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Introduction

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Drought is a complex, long-standing issue for much of the western United States. Examples in this case come from the Arkansas River Valley in Colorado, where recent droughts have created stress on communities, especially where water use is increasingly divided between agriculture and municipalities. For example, practices of buy-and-dry, where municipalities buy water rights from agricultural users, has had negative impacts on lives and livelihoods in Southeast Colorado that are dependent on the social and economic networks created by generations of agricultural production. Such instances illustrate how managing water for decision-makers, such as municipalities and individual farmers, can be challenging when multiple motivations, decision contexts, and resource needs are at play. Similarly, it highlights how it is often difficult to anticipate precisely which actions may unintentionally impact others over time. Building knowledge about how different groups have come together to learn from these challenges can help with future planning, especially as climate change climate change
Climate change includes both global warming driven by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases and the resulting large-scale shifts in weather patterns. Though there have been previous periods of climatic change, since the mid-20th century humans have had an unprecedented impact on Earth's climate system and caused change on a global scale.

Learn more about climate change increases the frequency and severity of drought.

Social learning, or a way of “learning together, to manage together” (), offers an avenue for creating common goals and management strategies in drought decisions. In social learning, individuals bound by a common potential threat, such as drought, contribute their different perspectives to create group knowledge over time (; ; ). The capacity to reflect on various needs and nimbly respond to surprises throughout the adaptation process is critical to social learning (). Social learning in drought adaptation— facilitated by flexibility, experimentation, and evaluation—thus helps to minimize negative tradeoffs and unintended consequences from drought. 

To understand how social learning is developed under drought, the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) interviewed individuals from different sectors--agriculture, municipalities, energy, natural resource management--in the Arkansas River Basin to learn about unexpected impacts from previous droughts. Two different cases came to light: one related to the negative impacts of buy-and-dry; and another related to unexpected opportunities that emerged to protect wild brown trout and grow tourism related to angling. By tracing the historical origins of decisions and their impacts, these cases show how decision-makers’ social learning enabled a swifter, more holistic response to unanticipated harms.

Key Issues Addressed

Decisions made about how to manage drought at individual or group scale can create unexpected impacts on others. It can be difficult for different groups responsible for their respective areas of water and drought management to adequately identify consequences of their actions on others. For example, legacies of water transfer from agricultural to municipal communities--called buy-and-dry--economically devastated Crowley County in southeast Colorado, which is still struggling to recover today. Stressed by chronic drought, farmers sold the majority of their water rights, transferring the majority of power to municipalities. In another example, a multi-year drought in the early 2000s created extremely low flows on the Arkansas River. While trout thrived, the recreation and agricultural sectors struggled.

Project Goals

• Track unintended consequences from drought decisions as they move throughout the area and impact others
• Identify features of social learning that can mitigate future unintended consequences ahead of time
• Share these lessons learned with others to help groups build social learning before drought and other hazards occur

Project Highlights

Compassion Over Conflict: Social learning requires people, often with different resource management goals, to learn with one another. Though potential for conflict was possible, long-term collaboration proved beneficial.

• Place-Based Approach: The team studied areas in a common river basin in Colorado where local decision makers had recent experience with drought. This approach allowed participants to reflect back on decisions they made, to note individual and community impacts they witnessed, and to identify others who might have been unexpectedly affected. The team also attended events relevant to water use in the study region, including local agricultural tours and sector-specific conferences. These events provided local insight into drought-related policies and management activities at various scales.
• Impacted Voices: Because multiple motivations, decision contexts, and resource needs are at play, and across different scales, the research team conducted interviews with participants across different sectors (e.g. agricultural producers, water managers, state engineers, extension agents, energy company officials) in the Arkansas River Basin. To understand how decisions made in drought ripple through a system, the research team asked participants to connect them with impacted individuals for further interviews.
• Historical Context: The research team performed a historical analysis of each example case by exploring local newspaper articles, trade journals, and online content created for the Arkansas River Basin. This approach allowed the research team to place decisions and their impacts into historical context to provide a richer understanding of why and how decisions might cascade through a system.

