EI Water Center story featuring Dr. Tanya Heikkila

The Earth Institute rang in 2008 by announcing a $6 million grant from the PepsiCo Foundation in January. This sizeable donation establishes a new interdisciplinary research center at the Earth Institute called the Columbia Water Center where Dr. Tanya Heikkila, Assistant Professor of Public Affairs at SIPA, will serve as its Senior Social Scientist.

Dr. Heikkila brings a strong background in water resource management, water policy, and decision-making analysis to CWC. She earned her MPA and PhD from the University of Arizona’s School of Public Administration and Policy (2001), and was a postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University’s Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis (2001-2002). She joined Columbia’s faculty in the MPA program in Environmental Science and Policy in 2002 where she teaches courses on environmental policy and public management, and leads workshops in policy implementation and analysis. Dr. Heikkila has published several papers in recent years on water management and operational decision-making. She co-authored the book “Common Waters, Diverging Streams: Linking Institutions and Water Management in Arizona, California, and Colorado,” Resources for the Future Press, ©2004. Her experience studying regional water systems, policy analysis, and stakeholder dialogue in these areas will serve the Earth Institute’s newest research center, the CWC, superbly.

The Columbia Water Center (CWC), in collaboration with other Earth Institute units and external partners, will lead the intellectual inquiry into the assessment of, and solutions to, the potential global crisis of freshwater scarcity. Sustainable water resource management has emerged as a global challenge in the 21^st century.  A changing climate and the growing demand by rapidly expanding populations are constraining fresh water availability in many regions.  The motivation for developing the CWC was the recognition that the problem of freshwater scarcity is tightly coupled with the challenges of globalization, shared food and energy requirements, and its potential for inducing large scale human migration and human conflict as aridity or scarcity increases in certain regions. Research, analysis and solutions developed through the CWC will tackle questions of regional water development and management, the resulting environmental and ecological impacts of this development, the effects of increased climate variability on water scarcity, and tools for increased water use efficiency.  Additionally, the CWC recognizes that we need to better understand and develop principles of water allocation and governance that can encourage water use efficiency and sustainable development strategies across multiple scales of decision-making.

To address these challenges, the CWC will explore novel, interdisciplinary approaches to address the emerging challenge of freshwater scarcity. Its goal is to demonstrate an integrated approach to managing water that improves rural livelihoods, accommodates climate change predictions, and improves access to potable and agricultural water sources while bringing the public and private sectors together to collaborate and help attain the Millennium Development Goals. CWC and Dr. Heikkila will inaugurate its operations with initiatives in four countries on three continents: Brazil in South America, China and India in Asia, and Mali in Africa. Each project will be tailored to each region while water sustenance and hydrologic systems are explored there from the local to global scale.