A wonderful new paper on the huge Tracy Arm landslide and tsunami will have profound but challenging implications for the management of risk in an age of increased tourism and rapid climate change.

The journal Science has published an excellent new paper (Shugar et al. 2026) that examines the extraordinary 10 August 2025 landslide and tsunami at Tracy Arm fjord in Alaska. The paper is open access, so you can read it for yourself (it is very accessible), and there has been a plethora of media coverage (quite rightly).

I wrote about this event at the time and in the aftermath, but Shugar et al. (2026) is the authorative source. There is little for me to add to the science, but AGU Eos has a really excellent write up and explainer that I thoroughly recommend.

That large landslides occur in fjords is not a surprise, and that they can generate enormous displacement waves is also not news. We know that landslide occurrence in these environments in general is increasing, and specifically so in Alaska. However, this paper is the most comprehensive and systematic analysis of such an event, and it has shown the remarkable threat that these events can generate. The tsunami created by this landslide had a 481 metre run-up; it is remarkable that there were no fatalities. If a large cruise ship had been in the area, with passengers being ferried ashore on small boats and exploring the shoreline, the consequences would have been catastrophic. It is unsurprising then that cruise companies are now amending their itineraries.

The USGS released the image below of the aftermath of the landslide and tsunami – scale is hard to understand in such images, but the crown of the landslide is over 1,000 metres above the level of the fjord, and the landslide had a subaerial volume of over 63 million cubic metres.

Shugar et al. (2026) has a brief section that examines the implications of this event, and of the understanding that it provides of the hazards posed by very large landslides in fjord settings. These are locations with extensive human activity – local communities, trade, fishing and tourism. There is some evidence that these landsldies are more likely to occur in the spring and summer months, when human occupation is higher. Our resilience to a tsunami wave that starts off being hundreds of metres high is low.

A case in point lies in Milford Sound in New Zealand, where (for example) an earthquake on the Alpine Fault has the potential to trigger a large landslide that could result in a major tsunami. Milford Sound is an extremely popular tourism location. Should such an event occur, and mass fatalities result, there is no doubt that the public inquiry would find that the societal risk was known and that it was probably unacceptable. However, to ban tourism, including cruise ships, in this area would carry heavy risks in its own right – it would profoundly impact the vital tourist economy of the area, on which many livelihoods depend. This is a substantial risk in its own right, and of course politics plays a major part too. Balancing these risks is a major challenge for any society.

Some hope is offered by the fact that this landslide showed substantial precursory seismic activity, which might represent a route to providing a warning for at least some of these rock slope failures. But research in this area is immature at the moment, and of course there will be no warning for a landslide triggered by a major earthquake.

So, the landslide at Tracy Arm fjord presents us with a host of major challenges, but it also represents a big step forward in our understanding of these events. Well done to Dan and his colleagues for another brilliant paper. I shall watch the debate with great interest.

Reference

Shugar et al. 2026. A 481-meter-high landslide-tsunami in a cruise ship–frequented Alaska fjord. Science, eaec3187. DOI:10.1126/science.aec3187

Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was received on Thursday by his American counterpart Donald Trump at the White House, in his first official visit to Washington since his return to power in 2023 and the second face-to-face meeting between the two leaders, following a brief 45-minute encounter on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit in Kuala Lumpur last October. The meeting, formalized as a working session rather than a state visit, seeks to consolidate the fragile bilateral truce reached after one of the most severe diplomatic crises in two centuries of relations between the two most populous democracies in the Americas.

PARIS, June 6 — The 2026 Fifa World Cup will inject billions of dollars into host economies, driven by a massive consumption surge that will benefit sectors as varied as tourism ‌to retail and athletic wear, according to analysts.

The iconic tournament, scheduled for June 11 to July 19 and set to be the largest soccer event ever, could power consumer spending at a time when broader demand remains fragile.

The first three-nation World Cup (WC) — spanning the United States, Canada and Mexico — is expected to boost global GDP by roughly US$41 ‌billion, according to Fifa’s socioeconomic impact analysis, conducted with the World Trade Organization(WTO).

