Catalyzing Frontiers in Water-Climate-Society Research: A View from Early Career Scientists and Junior Faculty

While we have always experienced variability in the availability of water across a variety of time scales, anthropogenic climate change will likely bring substantial additional effects on water cycles and water resource management, such as changes in timing, amount, and patterns of precipitation; decreasing snow packs; enhanced droughts; and more frequent and intense floods and storms, among others. Water management systems based on stationarity assumptions (i.e., that water and climate cycles remain within a certain range of variability) could be replaced by analytical and numerical strategies and techniques based on a nonstationarity framework, borrowing from understanding in geography and applied and physical climatology.\n Again, not all tenure-track individuals or professional researchers need to engage in such work, but for those who do wish to engage in collaborative, problem-oriented research, alternative incentives are needed to evaluate, encourage, and reward such research.