In the existing 276 international river basins, the increase in water variability projected by most climate change scenarios may present serious challenges to riparian states. This research maps the institutional resilience to water variability in transboundary basins and combines it with both historic and projected variability regimes, with the objective of identifying areas at potential risk of future hydropolitical tension. To do so, it combs existing international treaties for sources of institutional resilience and considers the coefficient of variation of runoff as a measure of past and future water variability. The study finds significant gaps in both the number of people and area covered by institutional stipulations to deal with variability in South America and Asia. At present, high potential risk for hydropolitical tensions associated with water variability is identified in 24 transboundary basins and seems to be concentrated mainly in northern and sub-Saharan Africa. By 2050, areas at greatest potential risk are more spatially dispersed and can be found in 61 international basins, and some of the potentially large impacts of climate change are projected to occur away from those areas currently under scrutiny. Understanding when and where to target capacity-building in transboundary river basins for greater resilience to change is critical. This study represents a step toward facilitating these efforts and informing further qualitative and quantitative research into the relationship between climate change, hydrological variability regimes, and institutional capacity for accommodating variability.

Internationally shared basins supply 60 % of global freshwater supply, are home to about 1/3 of the world’s population, and are focal points for interstate conflict and, as importantly, cooperation. To manage these waters, states have developed a large set of formal treaties, but until now these treaties have been difficult to access and systematically assess. This paper presents and makes publicly available the assembly and organization of the largest known collection of transboundary water agreements in existence. We apply for the first time a “lineage” concept to differentiate between independent agreements and groups of legally related texts, spatially reference the texts to a global basin database, and identify agreement purposes, goals and a variety of content areas. The 688 agreements identified were signed between 1820 and 2007 and constitute 250 independent treaties which apply to 113 basins. While the scope and content varies widely, these treaties nominally govern almost 70 % of the world’s transboundary basin area. In terms of content, treaties have shifted from an earlier focus on regulation and development of water resources to the management of resources and the setting of frameworks for that management. While “traditional” issues such as hydropower, water allocation and irrigation are still important, the environment is now the most commonly mentioned issue in treaty texts. Treaties are also increasingly likely to include data and information sharing provisions, have conflict resolution mechanisms, and include mechanisms for participation beyond traditional nation-state actors. Generalizing, treaties have become more comprehensive over time, both in the issues they address and the tools they use to manage those issues cooperatively

This research investigated the relationship between social cultural setting and background characteristics to African self-consciousness (ASC) as measured by the ASC Scale. Two hundred fifty Black college students, half from pre dominantly Black Florida A&M University (FAMU) and half from predominantly White Florida State University (FSU), were administered the ASC Scale and a background questionnaire. The findings revealed that: (a) FAMU stu dents obtained significantly higher ASC Scale scores than FSU students; (b) older students obtained significantly higher ASC scores than younger students; (c) upper level students obtained higher ASC scores than lower level stu dents, and this effect was more pronounced for FAMU students than for FSU students; (d) students with Black Studies backgrounds obtained higher ASC Scale scores than did students without this experience, especially for the FSU students; (e) FAMU students with all-Black elementary school backgrounds obtained higher ASC Scale scores than did the other students. It concluded: (a) that the African self-consciousness construct appears to be an important factor in explaining differences in psychological functioning and behavior among Black students in different sociocultural settings; and (b) that Black sociocultural settings and pro- Black experiential emphases are probably facilitative of healthy Black personality functioning.

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