Here is a look at stocks and sectors that brokerages expect to benefit from the once-in-four-years event:

Hotel operators

B. Riley estimates a total of 13.1 million visitors to the World Cup, including ticketed and non-ticketed attendees, generating 21.3 million room nights booked in hotels across online travel platforms.

Analysts said US hotel operators Marriott, Hilton and Hyatt as well as online travel platforms Airbnb, Booking Holdings and Expedia are poised to benefit from the event.

Marriott sees the World Cup-driven momentum to continue in the third quarter. Airbnb expects hosts in the New York-New Jersey area, Boston and Los Angeles to earn the most during the tournament.

Airlines

Goldman Sachs believes the WC could be a ‘net positive’ for US airlines.

“June is typically a seasonally lower inbound leisure and corporate travel period, with a meaningful amount of peak July/August outbound travel season occurring after the WC is over,” Goldman said.

A sharp rise in jet fuel prices due to the war with Iran, however, has forced US airline operators to ‌hike fares that are pushing budget-conscious Americans to delay or cancel summer trips.

Beer stocks

More than 1 billion pints of beer will likely be consumed ⁠globally during the season, giving a 0.3 per cent lift to the industry in terms ⁠of volumes, according to Jefferies. Improvements are expected in markets such as US, Mexico, Brazil and China.

“After five ⁠successive years of volatility, beer should be ⁠better in 2026,” Jefferies analysts said.

The tournament ⁠also sits at a favourable intersection of timing and geography. Roughly 75 per cent of matches will be played in the US while 84 per cent of the matches involving participating countries are in the beer-drinking-friendly time zones, the analysts added.

Bernstein, Goldman and Jefferies expect Corona beer-maker Anheuser-Busch InBev, the official beer sponsor for the WC, to ⁠be the key beneficiary. Heineken, the world’s second-largest brewer, is also expected to get a boost, helped by its exposure to Latin America and Europe.

US retail and sportswear

Goldman estimates a surge in merchandise demand from fans to push up sales at Dick’s Sporting Goods and Academy Sports.

Sportswear brands such as Adidas, Puma and Nike can benefit through increased brand visibility and marketing exposure during the World Cup, analysts said.

Goldman noted that Adidas, the official sponsor of the match ball, has kit sponsorship deals with several teams, positioning it to benefit from a global exposure during the event.

Food, restaurants and delivery

Citi ⁠said traditional grocers such as Albertsons and Kroger, along with bigger retailers including Walmart and Target, are likely to benefit from higher household spending during the WC.

Restaurant demand is also expected to rise, supported by tourism and group-viewings. This could lift McDonald’s, Domino’s Pizza, Wingstop ⁠and Chipotle, along with food distributors such as Performance Food Group, US Foods and Sysco.

Media and digital platforms

“We expect the 2026 men’s World Cup to ⁠generate the highest US ⁠advertising revenue in the event’s history,” Deutsche Bank analysts said.

Morgan Stanley said the tournament could generate about US$300-$400 million in advertising revenue for Fox, which holds the English-language broadcast rights. Deutsche Bank pointed to Comcast-owned Telemundo, which has the Spanish-language rights, as another beneficiary.

Internet companies such as Alphabet’s YouTube and Meta Platforms’ Instagram could get a lift from increased ‌user activity, Citi said.

Betting operators

Deutsche Bank expects online sports-betting firms Flutter Entertainment and DraftKings to relatively outperform, as World Cup-driven betting is likely to boost overall wagering volumes.

Macquarie forecast global wagers exceeding US$50 billion — nearly $0.5 billion per match — for the tournament, compared to over US$35 billion for the previous edition in 2022. — Reuters

United States federal prosecutors announced today that they had indicted Raúl Castro, the former President of Cuba and brother of Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, over the downing of two civilian planes in 1996. 

The U.S. Justice Department has accused Castro, who was defense minister at the time of the incident, of ordering the Cuban Air Force to shoot down the planes.

