Abstract:
California has been plagued by a multi-year (2011-2016) drought, which caused severe environmental issues (e.g., groundwater depletion) and significantly impacted food and energy production. Further stress from climate change, coupled with burgeoning energy and food demand, poses unprecedented challenges for the golden state to boost drought resilience and mitigate their extreme impact. It is therefore imperative to understand how climate and human-water interactions influence drought in the historical context, which acts as a basis for us to develop effective and actionable solutions to cope with future challenges. In this talk, I will first discuss how to implement an attribution framework to disentangle the relative contribution of climate and human interventions (e.g., irrigation, reservoir operation, groundwater pumping) to the intensification or mitigation of recent California drought. I will then introduce a novel hydro-economic model, which can be utilized to identify sustainable/optimal pathways towards better management of water-related trade-offs (i.e., energy production and irrigation in California) and long-term environmental sustainability (i.e., groundwater depletion), based on portfolios of interventions (e.g., penetration of solar and wind energy). Although this integrated modeling and analysis platform is tested in California, it can be generalized to other places and extended to larger scales (e.g., global). It can not only evaluate current water management strategies, but also identify sustainable and feasible pathways that optimize synergies and trade-offs among conflicting objectives, especially during water scarcity situations.

Bio:
Xiaogang He is a Princeton-trained Ph.D. Hydrologist with experience in economics, machine learning, and environmental policy. His research interests focus on the fundamental understanding of how climate change, variability, and human interventions affect drought and flood risk across scales, and how to implement an integrative framework (e.g., hydrological modeling, remote sensing, artificial intelligence, nexus approaches) to reduce their societal impact. He received his M.A. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Princeton University in 2016; M.E. in Civil Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 2013; B.Eng (Major, with honors) in Hydraulic Engineering, and B.Sc (Dual) in School of Economics and Management from Tsinghua University, China, in 2011.

He has received a number of accolades including the Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy (STEP) fellowship from Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton Energy and Climate Scholars (PECS) and Mary and Randall Hack ‘69 Award from Princeton Environmental Institute, and the Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP) fellowship from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). Most recently, his research achievement has been recognized by the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) Award for Excellence, which is given to SEAS advanced graduate students who have performed at the highest level as scholars and researchers at Princeton.