Department Systems Analysis, Integrated Assessment and Modelling

Water mediates the relation between climate change and its most dramatic societal impacts, including food shortages, migration, and conflict. Yet the important role of hydrology in dampening (or amplifying) the effect of climate change and shaping people's response to it is poorly understood. Conversely, the respective roles of climate change and policy decisions as drivers of hydrologic change are often challenging to disentangle. This project fills these gaps. In the theoretical realm, we seek to improve the representation of coupled human-water interactions in sociohydrological models under climate change. In the empirical realm, we develop causal inference techniques to attribute observed sociohydrologic changes to environmental vs. policy drivers.