The move ramps up pressure on the island, which Washington has subjected to a near-total oil blockade since January, and raises concerns that the U.S. is preparing an operation similar to the one that removed Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela earlier this year. 

Today’s charges relate to the killing of four members of the Miami-based Cuban dissident group Hermanos Al Rescate (Brothers to the Rescue), who were operating the planes when they were shot down on February 24, 1996. Three were American citizens and one was a U.S. resident. 

According to acting U.S. Attorney-General Todd Blance, Castro has been formally charged with conspiring to kill U.S. nationals. 

The issue of whether or not the planes were shot down in Cuban or international airspace is still a matter of debate. 

Florida’s Attorney-General had announced in March that a state investigation into Raúl Castro’s involvement would be reopened, a move which was endorsed by many Republican politicians, including Florida Senator Rick Scott. 

Tensions between the U.S. and Cuba have been rising precipitously, as the North American superpower has enforced a near-total oil blockade on the island, ratcheted up punitive sanctions targeting Cuban officials and demanded in ongoing negotiations between the two countries that the current Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel step down. 

Some have likened the charges brought against Castro to those directed at former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro before his capture earlier this year. Maduro was charged with drug trafficking in the U.S. in 2020, an accusation which served as justification for his forced removal from power by the U.S. military. 

It remains to be seen whether the charges against Castro will result in a similar U.S. operation in Cuba. 

Featured Image: Raúl Castro in 2016.  

Image Credit: Presidencia de El Salvador via Wikimedia Commons

License: Creative Commons Licenses

The post US authorities indict Raul Castro, longtime Cuban leader appeared first on Latin America Reports.

Despite its name, the Canadian Tuxedo is a distinctly American look. The denim-on-denim getup dates back to the 1950s, when Bing Crosby sported a full Levi’s ensemble while in Vancouver, setting a sartorial trend that continues today.

The national mythology woven into this utilitarian material is also the focus of Brooklyn-based Nick Doyle, who layers denim atop denim into large wall sculptures. From a pair of aviators reflecting puffy clouds to a vast Rocky Mountain landscape framed by brick, the works evoke a sort of nostalgic road trip west, as if chasing a big break, and ultimately, realizing the American dream.

For Doyle, denim is a poignant, loaded metaphor for much of American culture and history. The material has roots in chattel slavery, when people enslaved in the South were dyeing cotton with indigo. There’s also its association with the brusque masculinity of James Dean and cowboy ruggedness, itself an extension of the gold rush and Manifest Destiny. The fabric, in many ways, is a stand-in for the contradictions, hypocrisies, and unreachable desires so bound up in American life.

While researching the visual language of Americana in 2018, Doyle came upon a roll of denim discarded by a fashion designer moving out of his building. “At the time, I had no money, so I was making work out of material I found in the garbage or at my local hardware store,” he shares. “As I was pulling [the roll] out of the trash, I noticed a network of ideas connecting in my brain… I felt the material reflected the historical complexities I was seeing in my research, as well as being reflected in my own familial history.”

This encounter was one of those providential moments that set off an enduring fascination. In his solo exhibition Collective Hallucinations, on view at Perrotin, Doyle presents the latest of his denim sculptures, including stylized cacti, landscapes cordoned off by chainlink fences, and more mystical objects like tarot cards and a life-sized fortune teller’s shop.

The show contains myriad symbols of American exceptionalism and individualism, presented in the heritage fabric of the nation. Doyle shares:

Over the last few years, my conception of American mythology has only become more complex… I think in a lot of ways what we’re experiencing now is a breakdown of these mythologies. They are in direct conflict with the current political reality, yet they are summoned as if it is business as usual. The world’s image of America has changed, but our country’s nostalgia for itself is making us late to the party. There’s tragedy in vanity.

Collective Hallucinations presents these unrealized dreams and confrontations in varying shades of blue, rendering what appears to be individual moments as simply different washes of the same story.

