Resilient Transboundary Water Management through Water, Social, Systems, and Data Sciences

The Transboundary Groundwater Resilience (TGR) Network-of-Networks (NoN) synergistically brings together hydrology, social science, data science, and systems science to catalyze transformative change for groundwater systems around the world facing climate change exacerbated depletion. Unprecedented international groundwater depletion—intensified by realities of reduced surface water availability—threatens the resilience of communities in nearly every country, as well as the global populations that depend on resources from these regions. Improving groundwater conditions represents one of the most critical and time-sensitive scientific challenges of our generation. This NoN addresses region-to-region and discipline-to-discipline knowledge gaps to produce a research infrastructure foundation that meets stakeholder needs in support of improved decision-making outcomes. TGR seeks to unearth shared challenges, research priorities, and exemplar international cooperation and data sharing models that can be applied to other regions. TGR prioritizes leadership opportunities for students and early-career researchers who will lead the next generation to collaboratively integrate water, data, and systems science to address transboundary groundwater scarcity.

Building a comprehensive international network of networks presents many challenges. To address them, we organize workshops and training sessions that attract researchers and graduate students from different disciplines and develop an interactive expertise network, where transboundary researchers can find and connect with partners from other domains and regions, who work on similar problems.