Lessons Learned

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A community can “shortcut” social learning that might otherwise have had to happen through learning “the hard way.” The research team identified four avenues for short-cutting social learning: 1) holistic governance; 2) drawing expansive boundaries, 3) learning from past experience; and 4) enabling safer experimentation.

Managing resources without all parties involved can create a cascade of unintended consequences. However, formal or informal governance arrangements between stakeholders with a resource in common (e.g. river water) can cultivate social connection, awareness, and nimbleness that creates a more holistic approach to resource management. Further, learning from others can form a foundation for planning, preparedness, and responses that are more resilient to change. Shifting to collaborative frameworks can generate new connections across sectors within existing governance structures and broaden choices informed by system interdependencies. In the case of river management for trout and recreation, recreation and trout conservation groups came together under the auspices of a Voluntary Flows Management program, which allowed them to create alternative water flow agreements in non-drought times to accommodate both recreation and trout.

Individual decisions may create impacts beyond the short-term time scale in which the decision was made. Similarly, small-scale decisions (e.g. a particular farm) can have impacts that are difficult to trace if one looks only at that narrow scale. This necessitates both a longer, historical view of outcomes and drawing a more expansive spatio-temporal boundary around who counts as part of a resource system. For instance, considering who was or could be involved over longer time scales and across wider geographic areas, such as further from the direct impacts, would help understand the full extent of impacts. 

While there is no way to prepare for all possible vulnerable futures, experiments like pilot projects or temporary governance structures can serve as a proxy for direct experiences with negative outcomes. This knowledge can be quickly incorporated into new policies and practices. Further, creating space for experiments in resource management can open up possibilities to minimize or reveal negative consequences. For example, experiments can produce alternate future scenarios for decision-making, reveal unexamined elements of the system, and encourage generative problem solving among actors. In the case of buy-and-dry, different groups experimented with pilot programs to explore alternative water transfer practices that prioritize the needs of growing communities and the legacies of farming in Colorado.

Next Steps

• The research team will complete a similar study in the Weber Basin of Utah.
• Explore the feasibility of conducting other studies in drought-impacted states in the western U.S., including Wyoming and Texas.

Funding Partners

Resources

• Come Rain or Shine Podcast. (2021). “.”
• Berman (2017). . Springer.
• Fisher et al. (2019). “.” Environmental Policy and Governance 29: 235–247.
• Henderson et al. (2021). “‘” Weather, Climate, and Society 13(4): 729-741.
• Mostert et al. (2007). “.” Ecology and Society 12, 19.
• Koontz et al. (2004). “.” Policy Science 37: 185–204.
• Natarajan (2017). “.” Progress in Planning 111: 1–23.

Contacts

• Jen Henderson, Texas Tech University, jen.henderson@ttu.edu
• Lisa Dilling, Western Water Assessment, University of Colorado, Boulder, ldilling@colorado.edu
• Rebecca Morss, National Center for Atmospheric Research, morss@ucar.edu
• Olga Wilhelmi, National Center for Atmospheric Research, olgaw@ucar.edu
• Ursula Rick, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, ursula.rick@colorado.edu

CART Lead Author

• Jen Henderson, Assistant Professor, Texas Tech University: jen.henderson@ttu.edu
• Maude Dinan, Program Specialist, USDA Southwest Climate Hub, mdinan@nmsu.edu

The DLN is a peer-to-peer knowledge exchange between climate service providers and resource managers, created to gather and share lessons learned from drought events to prepare for future events. The DLN partners with CART to develop Case Studies, with funding from the National Drought Mitigation Center for interns and coordination support from the USDA Southwest Climate Hub.

Suggested Citation

Henderson, J., Dinan, M. (2022). “Analyzing Social Learning to Improve Drought Response Along the Arkansas River in Colorado.” CART. Retrieved from /project/social-learning-improve-drought-response.