Co-creating Research and Education Capacities to Understand, Visualize, and Mitigate Climate-Change Impact Cascades and Inequities in Central Mexico

In a rapidly urbanizing and climate-changing world, inter-basin water supply megaprojects are on the rise, with huge energy, greenhouse gas, and water injustice implications. These projects are subject to perverse positive feedbacks such that they increase climate change, and thus increase the water scarcity used to justify them in the first place. This project uses a planned 3-fold-expansion water supply program for Mexico City as the urgent impetus to co-create a new frontier in climate-change impact science, policy analysis and education. Participatory GIS and collaborative System Dynamics Modeling are paired to make impact cascades (i.e., multiple climatic and non-climatic impacts occurring simultaneously and interacting across sectors and regions) and inequities spatially explicit, and then combined with eXtended Reality (XR) technology to visualize and compare alternative climate/development scenarios that diverse stakeholders can inhabit virtually. The project will also co-create research-based courses for U.S. and Mexico-based students, as well as enhance community engagement, to facilitate integration of the research with public education.