The Global Water Security Center (GWSC) at The University of Alabama (UA), with partners in Tufts University (TU) and Oregon State University (OSU), has recently received a $2.4 million dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Minerva Research Initiative.
Brian C. Britt, Ph.D., Jameson L. Hayes, Ph.D., and Matthew S. VanDyke, Ph.D., associate professors of advertising and public relations, will work with the Tufts University’s digital humanities natural language processing specialist, Peter Nadel, to develop new ways to use news and social media to identify conflict and cooperation events.
“We’re excited to use news and social media data to better understand the impacts of shocks to the water system,” VanDyke said. “This should afford a more comprehensive assessment that includes social factors that may influence subnational and international cooperation and conflict around water issues.”
The Minerva Research Initiative will collect data on water conflict and cooperation events, evaluate how to efficiently buffer societies from shocks to their water system and measure the social unrest that comes from it. These insights will help the government anticipate and create well-informed policies and plans that work better with local people. In other words, the initiative will collect data on water shortage responses, such as local news, that better inform governmental response and aid.
The U.S. government continues to emphasize how water-driven risk affects political stability, but biophysical data, such as climate or land use data, are insufficient to identify areas at risk for water conflict.
“We see over and over that water is at the heart of many national security issues, yet even the best water scarcity data can’t tell us where conflict or cooperation will occur,” said Kate Brauman, Ph.D., the GWSC’s deputy director and principal investigator. “By taking into account events where water shocks lead to conflict or cooperation, we can better anticipate where and when water disturbances will have negative impacts.”
Dr. Melissa McCracken, Ph.D., assistant professor of international environmental policy at Tufts University, will lead the development of new conceptual models of societal resilience and its ability to reduce conflict with human-environmental systems. McCracken said that “by combining theory building with empirical research, [the Minerva Research Initiative] critically expands our understanding of which societal resilience factors are most important for cooperation in the face of disturbances to freshwater resources.”
The project team will develop new methods to overcome persistent barriers in monitoring conflict-cooperation outcomes, leveraging recent developments in machine learning, generative AI and large language models.
At Oregon State University, Aaron Wolf, Ph.D. will lead OSU’s contribution to water conflict analysis and cooperation based on the Transboundary Water Diplomacy Database (TFDD). Susanne Schmeier, Ph.D., affiliate faculty at OSU and associate professor of water law and diplomacy at IHE Delft – Institute of Water Education in the Netherlands, will contribute her academic and diplomacy experiences in water conflict and cooperation, with a particular focus on the legal and institutional mechanisms for water conflict and cooperation at both the international and subnational scales.
The GWSC translates water and environmental science to help key global decision makers improve security at the intersection of water, energy, food and health. For more information, visit their website.