water insecurity, resulting from global-change processes coupled with regional and local impacts. Drought, flooding, and water quality challenges pose significant threats, while at the same time, rapid urb...

Water plays a central role in climate adaptation, economic development, poverty alleviation, food and energy security, and ecosystem processes. Addressing current and future global change, particularly for competing water-governance objectives, requires planning flexibility that may be constrained by physical water-resources infrastructure. This pa...

The United States and Mexico have engaged in hydrodiplomacy—a practice of transboundary water management that blends water diplomacy and science diplomacy--for more than 75 years, since the adoption of the Treaty of 1944 and the creation of the International Boundary and Water Commission. We examine six major turning points in U.S.-Mexico hydrodipl...

An effective placement of irrigation efficiency in water management will contribute towards meeting the pre-eminent global water challenges of our time such as addressing water scarcity, boosting crop water productivity and reconciling competing water needs between sectors. However, although irrigation efficiency may appear to be a simple measure o...

Addressing wicked problems challenging water security requires participation from multiple stakeholders, often with conflicting visions, complicating the attainment of water-security goals and heightening the need for integrative and effective science-policy interfaces. Sustained multi- stakeholder dialogues within science-policy networks can impro...

Adaptation to global-change processes is conventionally based on assessment of human and environmental drivers and vulnerabilities. Institutionalizing adaptation involves interactive planning, implementation, and iterative evaluation of response measures and their outcomes, accompanied by adaptive-capacity enhancement. When applied in a river-basin...

In this study we analyse how three cities in the arid Americas have addressed urban growth while facing water scarcity: Hermosillo, Mexico; Mendoza, Argentina; and Tucson, USA. We use the urban water security framework to examine five domains of water management: sociodemographic, economic, technological, ecological and governance (SETEG). Our anal...

The year 2019 marked a significant milestone in U.S.-Mexico hydrodiplomacy: seventy-five years since the two countries adopted the Treaty of 1944, which apportioned between them the waters of the Rio Grande, Colorado River, and Tijuana River. Although the treaty is the countries' most notable and enduring act of hydrodiplomacy,[1] numerous cooperat...

The year 2019 marked a significant milestone in U.S.-Mexico hydrodiplomacy: seventy-five years since the two countries adopted the Treaty of 1944, which apportioned between them the waters of the Rio Grande, Colorado River, and Tijuana River. Although the treaty is the countries' most notable and enduring act of hydrodiplomacy, numerous cooperative...

La cooperación internacional en el ámbito de la ciencia es una herramien- ta de innovación y desarrollo. El Consorcio Arizona-México para Ambien- tes Áridos (Cazmex) contribuye a la consolidación científica, tecnológica y educativa, mediante el apoyo de proyectos relacionados con el medio ambiente, cambio climático y desarrollo social sustentable e...

Institutions governing common-pool resources have survived decades of global change with mixed performance. However, we have limited knowledge on how local institutions cope with and adapt to combined environmental and socio-economic changes. Using the case of 12 farmer-managed irrigation systems (FMIS) in Central and Western Nepal, this paper expl...

Synergies are required to ensure coordination between UN agencies (on norms and indicators), Member States (on coherence of policy instruments) and consumers (on perceptions of safety and affordability of services) to advance the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 6.3 which focusses on reuse of wastewater. In this paper we emp...

Commonly described as the “water tower for Asia,” the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) plays an important role in ensuring water, food, energy, and environmental security for much of the continent. The HKH is the source of ten major rivers that provide water—while also supporting food and energy production and a range of other ecosystem services—for two b...

Mountains host high biological and cultural diversity, generating ecosystem services providing benefits over multiple scales but also suffering significant poverty and vulnerabilities. Case studies in two contrasting village communities in the Indian Middle Himalayas explore linkages between people and adjacent forest and river ecosystems. Intervie...

Glaciers, snowpack, rivers, lakes, and wetlands in mountain regions provide freshwater for much of the world's population. These systems, however, are acutely sensitive to climate change. In Andean water towers, which supply freshwater to more than 100 million people, climate change adaptation planning is critical. Adaptation plans, however, are mo...

This article addresses the emergence and interrelation of food, energy, and water security in terms of resource use and the ensuing societal and environmental outcomes. For decades, food security and energy security have been well-accepted, operational concepts. Water security is the latest entrant, yet the implications of water insecurity for food...

Detecting droughts as early as possible is important in avoiding negative impacts on economy, society, and environment. To improve drought monitoring, we studied drought propagation (i.e., the temporal manifestation of a precipitation deficit on soil moisture and streamflow). We used the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), S...

The United-States-Mexico food system, and in particular the section located in the Sonoran Desert, is an example of the detrimental effects that result from instensified food production to supply increased demand from regional, transboundary, and global areas. Impacts to freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems in addition to human livelihoods and ins...

Water, energy, and food are essential elements for human life, but face constant pressure resulting from economic development, climate change, and other global processes. Predictions of rapid economic growth, increasing population, and urbanization in the coming decades point to rapidly increasing demand for all three. In this context, improved man...

The water-energy-food (WEF) nexus is rapidly expanding in scholarly literature and policy settings as a novel way to address complex resource and development challenges. The nexus approach aims to identify tradeoffs and synergies of water, energy, and food systems, internalize social and environmental impacts, and guide development of cross-sectora...

