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1. Hydropower, Social Capital, Community Impacts, and Self‐Rated Health in the Amazon*

   https://doi.org/10.1111/ruso.12419  

   Mayer, Adam; Lopez, Maria_Claudia; Cavallini_Johansen, Igor; Moran, Emilio (November 2021, Rural Sociology)

   Abstract Nations in the global South have developed hydropower projects at a rapid pace in recent decades, most notably Brazil and China. These projects have long‐documented impacts on social and ecological systems, yet the implications of hydropower for human well‐being and health are not fully understood. In this paper, we examine eight Brazilian Amazon communities in the Madeira river basin, near the Jirau and Santo Antônio dams (sample size: 536 households). We evaluate how impacts on community resources, social capital, and the experience of resettlement influence self‐rated health in these communities. Results suggest that the dams strained community resources and social capital, which were associated with reductions in self‐rated health. In particular, cognitive social capital (i.e., trust) is lower after the dams' construction. The effect of resettlement and compensation is more nuanced and qualified. This work suggests that hydropower projects have broad deleterious impacts on well‐being and health of human populations in hosting regions and that better directed efforts are required on the part of dam developers to reduce these negative outcomes. 

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2. Sustainable hydropower in the 21st century

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1809426115  

   Moran, Emilio F.; Lopez, Maria Claudia; Moore, Nathan; Müller, Norbert; Hyndman, David W. (November 2018, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   Hydropower has been the leading source of renewable energy across the world, accounting for up to 71% of this supply as of 2016. This capacity was built up in North America and Europe between 1920 and 1970 when thousands of dams were built. Big dams stopped being built in developed nations, because the best sites for dams were already developed and environmental and social concerns made the costs unacceptable. Nowadays, more dams are being removed in North America and Europe than are being built. The hydropower industry moved to building dams in the developing world and since the 1970s, began to build even larger hydropower dams along the Mekong River Basin, the Amazon River Basin, and the Congo River Basin. The same problems are being repeated: disrupting river ecology, deforestation, losing aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity, releasing substantial greenhouse gases, displacing thousands of people, and altering people’s livelihoods plus affecting the food systems, water quality, and agriculture near them. This paper studies the proliferation of large dams in developing countries and the importance of incorporating climate change into considerations of whether to build a dam along with some of the governance and compensation challenges. We also examine the overestimation of benefits and underestimation of costs along with changes that are needed to address the legitimate social and environmental concerns of people living in areas where dams are planned. Finally, we propose innovative solutions that can move hydropower toward sustainable practices together with solar, wind, and other renewable sources. 

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3. Watersheds and Infrastructure Providing Food, Energy, and Water to US Cities

   https://doi.org/10.1029/2023EF004258  

   Ao, Yufei_Zoe; Siddik, Md_Abu_Bakar; Konar, Megan; Marston, Landon_T (June 2024, Earth's Future)

   Abstract Civil infrastructure underpins urban receipts of food, energy, and water (FEW) produced in distant watersheds. In this study, we map flows of FEW goods from watersheds of the contiguous United States to major population centers and highlight the critical infrastructure that supports FEW flows. To do this, we draw upon detailed records of agriculture, electricity, and public water supply production and couple them with commodity flow and infrastructure information. We also compare the flows of virtual water embedded in food and energy commodity flows with physical water flows in inter‐basin water transfer projects around the country. We found that the virtual blue water transfers through crops and electricity to major US cities was 53 billion and 8 billion m³in 2017, respectively, while physical interbasin water transfers for crops, electricity, and public supply water averaged 20.8 billion m³. Highways are the primary infrastructure used to import virtual water associated with food and fuel into cities, although waterways and railways are most utilized for long‐distance transport. All of the 204 watersheds in the contiguous US support the food, energy, and/or water supplies of major US cities, with dependencies stretching far beyond each city's borders. Still, most cities source the majority of their FEW and embedded water resources from nearby watersheds. Infrastructure such as water supply dams and inland ports serve as important buffers for both local and supply‐chain sourced water stress. These findings can inform efforts to reduce water resources and infrastructure risks in domestic supply chains. 

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4. Hydroclimate risk to electricity balancing throughout the U.S

   https://doi.org/10.1088/2634-4505/ad92a5  

   Dennis, Lauren; Grady, Caitlin (November 2024, Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability)

   Abstract Although hydropower produces a relatively small portion of the electricity we use in the United States, it is a flexible and dispatchable resource that serves various critical functions for managing the electricity grid. Climate-induced changes to water availability will affect future hydropower production, and such changes could impact how the areas where the supply and demand of electricity are balanced, called balancing authority areas, are able to meet decarbonization goals. We calculate hydroclimate risk to hydropower at the balancing authority scale, which is previously underexplored in the literature and has real implications for decarbonization and resilience-building. Our results show that, by 2050, most balancing authority areas could experience significant changes in water availability in areas where they have hydropower. Balancing areas facing the greatest changes are located in diverse geographic areas, not just the Western and Northwestern United States, and vary in hydropower generation capacity. The range of projected changes experienced within each balancing area could exacerbate or offset existing hydropower generation deficits. As power producers and managers undertake increasing regional cooperation to account for introducing more variable renewable energy into the grid, analysis of risk at this regional scale will become increasingly salient. 

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5. Training the Next Generation of Seismologists: Delivering Research-Grade Software Education for Cloud and HPC Computing Through Diverse Training Modalities

   https://doi.org/10.1785/0220240413  

   Denolle, Marine A; Tape, Carl; Bozdağ, Ebru; Wang, Yinzhi; Waldhauser, Felix; Gabriel, Alice-Agnes; Braunmiller, Jochen; Chow, Bryant; Ding, Liang; Feng, Kuan-Fu; et al (June 2025, Seismological Research Letters)

   Abstract With the rise of data volume and computing power, seismological research requires more advanced skills in data processing, numerical methods, and parallel computing. We present the experience of conducting training workshops in various forms of delivery to support the adoption of large-scale high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud computing, advancing seismological research. The seismological foci were on earthquake source parameter estimation in catalogs, forward and adjoint wavefield simulations in 2D and 3D at local, regional, and global scales, earthquake dynamics, ambient noise seismology, and machine learning. This contribution describes the series of workshops delivered as part of research projects, the learning outcomes for participants, and lessons learned by the instructors. Our curriculum was grounded on open and reproducible science, large-scale scientific computing and data mining, and computing infrastructure (access and usage) for HPC and the cloud. We also describe the types of teaching materials that have proven beneficial to the instruction and the sustainability of the program. We propose guidelines to deliver future workshops on these topics. 

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