HWISE Scholar Highlight – Dr. Amanda Fencl

Dr. Amanda Fencl is an interdisciplinary environmental geographer and current Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M University.  She is working on the TAMU President’s Excellence Fund X-Grant project, Pathways to Sustainable Urban Water Security, as a member of an interdisciplinary research team led by Dr. Wendy Jepson. As part of the Pathways project, she will help examine how complex and anticipatory water governance regimes influence sustainable urban transitions with a focus on desalination and reuse technologies in California and Australia. She’s also currently collaborating with the Community Water Center supporting the development of a groundwater-focused drinking water webtool. Her research generally focuses on the ways in which governance arrangements at multiple levels erode and enhance resilience to climate and other environmental changes.

As a member of the UC Davis Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior, her dissertation project “Drinking Water Governance for Climate Change: Learning from a California Drought” used surveys, interviews, and GIS to explore the ways in which California’s polycentric water governance system is adapting to changing environmental conditions and extreme events. Amanda co-authored several other studies during her time at UC Davis. She investigated water access and injustice in California’s San Joaquin Valley, explored how small drinking water systems were adapting to climate change and droughts, and contributed to interdisciplinary reviews on groundwater security, drought, and climate change. Prior to UC Davis, she spent six years as a Staff Scientist with the Stockholm Environment Institute in the water resources and climate change adaptation research groups.  For more information visit her website and follow her on twitter @alfencl.

Selected Recent Publications:

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