Plants play a crucial role in regulating water fluxes between land and atmosphere and their response to climate change will influence future water availability and drought risk around the world. Currently, projections of future water availability are uncertain due to a lack of understanding of the role of plants, in part because solving this problem requires integration across a wide range of disciplines and tools, from climate dynamics to ecohydrology. The workshop will bring together these disciplines and develop strategies to reduce uncertainty in water availability projections globally and regionally.
Droughts are among the costliest natural disasters that affect society and ecosystems around the world. While we expect overall more precipitation in a warmer climate, there is growing evidence that many regions will at the same time be subject to increased drought risk. There are several reasons for this seeming contradiction, though the most important one is an increase in evaporation in a warmer climate outpacing increases in precipitation, in some regions intermittently, in others permanently. However, there exists substantial uncertainty on the magnitude and sometimes even the sign of drought risk change in a warming climate. In recent years it has become clear that a key source of this uncertainty is the response of plants to climate change, as plants are important conduits for and thus regulators of water fluxes between the land surface and the atmosphere. Plants respond differently to rising temperatures and increases in CO2 and it is not always clear whether plants will overall increase or decrease their water consumption given these opposing influences. Resolving this question and thus reducing an important source of uncertainty in future drought projections is emerging as a crucial scientific challenge with wide-ranging societal implications.
Droughts and terrestrial water availability more generally are prime examples of wicked and inherently interdisciplinary problems. As is often the case with contemporary climate change issues, various scientific groups are working on solving different parts of the same problem. In the case of water availability and plants, groups are working at scales ranging from global to leaf-level and using tools ranging from coupled Earth system models to observing platforms focused on individual trees. Yet, predicting how global climate change and plants will interact to change terrestrial water availability arguably requires a better understanding at all these scales and of all these tools.
Natural integration of such diverse bodies of knowledge is typically slow – too slow given the pace of climate change and the impact it already has on terrestrial water availability. This workshop will thus bring together a wide range of scientists working on different aspects of the terrestrial water availability problem with the goal to accelerate the exchange of knowledge and pursuit of a better understanding and ultimately reduction of uncertainties associated with future water projections.
The workshop aims to review the state of the field, identify observational findings and processes that are ripe for integration in climate models, critique current model behavior and identify shortcomings, and discuss emergent constraints. The goal is to produce a review paper, as well as spark ideas and collaborations for interdisciplinary white papers. A goal of the workshop and review paper is also to create figures and storylines that can be used to convey to the public to what extent the scientific community has confidence in their future water availability projections and how existing uncertainties might affect society and ecosystem management decisions going forward.
The workshop will bring together a diverse set of scientists from across disciplines including climate dynamics, climate and land surface modeling, hydrology, ecohydrology, remote sensing, and agriculture, to generate new collaborations and encourage integration of research towards a more comprehensive understanding of uncertainties in future water availability. The workshop will produce a review paper and white papers that aim to rally the wider community around research directions most critical to the ultimate goal of reducing these uncertainties. Further anticipated outcomes are condensed figures and messages to help the public understand the uncertainties around projections of future water availability and what aspects of that problem the science community is currently grappling with and how this might impact the information the public can expect from the scientific community in the near future.
The attendee list and participant profiles are regularly updated. For information on participant affiliation at the time of workshop, please refer to the historical roster. If you are aware of updates needed to participant or workshop records, please notify AGCI’s workshops team.
Event Co-Chair
