Multiple competing securities and transitions impact future water resource solutions: the importance of integrated approaches to frame, investigate and build resilient water futures

Water security is impacted by complex inter-related drivers from within and beyond the hydrological system. The demands to address challenges to energy security, food security, climate security, and biodiversity security through various just-transitions all have implications for water security but this dimension is rarely considered in the different solution spaces. Increasing water risks from many drivers including climate change are also challenging the possibilities of these transitions to deliver safe, sustainable and just solutions. 

There is thus a critical need for water research to support insight, innovations, and tradeoffs, that include variables and drivers beyond those of hydrological systems. To bring impact on the ground, researchers need to develop framings, methods, and models that work across traditional siloes to deliver evidence, technical innovations and policy solutions that deliver in the local environmental, social, economic, and political contexts. 

Following this framing, a case study from the Middle East North Africa will be given on joined up research across many disciplinary boundaries to deliver insight and solutions to manage drought risk in Morocco and Jordan. Global and local interactions playing out in these locations demand new water thinking and ideas are put forward on how to achieve this. The approaches used draw on a plethora of methods, data and approaches from development in agricultural water management, through seasonal precipitation forecasting, and policy and planning through to understand the drivers to internal displacement of people through the threat multiplier effects of droughts.