Leveraging international expertise, the Global Centre for Climate Change Impacts on Transboundary Waters (GC3TW) currently studies water resources spanning the U.S. and Canadian geopolitical boundaries
Specifically, the Center 1) models and projects climate change impacts on water resources; 2) improves the understanding of these impacts on ecosystems and diverse communities; and 3) increases capacity for governance, management, and disaster resilience.
Its ultimate aim is to engage communities around the world.
The Center’s research will be used to benefit the most at-risk communities in at-risk regions. Climate change is threatening aquatic resources across North America and around the world, intensifying floods and droughts, worsening water quality, and damaging homes and infrastructure.
The tools and knowledge for community adaptation, however, are often non-existent, fragmented across jurisdictional boundaries, or simply too difficult to access. GC3TW will help manage resources in these multi-jurisdictional settings by providing a diverse perspective on governance structures, community collaboration, and management strategies
Collaborating with Indigenous leaders and communities
Guided by Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous Partners, the Center emphasizes building knowledge in collaboration with Indigenous leaders and communities.
By advancing Climate Modeling to Prepare a Changing World, the Center develops high-accuracy models capable of predicting climate impacts on the hydrological and ecological systems of transboundary waterways. We are building Global Relationships with international partnerships that cultivate idea-sharing and knowledge-building around the globe.
The GC3TW is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. The Global Center is a partnership among McMaster University (Dr. Gail Krantzberg, Canadian Principle Researcher), the University of Michigan, Toronto Metropolitan University, the Six Nations of the Grand River, Brock University, Wilfrid Laurier University, Cornell University, the College of Menominee Nation, the Red Lake Nation, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The GC3WT is complemented by Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Strategies (CLARS)
The impacts of climate change on human mobility are projected to be enormous, with estimates of people on the move ranging from 200 million by 2050 to 2 billion by 2100). The World Bank has recently modelled that under pessimistic emissions and development scenarios, as many as 216 million people could move within their own countries due to slow-onset climate change impacts by 2050.
CLARS incorporates climate migrants’ socioeconomic vulnerabilities (in relation to gender, race, religion, ethnicity, culture, age and sexual orientation) to examine how experiences in the Lake Victoria Basin (LVB) and Great Lakes Region (GLR) can inform each other’s adaptive practices. Primarily, CLARS explores, designs, and recommends co-produced adaptation strategies for reducing socioeconomic vulnerabilities and building resilience for vulnerable climate migrants and host communities across five LVB and GLR urban settings in Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, USA Canada.
CLARS is funded by Canada (Dr. Gail Krantzberg, Canadian Principle Researcher), the USA, Germany and the United Kingdom.