In addition to his practice, Doyle will soon open the second iteration of a kink bar called Human Resources at Basel Social Club and is working toward a fall exhibition of paper collages and prints at Pace. If you’re in New York, Collective Hallucinations runs through May 30. Otherwise, find more on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Collaged Denim Sculptures by Nick Doyle Unravel American Mythology appeared first on Colossal.

WASHINGTON, June 6 — The United States announced Friday its approval of a US$1.98 billion (RM7.98 billion) arms sale to Kuwait, one of the Gulf countries hit by Iranian strikes during the Middle East war.

In a statement, the US State Department said it would allow purchases of counter-drone technology from defence company Anduril, which was founded by a supporter of President Donald Trump.

“This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by improving the security of a major non-Nato ally that has been an important force for political stability and economic progress in the Middle East,” the statement said.

Earlier this week, Kuwait officials “condemned Iranian aggression” when a drone strike on its international airport killed one person and injured 63 others.

Tehran denied involvement in the attack, saying it was “an error in the American Patriot systems,” referring to a US anti-missile battery.

The attacks came despite the April 8 ceasefire that paused the war sparked by the February 28 US-Israeli bombing of Iran, and has largely held despite sporadic exchanges of fire. — AFP

One year after the Trump administration launched its tariff offensive against more than 180 countries, Latin America presents a mixed picture: some economies lost competitiveness in the U.S. market, while others redirected exports or negotiated agreements to cushion the blow.

Brazilian financial markets posted one of their best sessions of the year on Monday after President Donald Trump announced a five-day postponement of strikes against Iran's energy infrastructure, citing “productive conversations” with Tehran.

Brazil's government on Friday issued an official note rejecting the decision adopted by the administration of US President Donald Trump to designate Brazil's two main organized crime groups, the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and the Comando Vermelho, as terrorist organizations. "We will not accept the use of arbitrary measures from abroad as a pretext to attack our sovereignty and our economy," the statement warned, while avoiding explicit reference to the US administration. The measure, announced on Thursday, adds both organizations to a list that includes Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, the main Mexican cartels, and the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua.

Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news that impacts science and scientists today.

In the contiguous United States, crop irrigation, municipal water supplies, and thermoelectric power generation use more than 224 billion gallons of fresh water every day. Conducting water research or making decisions about water use, until now, often required referencing datasets across various agencies. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Water Availability Assessment Data Companion (NWDC), announced this week, aims to streamline this process. In part, the tool is designed to help decisionmakers better understand the balance between how high demand and limited supply affect water availability in their communities.

“While the United States has abundant water nationally, regional imbalances between supply and demand may create water challenges affecting millions of Americans,” said lead scientist Shirley Leung in a USGS press release. “What once required significant resources and time can now be done in minutes, giving communities of all sizes the same foundation for water planning.”

The lower 48 states are home to about 80,000 sub-watersheds, from those in the arid southwest to the Great Lakes Basin, where about 84% of North America’s surface fresh water is located. According to the USGS, the NWDC is the first tool that integrates information about water availability in individual watersheds at a national scale.

The tool is designed to complement Water Data for the Nation (WDFN), another USGS product that consolidates observational data from the agency’s thousands of local monitoring stations gathering data on streams, lakes, reservoirs, precipitation, water quality, and groundwater. The new tool uses modeling to fill in spatial and temporal gaps between the observations made at these stations.

Water managers, researchers, agricultural experts, and others can use the NWDC to compare watershed conditions, identify seasonal patterns in water use, or to create data visualizations of statewide water use, for example. Though the tool currently covers only the contiguous United States, it will soon be extended to Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, according to the USGS.

David Tarboton, a professor of civil engineering at the Utah Water Research Laboratory, said he was “intrigued” by the new tool, and is interested in examining the data its model produces. 

While Tarboton was disappointed that the tool’s most recent available data are from 2020, “having a sort of integrated, wall-to-wall dataset that’s consistently produced is very valuable,” he said. He works, in part, in the areas of hydroinformatics and data sharing, and noted that the modern methods the agency is using to share the data could be useful in developing automated tools.

—Emily Gardner (@emfurd.bsky.social), Associate Editor

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about science or scientists? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org.

Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

“Future winters promise less snow, more rain. Nobody’s prepared.” So proclaims the title of a recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America that frames adaptation to snow loss as the “million-dollar question” facing the western United States.

Declining snowfall—and snowmelt—affects ecosystems, urban and rural water supplies, hydropower, recreation, tourism, and agriculture. As the largest sectoral consumer of fresh water globally, agriculture is particularly vulnerable to snow loss.

Much of the U.S. West faces one of the worst snow years on record, and the statistics on future conditions feel dire. Up to 40% of the water demand for agriculture in the region is likely to go unmet as it gets warmer and less snowy. Similar scenarios are shaping up elsewhere around the world, including southern Europe, high-mountain and Central Asia, western Russia, and the southern Andes [Qin et al., 2020].

In response, water managers have developed a range of approaches for adapting to snow loss: infrastructure-based approaches like managed aquifer recharge, nature-based solutions such as forest management and beaver dam analogues, demand-side approaches like multibenefit land repurposing, and polarizing supply-side approaches like reservoir expansion and cloud seeding (Figure 1).

However, efforts to identify which of these strategies to implement for different drainage basins, or watersheds, using the variety of available approaches seem to fall into one of two traps: either searching for unrealistic one-size-fits-all panaceas [Ostrom, 2007] or treating every basin as unique, which is costly and inefficient.

Importantly, continuing along this trajectory means that we’re on track to offset only about a third of global climate-induced crop yield losses by 2100. For the western United States, previous work has estimated cumulative economic losses from declining snowfall of hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars while noting that rational adaptation decisions are hampered by the lack of financial analyses of the importance of snow [Sturm et al., 2017].

We thus suggest that the “trillion-dollar question” isn’t how to adapt but, rather, where existing strategies may make the most—and fastest—difference to offset projected losses. Answering this question requires an approach that matches strategies to the contexts where they are more likely to succeed—one that treats basins as neither uniform nor unique.

A Mismatch in Research and Operational Scales

Physical scientists tend to look at snow loss as a basin-scale problem, in part because this view aligns with hydrologic boundaries. However, as our colleague, applied economist Joey Blumberg, explains, “county lines were not drawn to follow watersheds, and rivers do not conform to political borders, creating a patchwork of mismatched boundaries.”

Scientists have long emphasized that mitigating climate change requires us to “think globally, assess regionally, act locally.” And in 1992, the authors of the Dublin Principles reasoned that moving the needle on “wicked water problems” requires targeting decisionmaking at the “lowest appropriate level,” where stakeholders can collaborate most effectively.

The challenge is that “local” isn’t a single, consistent unit. We recently explored the lowest appropriate level concept for agricultural water management in the U.S. West by defining local operational contexts on the basis of intermediaries such as irrigation districts, water conservancies, and mutual water companies that connect individual farmers to their hydrology [Gordon et al., 2024].

Working at this scale, we found one-size-fits-all strategies often don’t hold up, even within the same hydrologic basin [Gordon et al., 2024; Boisramé et al., 2026]. In the Upper Colorado River Basin, for example, expanding reservoir storage could buffer agriculture in northeastern Utah against declining snowpack, but the same strategy may fail miles away in southwestern Wyoming, where a thirstier atmosphere may make it harder to refill existing reservoirs.

However, collecting detailed local-scale information for just 13 of the roughly 2,600 operational contexts nationwide took almost 3 years of searching websites, reading working papers, and calling water managers.

Scaling this approach across the entire western United States is understandably overwhelming. We need a more systematic approach to help managers identify which strategies could work most effectively, and where.

A Diagnostic for Agriculture and Snow Loss

Ostrom [2007] argued that complex systems, such as Western agriculture, “are partially decomposable in their structure.” This insight is woven into archetype analysis, an approach for identifying recurrent patterns across otherwise diverse systems.

Like workplace assessments—which are genuinely useful, albeit imperfect, tools for understanding successful management styles—archetypes draw on qualitative, quantitative, or hybrid approaches to group diverse operational contexts on the basis of shared characteristics [Sietz et al., 2019]. These groupings enable systematic knowledge transfer about, for example, how management strategies that work in one context can also guide adaptation elsewhere.

