Environmental flows (e‐flows) are powerful tools for sustaining freshwater biodiversity and ecosystem services, but their widespread implementation faces numerous social, political, and economic barriers. These barriers are amplified in water‐limited systems where strong trade‐offs exist between human water needs and freshwater ecosystem protection. We synthesize the complex, multidisciplinary challenges that exist in these systems to help identify targeted solutions to accelerate the adoption and implementation of environmental flows initiatives. We present case studies from three water‐limited systems in North America and synthesize the major barriers to implementing environmental flows. We identify four common barriers: (a) lack of authority to implement e‐flows in water governance structures, (b) fragmented water governance in transboundary water systems, (c) declining water availability and increasing variability under climate change, and (d) lack of consideration of non‐biophysical factors. We then formulate actionable recommendations for decision makers facing these barriers when working towards implementing environmental flows: (a) modify or establish a water governance framework to recognize or allow e‐flows, (b) strive for collaboration across political jurisdictions and social, economic, and environmental sectors, and (c) manage adaptively for climate change in e‐flows planning and recommendations. This article is categorized under: Water and Life > Conservation, Management, and Awareness Human Water > Water Governance Engineering Water > Planning Water

Social processes are essential components of human-environment systems and their dynamics. However, modeling a tightly coupled socio-environmental system over a large area and across wide social and environmental diversity presents several challenges, given the complexity of the interactions and their spatial heterogeneity. The transboundary Rio Grande/Río Bravo (RGB) Basin is an excellent case study to address these challenges. Water scarcity and over-allocation of water are present in a highly engineered system with extensive damming and a complex structure of agreements and compacts that govern the distribution of hydrological resources among users. Since no basin-wide approaches to modeling the RGB as a socio-environmental system exist, we attempt to close this gap. Building on data collected through extensive ethnographic fieldwork, we used a structured, collaborative, and integrative approach for documenting existing knowledge on and modeling of the RGB socio-environmental system. We assess different models for conceptualizing human behavior applied in the RGB, identify a need to redefine the (spatial) boundaries of the system and produce inductively generated knowledge about the interlinkages of social processes with environmental system components in the form of a semi-quantitative conceptual model. Our research demonstrates an alternative to ad-hoc approaches to defining “the social” in socio-environmental models and is a first step towards the development of a basin-wide computer simulation model of the RGB socio-environmental system.

The Rio Grande/Bravo is an arid river basin shared by the United States and Mexico, the fifth-longest river in North America, and home to more than 10.4 million people. By crossing landscapes and political boundaries, the Rio Grande/Bravo brings together cultures, societies, ecosystems, and economies, thereby forming a complex social-ecological system. The Rio Grande/Bravo supplies water for the human activities that take place within its territory. While there have been efforts to implement environmental flows (flows necessary to sustain riparian and aquatic ecosystems and human activities), a systematic and whole-basin analysis of these efforts that conceptualizes the Rio Grande/Bravo as a single, complex social-ecological system is missing. Our objective is to address this research and policy gap and shed light on challenges, opportunities, and success stories for implementing environmental flows in the Rio Grande/Bravo. We introduce the physical characteristics of the basin and summarize the environmental flows studies already done. We also describe its water governance framework and argue it is a distributed and nested governance system across multiple political jurisdictions and spatial scales. We describe the environmental flows legal framework and argue that the authority over different aspects of environmental flows is divided across different agencies and institutions. We discuss the prioritization of agricultural use within the governance structure without significant provisions for environmental flows. We introduce success stories for implementing environmental flows that include leasing of water rights or voluntary releases for environmental flow purposes, municipal ordinances to secure water for environmental flows, nongovernmental organizations representing the environment in decision-making processes, and acquiring water rights for environmental flows, among others initiatives. We conclude that environmental flows are possible and have been implemented but their implementation has not been systematic and permanent. There is an emerging whole-basin thinking among scientists, managers, and citizens that is helping find common-ground solutions to implementing environmental flows in the Rio Grande/Bravo basin.

Integrative research on water resources requires a wide range of socio-environmental datasets to better understand human-water interactions and inform decision-making. However, in transboundary watersheds, integrating cross-disciplinary and multinational datasets is a daunting task due to the disparity of data sources and the inconsistencies in data format, content, resolution, and language. this paper introduces a socio-environmental geodatabase that transcends political and disciplinary boundaries in the Rio Grande/Río Bravo basin (RGB). The geodatabase aggregates 145 GIS data layers on five main themes: (i) Water & Land Governance, (ii) Hydrology, (iii) Water Use & Hydraulic Infrastructures, (iv) Socio-Economics, and (v) Biophysical Environment. Datasets were primarily collected from public open-access data sources, processed with arcGIS, and documented through the FGCD metadata standard. By synthesizing a broad array of datasets and mapping public and private water governance, we expect to advance interdisciplinary research in the RGB, provide a replicable approach to dataset compilation for transboundary watersheds, and ultimately foster transboundary collaboration for sustainable resource management.

Stephanie Paladino is an environmental anthropologist working out of Athens, GA Jeanne Simonelli is a writer, anthropologist and activist recently retired from Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NCThese are hazards so grave that every citizen should have a voice in deciding whether this is the road to energy independence we-or anyone-should take. . . . (Margaret Mead 1976, in Townsend 2013 As Pat Townsend, in her article in this special CAFE issue on energy and anthropology reminds us, we should not be surprised to find that "Margaret Mead has been there before us." Writing about nuclear energy in 1976, Margaret Mead and coauthors pointedly captured the sense of urgency and purpose that is now driving a growing wave of anthropological engagements with energy. This sense of urgency, one of the main impulses behind the organization of panels on energy and anthropology at the 2012 Society for Applied Anthropology and American Anthropological Association meetings by ourselves and colleagues, led to our coeditorship of this special issue. In turn, these have sparked a wave of purposeful networking and collaborations among anthropologists and allied social scientists working across energy sites and systems.These emerging efforts continue a long history of anthropological engagement with energy. Beginning in mid-last century, anthropologists and ecologists made significant contributions to placing human activities in ecological context. One of the signal contributions of this work was to make visible the energetic relations underlying production systems and associated social relations. They compared, for instance, the energy efficiency of food production based exclusively on human labor to the energy inefficiency of industrialized agricultural, with its dependence on material and energy importations into local systems and the energy losses incurred in the process. This work pointed to the disruptions caused among ecosystems by the movements, transformations, and discharges of energy. It also indicated that the ability of a society to engage in increasingly intensive production is predicated on it having access to socionatural landscapes as sources of extraction.In addition, anthropologists in and outside of the academy have produced an abundant body of knowledge documenting why, where, and how these transformations and movements of energy have come about, and how they are differentially experienced, constructed, and influenced. Working from fields as diverse as development anthropology, human rights, farming research, and public health, for instance, anthropologists have traced the displacements and dispossessions caused by hydroelectric dams and mining sites; the patterned effects of and responses to disasters; and the disproportionate exposure of the poor and minorities to illness and social disruption from industrial energy practices. Anthropologists have played a significant role in documenting the effective sacrifice of cultural and natural landscapes, as well as the rights, health, and possible futures of who...