Climate change is projected to have significant impacts on regional water resources over the next century. As longtime Colorado River water manager Eric Kuhn will discuss, science predicts that the future of the Colorado will include more severe droughts, changed precipitation patterns, altered hydrographs, greater demands, and reduced supplies. Kuhn will explain the differences between traditional conservative and popular conservative approaches to water management and argue why the popular conservative approach that disregards climate change could have dire consequences for the West.

Precipitation patterns in the American West are widely varied and lead to both tremendous floods and prolonged droughts, and understanding these variations is a key component in helping residents adapt to life in this region. In this lecture, Kelly Redmond, deputy director of the Desert Research Institute, discusses natural variability in precipitation patterns throughout the West and comments on the additional impact human-driven climate change may have on climate and water resources in the region.