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| Water in the Lower Rio Grande/Río Bravo Basin |
We developed the project around a relatively new and rapidly evolving interdisciplinary approach to examining complex long-term sustainability issues called integrated assessment (IA). IA has been defined as a method of assembling, summarizing, organizing, reconciling and interpreting existing pieces of knowledge across a diversity of disciplines, and communicating this information in a coherent way that can aid decision makers (Parson, 1995). This definition embodies two essential characteristics of IA: it should contain "added value" to insights derived from disciplinary research, and it should inform policy and support decision-making (Rotmans and van Asselt, 1996). The distinguishing feature of IA is its emphasis on integration among disciplines. The analogy of bricks and mortar is often invoked to describe IA (see e.g. Risbey et al., 1996). The bricks represent the IA's various disciplinary components that draw on well-developed theory and methodologies of the particular fields; in this project these included economics, hydrology, ecology and engineering. The mortar that binds the bricks together represents the integrative processes of the IA.
Much of IA research to date has been directed at global environmental issues, and climate change in particular. Given the complex, interdisciplinary nature of most water problems, they are a natural candidate for the application of IA methods. However, because of the fundamental relationship of water to geography, our extension of IA to examine water resource issues required a greater focus on regional influences and pressures such as population growth and the regional economy, recognizing also that policy implementation would generally occur at the regional scale as well. We benefited greatly from the experiences of the MINK study of climate change in four mid-western states of the US (Rosenberg and Crosson, 1991).
Because Integrated Assessment as a methodology is young and still evolving, no established best practice yet exists. Consequently, the project was begun with a general plan for the integrated assessment in mind, but also with significant methodological details to be resolved as the project progressed. The IA methodology that ultimately emerged was the result of lengthy, occasionally intense discussions among the project team members.
Figure 5: Integrative Structure of the Project
Integration occurred at two levels. First, members of the project's various teams (water supply and demand, water quality, population, socio-economic development, ecology, and water management) combined data and information from Mexico and Texas within their project component. Second, the team as a whole worked on integration across disciplinary components, which was the thrust of the integrated assessment methodology. The integrative structure of the project is depicted in Figure 5.
The project examined water and development under current and projected future conditions.
The Baseline Current Context
As in many watersheds, knowledge and information about the Lower Rio Grande/Bravo Valley Basin is fragmented, disjointed, incomplete, and sometimes inaccurate. The baseline assessment sought to gather and integrate information and data to establish a more complete, interdisciplinary understanding of the region as a whole. In terms of the integration process, the identification and representation of linkages between components was paramount, since these relationships describe the interactions among these components (see Figure 5). In practice, these linkages represented critical exchanges of information among researchers.
The Future
Our analysis of the future was shaped by two key driving forces: population growth and water availability. To examine a range of possible interactions of these two fundamental drivers, the integrated assessment utilized population projections and a set of water scarcity scenarios, developed to span a range of plausible alternative water availability futures. The IA then considered a set of policy and management options aimed at establishing a more sustainable trajectory for regional water use and development.
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| Page Updated/Reviewed: 01/12/2007 8:38 AM |
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