A Binational Perspective on Water

By Bob Nosbisch

Finding solutions to the challenges of balancing limited water supplies with increasing demand in arid environments is a difficult task, but the job becomes much more complicated when dealing with the rules, regulations, laws and policies that affect the U.S. and Mexico.

Examining these binational challenges is a focus of Christopher Brown’s research.

The geography professor serves on the Good Neighbor Environmental Board, an independent U.S. presidential advisory committee that provides input to the President and Congress on “good neighbor” environmental infrastructure practices along the U.S.-Mexico border. In February 2005, the board’s eighth annual report addressed water resources management on the border and provided useful insight into a range of issues. The board’s tenth report, released in March, examines options for balancing national security activities and environmental protection on the border.

Brown emphasizes the importance of the water component to this year’s report, because “the security tools the U.S. government is proposing and already implementing have an impact on surface drainage flows and they have an impact on the ability of people to interact across the river.”

Brown also worked with Jean Parcher of the U.S. Geological Services, Gilbert Anaya of the International Boundary Water Commission and Alfredo Granados of la Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez on a proposal that was submitted to the Southwest Consortium for Environmental Research and Policy (SCERP). In this proposal, Brown and his colleagues propose to conduct a flood risk assessment in an area bounded by El Paso/Juárez to the south and Elephant Butte Lake to the north.

Another project, funded by SCERP and on which Brown recently collaborated, was a geographic information system (GIS) study of water resource vulnerability in the Paso del Norte region.

Brown, colleague Janet Greenlee of the NMSU Department of Geography, Brian Hurd of the NMSU Department of Agricultural Economics and Agricultural Business, Alfredo Granados of la Universidad Autónoma in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and Marguerite Hendrie of the National Park Service in Flagstaff, Ariz., examined the vulnerability of watersheds in a national context. A panel of 20 American and Mexican scientists was convened, helping the project team to identify sources of watershed vulnerability, indicators to measure such vulnerability, and the geospatial data needed to build these indicators.