We’re excited to announce that the N-EWN publication, “Operationalizing equity for integrated water resources management,” was selected to receive the Lanfear Award from the Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA)
The publication was a dual effort between the N-EWN founding partners, the University of Georgia (UGA) and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). It identified four common barriers to including social equity in water resources planning, and suggested solutions for overcoming them.
Abstract: Advancing social equity has been implicitly and explicitly central to water resources policy for decades. Yet, equity remains largely outside of standard water resources planning and management practices. Inclusion of equity within water resources infrastructure is inhibited by barriers including an incomplete conceptual understanding of equity, a perceived lack of quantitative and qualitative equity metrics, unclear connections between equity and standard project planning frameworks, and the absence of concrete examples. To facilitate greater practical inclusion of social equity in water resources practices, we describe equity relative to dimensions of distribution, procedure, and recognition and identify metrics associated with each. We then map these dimensions of equity onto different stages of a water resources project life cycle. We discuss how inequities are often perpetuated by current approaches and highlight case studies that promote one or more of the facets of equity. Rather than providing a prescriptive solution to “achieve” equity within water resources practices, we emphasize the need for contextualized approaches that include pragmatic steps toward more equitable practices and outcomes.
Led by Cydney Seigerman, who received their PhD at the University of Georgia in Integrative Conservation (ICON) and Anthropology in April 2024, and is now a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at UGA, the publication was a collaborative effort between various UGA departments. Additional University of Georgia authors included advisor in the Department of Anthropology, Don Nelson, Andressa Mansur, a former postdoctoral student in the College of Engineering, Shelly Biesel, a Mellon Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Anthropology, Raul Basilio, a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology, and Bruno Ubiali a PhD student in the Integrative Conservation (ICON) program and Department of Anthropology.
USACE representatives on the team included research civil engineer Kyle McKay, Jon Hallemeier, Interdisciplinary Study Manager, Candice Piercy, Research Environmental Engineer, Sebastian Rowan, an ORISE graduate fellow at the University of Hampshire, through USACE, and Elissa Yeates, Research Engineer in the Coastal and Hydraulics lab.
The Lanfear Award was established by AWRA in 2020 to recognize the authors of outstanding technology-related papers published in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA) during the previous year.
You can read the full publication here.
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