“Researchers can empirically derive building blocks or components that comprise archetypes to represent key features of a system,” explains Elizabeth Koebele, who studies urban water sustainability [Garcia et al., 2019] and has begun applying archetypes in that context. However, she notes, these building blocks “vary based on the system context, available data, and study goal.”

We propose three main characteristics that interact to define operational contexts in snow-dependent agriculture in the western United States: physical constraints, governance systems, and human behavior. Physical constraints, including biophysical setting, infrastructure, and climate, determine available water supplies. Governance capacity relative to governance complexity shapes how those supplies are allocated across competing uses. Human behaviors influence both water demand and how users respond to supply conditions and governance rules.

Using these characteristics to establish archetypes of water management contexts could define a path forward for operationalizing an approach to accelerate successful adaptations to declining snowpacks in the West.

Constraining How Snowmelt Becomes Water Supply

Physical constraints stem from biophysical processes that influence how, when, and how much snow becomes streamflow; infrastructure that stores and conveys water; and hydrologic and climatic uncertainties about future supplies. These constraints can vary substantially from basin to basin.

Consider the Walker River Basin and California’s San Joaquin Valley, both of which rely on Sierra Nevada snowpack but have different biophysical settings. In some parts of the central Sierra, forest management can reduce wildfire risk and increase streamflow by up to 14% during low-snow years. Elsewhere, however, water made available by forest management may be consumed by remaining vegetation, limiting downstream gains.

These biophysical differences interact with uses of built infrastructure, including irrigation systems, reservoir outlets, and canals, to determine how and when water is stored and released. As temperatures warm and snowmelt declines, officials in both the Walker River and San Joaquin Valley basins must increasingly manage for a wider range of extremes, including “cold-water droughts.” However, the infrastructure to manage these trade-offs through reservoir storage and operations that balance agricultural deliveries with aquatic habitat needs is more developed in the highly managed San Joaquin than in the Walker.

Layered on top of biophysical and infrastructural constraints are climatic and hydrological uncertainties, such as whether snow loss will lead to more evapotranspiration and less streamflow. These uncertainties complicate management decisions based on cost-benefit modeling of individual strategies: Should districts expand reservoir storage if precipitation is predicted to increase or decrease depending on the model? Frameworks like Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty emphasize the need to select strategies that are robust across many possible futures.

Thankfully, measuring physical constraints on snowmelt at basin scales—a means, along with improved modeling, to reduce hydroclimatic uncertainties—is becoming more feasible today with newly developed tools. Water managers can turn, for example, to databases like the U.S. Geological Survey’s ResOpsUS [Steyaert et al., 2022], which catalogs historical reservoir operations across the contiguous United States, and to publicly available hydrologic projections such as those from Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Coupled Models Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6) ensemble.

Governance Controls Supply Allocations

We frame governance around capacity and complexity. Capacity in this context is the ability of stakeholders “to mobilize resources in order to make equitable and fair decisions around shared challenges,” according to governance scholar Gina Gilson. Complexity refers to the number and intricacy of jurisdictions, authorities, regulations, and stakeholders involved. As governance complexity increases, the effectiveness of adaptation strategies becomes more sensitive to capacity constraints, particularly regarding timescales and funding.

For example, infrastructure in the Walker is controlled locally by a single water district, and jurisdictional coordination involves two states and the Walker River Paiute Tribe. Coordination on water management is never simple, but fewer jurisdictions generally means faster decisionmaking and clearer authority, allowing the single water district to implement strategies like multibenefit land repurposing more readily. Such implementations, in turn, enable reduced agricultural water use, directly supporting restoration of Walker Lake and recovery of endangered species.

The San Joaquin Valley is vastly different in scale and complexity, covering eight California counties, one of which alone has 22 water districts and seven cities. Following the passage of the state’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, water users in the basin formed more than 120 groundwater sustainability agencies. Agricultural water management thus involves overlapping federal and state systems that operate under different rules, contracts, and regulatory requirements. While land repurposing programs can be implemented, more substantial capacity, time, and resources are typically needed to do so.

