Impacts of Climate Change on Water Resources
Areidy Beltran-Peña is an Earth System Scientist and a Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow. She leverages integrated assessment and Earth system models to investigate the global and regional impacts of climate change on water resources available for natural and human consumption. Overall, her research sheds light on the intricate dynamics impacting water and food security amid a changing climate, highlighting the importance of both global and regional analyses.
As the world’s water towers, mountains are actively threatened by anthropogenic climate change, meeting the ever-growing agricultural demand while preserving environmental flow requirements poses an urgent and complex challenge. In the western United States, where nearly 75% of freshwater originates as snow in the Sierra Nevada, Rocky, and Cascade mountain ranges, over 90% of snow monitoring sites show declines in snowpack and earlier melting times. This is projected to continue and possibly accelerate into the mid-to-end of the 21st century. California is the largest agricultural producer in the United States and the country's largest agricultural exporter. However, California's snow-dependent basins are actively threatened by anthropogenic climate change, which will reduce freshwater availability from snow in the Sierra Nevada and in turn could significantly affect crop yields. Based on hydroclimate fluctuations marked by extreme precipitation and reduced snowpack under 1.5°C, 2.0°C, and 3.0°C warming scenarios, Areidy is using Earth system models to quantify potential changes in the timing and magnitude of water supply for the California State Water Project and ecological flows sourced from the mountainous western slopes of the Sierra Nevada within the Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Tulare USGS HUC6 watersheds.
At Stanford, she is identifying adaptation opportunities for water and food systems in a possible future with more extreme, punctuated precipitation and low-to-no-snow conditions in California. She is also interested in exploring climate risks at the shorter timescales associated with extreme climate events. Her goal is to catalyze the development of robust climate resilience strategies through climate risk research.
