FPP Champion at NSS Conference: Navigating the Water Crisis
The US National Sustainability Society held their 3rd annual conference on the Colorado State University (CSU) campus in Denver, Colorado on 17-19 August, on the theme of “Courage, Credibility and Collective Action on Sustainability”. Our 2026 USA National Champion of the Frontiers Planet Prize was first speaker in a key session on navigating the water crisis.
Chair: Krista Bailey, CSU
Speakers:
Amir AghaKouchak, UC Irvine
Brad Udall, Senior Scientist at the Colorado Water Centre, CSU
Sybille Sharvelle, One Water Solutions Institute, CSU
Professor Amir AghaKouchak set the global scene for water scarcity with his Prize-winning expert perspective on macro-climate threats, and new ways to quantify and predict these. He was followed by Brad Udall, who shared a comprehensive overview of regional US policy realities in the Colorado River basin, arising from the combination of old laws, climate change and population growth. The third and final speaker, Sybille Sharvelle, gave key research insights on local watershed tools for addressing water scarcity.
Speaking to the global scientific picture, Amir AghaKouchak titled his talk “From Hazard to Consequence: Impact-Based Drought Monitoring and Prediction.”
He demonstrated different tools developed by his research team for managing the water crisis, from a real-time global rainfall monitoring to a new product which monitors drought globally at varied scales for different applications. Most drought model predictions cannot foresee more than a few months, but this system uses 18-month data to predict long-term. Fully downloadable basin-level drought data can be accessed just by clicking on the interactive map, providing a helpful graphic overview for summary takeaways. He shared the variables and metrics – such as precipitation and soil moisture – which form the basis of the drought index, and how a new, unified indicator had been created.
This index platform has been used by over 1.8M people in 219 countries since its inception, proving its global applicability and efficacy, especially for countries which lack their own drought monitoring and prediction systems.
Amir further showed how the system had been adapted to be more user-friendly, based on many workshops in varied global regions to understand end-users’ needs. This led to the adaptation of the drought monitor towards impact-based metrics – for example, the impact on crop yields, or energy generation.
Giving a case study, Amir showed the “Snow Drought” tool which links lack of snowfall across the States (caused by climate-change-led temperature rise) to the subsequent impacts on irrigation water availability, and how this then translated to productivity of various crop types. So that if you have information on snow deficit, you can translate that directly into predictions for water for irrigation purposes and therefore to later crop harvests. 3 key crops – wheat, rice and maize – were mapped globally using this tool to give an idea regionally of expected impacts on the agriculture system.
He also gave a preview of another application which his team hopes to make operational soon and is currently in test phase: the Water Resource Vulnerability Monitor. This incorporates impacts of anthropogenic activities as well as climate-influenced variables. Anthropogenic drivers of drought include land-use change for agriculture, and water-system management, such as dams and reservoirs, for growing populations.
Future tool solutions which Amir and his team aim to deliver are:
advance current systems into actionable solutions by integrating data on water management at the local scale (lakes and reservoirs) with non-climactic influences on drought impacts
implement an AI-powered Food Intelligence System which can predict impacts from human crises such as the Ukrainian conflict
Questions to the speakers live in the room focused on key solutions to implement to the water crisis at the US level, and our US National Champion joined the discussion to expertly enlighten the answers from the global impacts perspective.
The session concluded with his reflection on the possibilities for alternatives to water-heavy animal farming, from a systems-analysis standpoint – he noted that we don’t have counter-factuals for the production water costs of synthetic alternatives to products such as leather, but that these can require a lot more water use within the agricultural system, and cause more pollution from the production process.
It is important to consider how we replace the water-heavy systems we currently depend on, as we move towards a future world that works within the safe operating spaces of the nine planetary boundaries.