ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT: Water management must overcome multiple global challenges as well as endemic human mismanagement and poor stewardship. Critical to this local to global effort are new tools from the Earth systems sciences, which for the first time offer biogeophysical knowledge and perspectives, information highly useful for all levels of water stakeholders, especially when combined with contributions of the social sciences. We have ascertained, for example, that 84% of the world’s people live in the driest half of the globe; we are able to measure the pandemic effect of water diversion and engineering on the world’s drainage basins; we can improve the health of people today using what we’re learning about the history of pollution; and we are beginning to make impacts of climate change more predictable. In the inevitable complex conflicts over water the financing, production, integration and dissemination of this information are essential.