Ecosystem characteristics and processes provide significant value to human health and wellbeing, and there is growing interest in quantifying those values. Of particular interest are water-related ecosystem services and the incorporation of their value into local and regional decision making. This presents multiple challenges and opportunities to the hydrologic-modeling community. To motivate advances in water-resources research, we first present three common decision contexts that draw upon an ecosystemservice framework: scenario analysis, payments for watershed services, and spatial planning. Within these contexts, we highlight the particular challenges to hydrologic modeling, and then present a set of opportunities that arise from ecosystem-service decisions. The paper concludes with a set of recommendations regarding how we can prioritize our work to support decisions based on ecosystem-service valuation.

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Given the slow policy response by governments, climate leadership by other institutions has become an essential part of maintaining policy momentum, driving innovation, and fostering social dialogue. Despite growth in carbon pricing in government and the private sector, our review suggests low, but growing, adoption of internal carbon prices (ICPs) by higher education institutions (HEIs), who may be uniquely suited to implement and refine these tools. We analyze the range of ICP tools in use by eleven U.S. HEIs and discuss tradeoffs. Our analysis identifies several reasons why proxy carbon prices may be especially well-suited to decisions (especially at the system-scale) around carbon neutrality at a wide range of institutions. Using a unique dataset covering 10 years of real-world analysis with a proxy carbon price, we analyze the interaction of ICPs with life cycle cost analysis to start to identify when and how internal carbon pricing will be most likely to shift decisions. We discuss how schools and other institutions can collaborate and experiment with these tools to help drive good climate decision-making and inform climate policy at larger scales.

Governments are increasingly reliant on the reacquisition of water rights as a mechanism for recovering overexploited basins. Yet, serious concerns have recently been raised about the efficacy and operational dimensions of existing programs. Water buyback is typically implemented as the purchase of a fixed quantity of water rights from the agricultural sector at the price set by the Water Authority. This paper seeks to analyze whether the use of water buyback in its current form represents a sensible means of recovering overexploited basins. The results-which are particularly relevant to contexts characterised by poor enforcement regimes and widespread illegal water use-highlight the need for greater scrutiny of current programs and call for additional work to improve the design of reacquisition policies in the context of water resource management.

Increasingly, central governments approach contentious natural resource allocation problems by devolving partial decision-making responsibility to local stakeholders. This paper conceptualizes devolution as a three-stage process and uses a simulation model calibrated to real-world conditions to analyze devolution in Spain's Upper Guadiana Basin. The Spanish national government has proposed spending over a billion euros to reverse a 30 year decline in groundwater levels. We investigate how the government can most effectively allocate this money to improve water levels by utilizing its power to set the structure of a local negotiation process. Using a numerical Nash model of local bargaining, we find that if the national government creates appropriate incentives, local bargaining can produce water stabilization. The actual water levels that will emerge are highly dependent on the central government's decisions about the budget available to local stakeholders and the default policy, which will be influenced by the relative value the government places on various financial and environmental outcomes. Our paper concludes by determining the relationship between these relative valuations and the government's preferences over water levels.