Emerging efforts like the Western States Water Data Access and Analysis Tool (WestDAAT) and the Harmonized Database of Western U.S. Water Rights make it easier to assess governance in a basin by standardizing data about rules, regulations, and water rights across states. Combined with mapping of irrigation service areas and water transfers [Siddik et al., 2023], these resources help stakeholders identify the jurisdictions involved, how authority is distributed, and what coordination mechanisms exist for agricultural water management.

Human Behavior Shapes Demand Responses

Once snowmelt reaches water users, behavioral dynamics—how people respond to crises, policies, and changing conditions—determine how effectively management strategies achieve desired results.

Water demand is influenced by consumption choices and by economic, political, and cultural factors. It is also influenced by factors that typical hydrologic models rarely account for, including social structure, social memory, and affluence. More affluent users are less likely to modify their behavior to reduce water use under conditions of scarcity.

The dynamics of water demand in the South Platte River Basin, for example, are especially complex, as they are balanced across cities, agriculture, and ecosystems across parts of Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming. Water prices in the basin’s Big Thompson project, a federal water diversion system in northern Colorado, jumped from $1,500 per acre-foot in 1990 to more than $30,000 in 2018, driven by economic factors that resulted in cities owning 70% of water originally intended for agriculture.

Even with reliable projections of future climate and water supply, carefully planned strategies can be overwhelmed by economic and behavioral factors, resulting in transfers and reallocations of water. What’s more, behavioral responses to adaptation strategies can paradoxically increase demand when users perceive that scarcity problems are solved.

The “reservoir effect” occurs when water security perceptions encourage expansion of water-intensive activities [Di Baldassarre et al., 2018]. Similarly, the irrigation efficiency paradox shows how efficiency gains can lead to expanded production and reduced return flows (how much irrigation water returns to streams and aquifers) downstream [Grafton et al., 2018].

Conceptual frameworks, models, and global case studies have all been used as approaches to study the effects of human behavior on hydrology. With sufficient training data, we believe tools like machine learning could be used to further explore how behaviors influence adaptation and to anticipate shifts as snow loss continues.

Archetypes in Practice

By evaluating how physical factors, governance systems, and human behavior shape outcomes across places like the Walker, South Platte, and San Joaquin basins, researchers and practitioners can establish archetypes to help identify patterns in what strategies are most effective in different places and assess how to transfer lessons from one setting to another (Figure 2).

The Walker River Basin exemplifies an archetype common to agriculturally dominated headwaters in the western United States with low governance complexity (few jurisdictions), adequate capacity (resources), low behavioral complexity (more predictable and unified user groups), and substantial physical constraints (significant future snow loss and limited infrastructure for water storage and supplementation).

With this profile, the Walker is an ideal testing ground for evaluating how effectively different strategies offset changes in snowmelt. Does cloud seeding increase snowpack? Could beaver dam analogues—a nature-based solution reminiscent of Idaho Fish and Game’s mid-20th century effort to parachute beavers into the wilderness—meaningfully increase water retention? Could multibenefit land repurposing buffer people and ecosystems against supply volatility while restoring ecosystem functionality?

The value of organizing operational contexts by archetypes is that each context need not be treated as unique. Lessons learned from the Walker could be systematically transferred to other areas with similar characteristics and could be incrementally tested in others.

The South Platte has physical constraints similar to Walker’s but features greater governance complexity because of multiple interstate compacts, as well as greater behavioral complexity. Modeling analyses indicate that demand-side strategies could adapt to more volatile water supply in the South Platte [Gharib et al., 2023]. But implementing them requires balancing perspectives from both agricultural and urban water users—a behavioral dynamic absent in Walker.

Crop switching to cultivate higher-value crops on less acreage could reduce water use. However, options for what crops can be grown where are constrained by factors like elevation and climate. Even where feasible, new crops would require investments in education, new infrastructure, risk management, and agronomic knowledge.

