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Understanding and modeling the trajectories of change in broad level interactions in food-energy-water systems is incomplete when it is undertaken by researchers in isolation from those who live and work in the systems. For models and outcomes to have validity they need to be subjected to sustained development and iteration with stakeholders. This requires a paradigm shift in our thinking of stakeholder engagement from viewing such engagement as an isolated activity or part of the data collection methods to thinking of engagement as a process of knowledge generation. That process hinges on building relationships and building trust, and also sustaining these as long-term relationships through multiple elements of research design and execution. Using the case-study of a mid-size river basin we demonstrate a co-production of knowledge process for food-energy-water systems. The findings highlight the multiple and different ways in which knowledge co-production can be transacted in food-energy-water systems while also generating solutions to the use and re-use of water, energy, and nutrients at the landscape level.

Finding effective and practical solutions to climate change challenges in food-energy-water systems requires the integration of experts in local/regional social and biophysical systems, and these are commonly local community members. In the Magic Valley, Idaho we investigated the tensions between water used for energy and to irrigate cropland for food production, as well as, strategies for protecting water quantity and quality. Incorporating stakeholders with long-standing expertise allows the development of solutions to these challenges that are locally and regionally practical and consistent with the values of the social system into which they are incorporated. We describe a stakeholder-driven process used in a case study in the Magic Valley that incorporated local experts to develop plausible future scenarios, identify drivers of change, vet impact and hydrological modeling and map areas of change. The process described allowed stakeholders to envision alternative futures in their region, leading to development of enhanced context and place-based solutions and an anticipated time line for adoption of those solutions. The solutions developed by the stakeholders have been applied across many geographic areas. The described process can also be applied across a broad range of geographic levels. Most importantly, stakeholders should be involved in anticipating solutions and solution timing to the differing challenges posed by each scenario.

An integrated dataset was developed that combined stakeholder perceptions of environmental change (precipitation, air temperature, water temperature, fish abundance, fish size, residential development) and comparable instrumented measures of environmental changes based on sensor records. All data were transformed to a common 3-point categorical scale to support statistical comparison of social and biophysical change for the same change variables. The integrated dataset is available on Mendeley (http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/cjfxg84bmx.1).