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Water resource managers face the complex challenge of balancing water allocation between human and environmental needs. Declining water availability in many regions globally is driven by over- allocation and usage by municipal and agricultural users and climate-driven changes in rainfall. At the same time, environmental flows in rivers and streams that sustain fish and other aquatic life are decreasing for the same reasons. Because freshwater species’ populations are declining rapidly, it is increasingly important to balance between human and environmental water needs. However, there are significant barriers and socio-political issues that prevent water from being allocated to conserve freshwater ecosystems. This...
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Abstract (from ScienceDirect): Policies that mandate environmental flows (e-flows) can be powerful tools for freshwater conservation, but implementation of these policies faces many hurdles. To better understand these challenges, we explored two key questions: (1) What additional data are needed to implement e-flows? and (2) What are the major socio-political barriers to implementing e-flows? We surveyed water and natural resource decision makers in the semi-arid Red River basin, Texas-Oklahoma, USA, and used social network analysis to analyze their communication patterns. Most respondents agreed that e-flows can provide important benefits and identified the same data needs. However, respondents sharply in their...
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The Rio Grande/Bravo is an arid river basin shared by the United States and Mexico, the fifth-longest river in North America, and home to more than 10.4 million people. By crossing landscapes and political boundaries, the Rio Grande/Bravo brings together cultures, societies, ecosystems, and economies, thereby forming a complex social-ecological system. The Rio Grande/Bravo supplies water for the human activities that take place within its territory. While there have been efforts to implement environmental flows (flows necessary to sustain riparian and aquatic ecosystems and human activities), a systematic and whole-basin analysis of these efforts that conceptualizes the Rio Grande/Bravo as a single, complex social-ecological...
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