Rivers and riparian ecosystems have historically provided a range of beneficial goods and services to human societies. However, floodplains have also posed risks to the humans that came to rely upon them. Although riparian areas are among the most resource-rich and biodiverse ecosystems, they are also some of the most disturbed by human activity. T...

Water security has emerged as a major framing template in environmental governance and resource management. The term and underlying concepts have attracted the attention of governmental and nongovernmental organizations, private industry, and the academy in policy and practice. Notwithstanding the palpable rise in its use, a comprehensive understan...

The Hindu Kush Himalaya is undergoing rapid change, driven by twin megatrends of climate change and urbanisation, which threaten their crucial water-provisioning services for over a billion people across Asia and undermine quality of life, economic development, and environmental sustainability within the region. This chapter examines current and fu...

Precipitation is one of the most critical inputs for models used to improve understanding of hydrological processes. In high mountain areas, it is challenging to generate a reliable precipitation data set capturing the spatial and temporal heterogeneity due to the harsh climate, extreme terrain and the lack of observations. This study conducts inte...

Riparian ecosystems are valuable to the ecological and human communities that depend on them. Over the past century, they have been subject to shifting management practices to maximize human use and ecosystem services, creating a complex relationship between water policy, management, and the natural ecosystem. This has necessitated research on the...

Water scarcity has intensified in northeast Brazil over the past decade. The same period has brought economic growth, aggressive government-funded social support programmes, and technological advancements. These latter factors have led to widespread, successful, and largely unintended adaptation to increasing climatic stress. With specific focus on...

Mountainous areas with extreme elevation gradients and corresponding ranges of biophysical and socioeconomic conditions are highly vulnerable to global change. We propose that the ability to anticipate changes in weather, markets, and the availability and cost of resources is crucial to livelihoods and a key component of adaptive capacity. We condu...

The accumulation of traffic-related trace elements in soil as the result of anthropogenic activities raises serious concerns about environmental pollution and public health. Traffic is the main source of trace elements in roadside soil on the Tibetan Plateau, an area otherwise devoid of industrial emissions. Indeed, the rapid development of tourism...

Pervasive social and ecological water crises in Mexico remain, despite over two decades of legal and institutional backing for Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) as a policy tenet. In this article we apply a socialshed analysis to uncover and understand the geographical and jurisdictional forces influencing the social construction and sim...

Small-scale irrigation systems managed by farmers are facing multiple challenges including competing water demand, climatic variability and change, and socioeconomic transformation. Though the relevant institutions for irrigation management have developed coping and adaptation mechanisms, the intensity and frequency of the changes have weakened the...

Glaciers, snowpack, rivers, lakes, and wetlands in mountain regions provide freshwater for much of the world's population. These systems, however, are acutely sensitive to climate change. In Andean water towers, which supply freshwater to more than 100 million people, climate change adaptation planning is critical. Adaptation plans, however, are mo...

Hydropower is often termed “green energy” and proffered as an alternative to polluting coal-generated electricity for burgeoning cities and energy-insecure rural areas. India is the third largest coal producer in the world; it is projected to be the largest coal consumer by 2050. In the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, India, over 450 hydroelectric...

In the face of high-impact, but uncertain, environmental changes likely to affect the supply and demand of water resources, societies are discussing the need to adapt to such changes and considering their available options to do so. Inspired by a decision-analysis approach called robust decisionmaking (RDM), a collaborative science-policy dialogue...

Climate variability and change exert disproportionate impacts on the water sector because water is a crosscutting resource for food production, energy generation, economic development, poverty alleviation, and ecosystem processes. Flexible surface water and groundwater storage together with adaptive water governance are increasingly recognized and...

This article reviews and contrasts two approaches that water security researchers employ to advance understanding of the complexity of water-society policy challenges. A prevailing reductionist approach seeks to represent uncertainty through calculable risk, links national GDP tightly to hydro-climatological causes, and underplays diversity and pol...

The Uttarakhand flash floods of 2013 have been dubbed as the “Himalayan Tsunami”. The region has been subjected to severe changes in its high-mountain glacial environment. The risk of disasters striking this region has therefore considerably increased in recent times because of the increased human activities and unplanned urbanization, which along...

In the western US–Mexico border region, both countries’ authorities look to desalination as a means to meet increased demands for dwindling supplies. In addition to several existing or planned desalination plants, plans exist to develop projects along Mexico’s coasts to convert seawater into freshwater primarily for conveyance and consumption in th...

The urban water–energy nexus is defined as the interlinkages among water, energy, and attendant infrastructure, coupled with the populations that rely on them and the institutions for their governance. Because these interlinkages shape the future trajectory of cities – their form, function, and footprint – the nexus can be harnessed as a holistic p...

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The United States and Mexico share waters in a number of hydrological basins and aquifers that cross the international boundary. Both countries recognize that, in a region of scarce water resources and expanding populations, a greater scientific understanding of these aquifer systems would be beneficial. In light of this, the Mexican and U.S. Princ...

A persistent paradox in the global boom of renewable energy revolves around how little of its vast potential has been developed on Native American lands. For economic and environmental reasons, attempts to reverse this pattern are on the rise. Such plans will encounter many unique conditions, particularly those related to tribal norms, customs, and...

Multiple intersecting factors place pressure on planetary systems on which society and ecosystems depend. Climate change and variability, resource use patterns, globalization viewed in terms of economic enterprise and environmental change, poverty and inequitable access to social services, as well as the international development enterprise itself,...