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Abstract We offer the first study unpacking the taxonomy of collaboratives that undertake wildland fire management and how that taxonomy relates to resilience. We developed a comprehensive inventory totaling 133 collaboratives across twelve states in the western United States. We extracted each collaborative’s vision, mission, program goals, actions, and stakeholder composition. Based on this data we summarize temporal and spatial trends in collaborative formation and discuss formation drivers. Furthermore, we developed a cluster map of collaboratives based on patterns of co-occurrence of collaborative vision, mission, and goals. We identify distinct co-occurrence patterns of themes emerging from qualitative coding of collaborative missions, visions, and objectives, and define three distinct collaborative archetypes based on these. Finally, using theory-supported actions linked to basic, adaptive, and transformative social and ecological resilience, we code for presence or absence of these outcomes for each collaborative. We present the resilience outcomes by state and discuss how various collaborative typologies differentially impact levels of social and ecological resilience. Our study concludes that fire management actions for adaptive resilience such as fuels reduction, tree thinning, and revegetation are most numerous but that there is an emergent phenomenon of collaboratives engaging in transformative resilience that are mostly citizen-led networked organizations reshaping the social and ecological landscapes to include prescribed burning on a larger scale than present. 

Water planning and governance strategies must adapt to challenges associated with population growth, climate change, and projected water shortages. In the Western United States, agriculture is the dominant water use, and agricultural water users are being asked to conserve or share their water with other uses. Managing scarce water supplies at the local level often involves creative solutions, many of which are not well documented, especially in the agricultural sector. It is therefore critical to understand ideas to manage scarce water resources from the perspective of agricultural water users and those who work with them. In our research, we used interviews to explore how agricultural water users are managing increasing water scarcity in the Middle Rio Grande basin of central New Mexico and what enables or prevents them from taking innovative action to manage water scarcity. We hypothesized that we would find undocumented water use innovations born out of water users’ responses to lower and more variable water availability in recent years. We primarily recruited interviewees through snowball sampling, with a total of 42 (47%) agricultural water users, decision makers, and non-profit leaders influencing agricultural water governance in the basin accepting our invitation to participate. Our approximately one-hour, semi-structured and open-ended interviews explored agricultural water users’ lived experiences with water governance and opportunities to manage water scarcity. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, coded, and analyzed using HyperRESEARCH software (version 4.5.4). Our results did not support our hypothesis. Instead, we found that agricultural water users struggled to implement well-known innovations amid the pressures of water scarcity, supply uncertainty, administrative complexity, and constraints on their time, labor, and money. Water users and decision makers were mutually interested in implementing innovations in crop choice, flexibility in water storage, use, and management, stricter enforcement of water use efficiency, and access to more efficient irrigation equipment. However, high costs, a lack of knowledge, education, and training, and challenges related to water distribution and scheduling prevented agricultural water users from accessing these and other innovations. Recommendations include incentive-based policies to promote agricultural water use innovations that require high initial costs, improved water accounting at the basin and regional levels to promote flexible and reliable access to agricultural water, targeted education and outreach programming on alternative irrigation methods and cropping patterns, and improved access to irrigation scheduling information to support agricultural water users in planning for water scarcity. 

Scaling up climate-adaptation in wildfire-prone watersheds requires innovative partnerships and funding. Water utilities are one stakeholder group that could play a role in these efforts. The overarching purpose of this study was to understand water utility engagement in wildfire mitigation efforts in the western United States. We conducted an online survey of water utilities in nine states and received 173 useable responses. While most (68%) respondents were concerned or very concerned about future wildfire events and the impact of wildfire on their operations, only 39% perceived their organization as responsible for mitigating wildfire risk. Federal land ownership decreased feeling responsible for wildfire mitigation, while concern for and information on wildfire increased feeling responsible for mitigation. The perception of response efficacy of mitigation actions for the 68 water utilities engaged in wildfire risk mitigation activities was very high, with most agreeing that mitigation actions are effective. Self-efficacy to implement mitigation actions, however, was mixed, with most utilities wanting more information on wildfire risk and impacts to watershed services. The most reported wildfire mitigation actions were forest thinning and stream restoration. Water utilities engaging in these actions typically partnered with government agencies or other water utilities to complete the work and funded these activities through water user fees and grants. Our findings suggest that water utility engagement in wildfire mitigation for water security could be increased through providing more assessments of wildfire risk to water utilities and through more outreach and engagement with water utilities operating on federal lands. 

Global climate models project that New Mexico's Upper Rio Grande watershed is expected to become more arid and experience greater climatic and hydrological extremes in the next 50 years. The resulting transitions will have dramatic implications for downstream water users. The Upper Rio Grande and its tributaries provide water to about half of New Mexico's population, including the downstream communities of Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and surrounding agricultural areas. In the absence of formal climate adaptation strategies, informal governance arrangements are emerging to facilitate watershed climate adaptation strategies, including fuel treatments and stream remediation. One example is the Rio Grande Water Fund (RGWF), a collaborative effort coordinating work to protect storage, delivery, and quality of Rio Grande water through landscape-scale forest restoration treatments in tributary forested watersheds. This article examines the RGWF as one example of an emerging adaptation strategy that is working within—and beyond—existing legal and policy frameworks to accomplish more collaborative efforts across jurisdictional lines and administrative barriers. We identified ten (10) key characteristics of adaptive governance from the relevant literature and then applied them to the RGWF's experience in the watershed to date. Key findings include: (1) the RGWF's approach as a collaborative network created the right level of formality while also keeping flexibility in its design, (2) a scalar fit to the environmental challenge built social capital and investment in its work, (3) leadership from key stakeholders leveraged opportunities in the watershed to create and maintain stability, and (4) use of adaptive management and peer review processes built capacity by creating the feedback loops necessary to inform future work. 

The Colorado River supplies >40 million people in the United States Southwest with their daily water supply and is unable to meet the current demands. New approaches are needed to enhance sustainability and resilience. A net zero urban water (NZUW) approach meets the needs of a given community with a locally available and sustainable water supply, without detriment to interconnected systems and the long-term water supply. Transitioning to a NZUW future will require considerable modifications to governance and policy across the Southwest and its cities specifically. We identify five areas of governance and policy challenges: diversified water sources and sinks; planning, design, and operation; monitoring and enforcement; coordination; and addressing equity and justice. Four case study cities are investigated: Albuquerque, Denver, Los Angeles, and Tucson. Across these cities, the policy priorities include supporting potable water reuse, coordinating policies across jurisdictions for alternative water sources, addressing equity and justice, developing and incentivizing water conservation plans, and making aquifer storage and recovery projects easier and more economical to pursue. We conclude that a NZUW transition in the Southwest faces considerable governance and policy challenges, but moving cities toward this goal is crucial.