Climate change threatens land and water resources primarily as rising temperatures intensify the global water cycle, leading to more frequent and severe extreme weather events like droughts, floods and wildfires, and causing widespread degradation of ecosystems and infrastructure.
As communities will be facing rising threats to land and water resources, developing sustainable land management plans will be crucial across all scales and sectors. Land and water management are deeply intertwined: when land use planning and water management are unnecessarily separated, and climate impacts are not considered in either, communities end up more vulnerable to extreme weather events, water scarcity, water quality degradation, and ecosystem degradation.
Sustainable land management can improve biodiversity, reduce GHG emissions, and improve carbon sequestration potential, while mitigating water scarcity, food scarcity and poverty. Some sustainable land and water management practices for climate mitigation and adaptation include:
Communities should develop comprehensive plans for an integrated analysis of how land use and building type decisions have impacts on water supply and demand. Plans should consider local environmental and socio-economic conditions, and involve collaboration across sectors, stakeholders, and scales, including internationally, and should feature the involvement of community members who are most vulnerable to climate impacts, water scarcity, and land degradation, including Indigenous peoples.
The following three case studies are examples of organizations exploring water and land management policies within a climate change context in different communities in the U.S.- the Colorado River Basin, Southern Massachusetts, and California’s Central Coast.
Overuse and droughts exacerbated by climate change produced the Colorado River Crisis, a clear lesson in the importance of the intersections of climate change, land use, and water policy. The Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy at the Lincoln Institute is working to implement integrated water and land policy in the Colorado River Basin through initiatives like the Colorado Water and Land Use Planning Alliance, a grassroots group of state agencies, local governments, NGOs, and researchers, and the Water & Tribes Initiative to produce collaborative action with the 30 Native American tribes who have been systematically excluded from their water rights and from development of water use policy.
The State of Colorado’s Water Plan set a goal for 75% of Coloradans to live in communities with water-saving actions incorporated in their land use plans by 2025. Several other states in the Colorado River Basin require water to be addressed in community land use plans. As such, the Babbitt Center produced a manual for local governments to develop comprehensive and integrated land and water policies. To build a cohesive plan, communities will need to coordinate land and water planning teams, establish metrics to track progress toward goals, and consider important questions like how much water various land use sectors use, how water is used or conserved, how the development process considers water, if water is used efficiently indoors and outdoors, how land use impacts watersheds, and what are future projections for population, housing, employment, and water demand.
The Community Land & Water Coalition of Southeastern Massachusetts is a grassroots network of organizations and community members dedicated to protecting, preserving, and stewarding the land and water resources of their community. Creating transparency in land-use decisions, the Coalition informs residents on how they can participate and attend public meetings on environmental issues, and campaigns against sand mining and logging, while advocating for responsible renewable energy siting and other land-use issues in the region.
California’s Central Coast is facing water shortages, severe droughts, housing shortages, rapid expansion of agriculture, and climate change impacts. The state’s historic Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) requires communities to establish local groundwater sustainability agencies. One comprehensive study in Ecology & Society analyzes the implementation of SGMA along with other scenarios of land-use and water management strategies, assessing trade-offs for decision making. Stakeholders in the communities aimed to improve water supplies, reduce groundwater level declines, and reduce water pollution, while conserving habitats, preserving farmland, and producing low- and medium-income housing. The study produced vulnerability maps to improve local adaptation planning, and identified that localized approaches have less trade-offs. Like SGMA, the strategies outlined have the potential to “transition systems from unsustainable configurations into resilient ones.”