Through iterative expansion and testing, broad archetypes like “high behavioral complexity” could be specified to reflect dynamics like rural-urban competition or concerns around buy-and-dry economics. Archetypes may also point to contexts where governance complexity signals that decisionmaking is occurring above the lowest appropriate level.

The San Joaquin, with its extremely complex governance involving numerous local, state, and federal agencies managing surface and groundwater, is one potential example. Recognizing this pattern can help identify where substantial resources and long timelines may be required to implement programs (e.g., LandFlex) requiring legislative authorization, multiagency coordination, and stakeholder engagement. It may also signal the need to identify smaller operational contexts within larger settings so implementations proceed more rapidly.

Operationalizing Archetypes from Diagnosis to Action

Developing a systematic approach to match adaptation strategies with areas where they are most likely to succeed in operation is only a first step. Applying diagnostics without mechanisms to implement new strategies is often insufficient to drive timely action.

An instructive precedent of success in water quality management comes from the 1970s. By then, pollution controls on factories had improved compared with the early 20th century, yet water quality in surface waters across the country still declined because of pollution in agricultural runoff. The breakthrough came with the EPA’s total maximum daily load (TMDL) program, which created a structured process that set measurable goals for reducing pollution and assigned responsibility for meeting those goals to the sources of the pollution, allowing for local control over adaptation.

Archetypes could play a similar role in facilitating beneficial snow-loss adaptations, and a structure like the TMDL program could start by assessing supply-demand risks across operational areas, setting performance targets such as reservoir reliability and shortage frequency, and then using the diagnostic to identify which strategies fit each archetype. Results and lessons could be shared region-wide, while implementation would remain locally driven.

This suggestion is, emphatically, not a prescription for specific policy mechanisms. But it serves as a reminder that—just as few of us engage with workplace assessments or change behavior on the basis of their results without organizational support—archetypes will need to be paired with implementation structures to translate diagnosis into action.

Beyond Silver Bullets

Nearly 20 years ago, Ostrom [2007] warned against seeking panaceas for complex environmental problems. There is no silver bullet for snow loss or single answer to our trillion-dollar question, but one path forward for sustaining complex Western ecosystems lies in developing archetypes of different types of basins.

A small irrigation district, for example, wouldn’t need to independently test every strategy in Figure 1 or develop complex decision support tools when a similar archetype already evaluated which strategies work under comparable governance, behavioral, and physical conditions.

Critically, these archetypes can be developed and refined by managers and scientists to capture more nuanced realities. Physically constrained systems, for example, could include areas facing high future uncertainty or limited reservoir flexibility. Governance and behavioral dimensions could likewise evolve to represent contexts where subsidies lead to incoherent incentives or where cultural norms link water use to local identities and traditions.

Like workplace assessments, the goal isn’t to diminish unique personalities but to work with them more strategically. Archetypes can show where we don’t need to reinvent the wheel to adapt and where the wheel might need to be tweaked. By leveraging collective knowledge and learning across regions facing similar challenges, rather than crafting new solutions basin by basin, we can reduce the time and resources needed to implement equitable and sustainable adaptation solutions.

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grants 1828902 and OIA-2148788. Where We Live is funded by a grant from NSF’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) RII Track-2 program and features partnerships across the University of Idaho (award 2316126); the University of Nevada, Reno (award 2316127); and the University of South Carolina (award 2316128). Work was also supported by internal funds from the Division of Hydrologic Resources at the Desert Research Institute.

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Author Information

Beatrice L. Gordon (beatrice.gordon@dri.edu), Gabrielle F. S. Boisrame, Christine M. Albano, and Rosemary W. H. Carroll, Desert Research Institute, Reno, Nev.; and Adrian A. Harpold, University of Nevada, Reno

Citation: Gordon, B. L., G. F. S. Boisrame, C. M. Albano, R. W. H. Carroll, and A. A. Harpold (2026), Archetypes could accelerate agricultural adaptation to less snowpack, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260184. Published on 9 June 2026.

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