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Flooding is a hazard that impacts more people than any other type of disaster, and is increasing in frequency and magnitude due to climate and demographic change. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites are an excellent remote sensing data source for monitoring flood events, thanks to their ability to acquire data over the land surface in all-weather conditions. The Capella high-resolution X-Band SAR system will provide an unprecedented temporal revisit when its entire constellation is deployed. This contribution presents results with Capella data covering the inundation that occurred in Windsor, Australia, in March 2021. A qualitative comparison employing Sentinel-1 for the same event is as well provided.

Megacities are socio-ecological systems (SES) that encompass complex interactions between residents, institutions, and natural resource management. These interactions are exacerbated by climate change as resources such as water become scarce or hazardous through drought and flooding. In order to develop pathways for improved sustainability, the disparate factors that create vulnerable conditions and outcomes must be visible to decision-makers. Nevertheless, for such decision-makers to manage vulnerability effectively, they need to define the salient boundaries of the urban SES, and the relevant biophysical, technological, and socio-institutional attributes that play critical roles in vulnerability dynamics. Here we explore the problem of hydrological risk in Mexico City, where vulnerabilities to flooding and water scarcity are interconnected temporally and spatially, yet the formal and informal institutions and actors involved in the production and management of vulnerability are divided into two discrete problem domains: land-use planning and water resource management. We analyze interviews with city officials working in both domains to understand their different perspectives on the dynamics of socio-hydrological risk, including flooding and water scarcity. We find governance gaps within land-use planning and water management that lead to hydro-social risk, stemming from a failure to address informal institutions that exacerbate vulnerability to flooding and water scarcity. Mandates in both sectors are overlapping and confusing, while socio-hydrological risk is externalized to the informal domain, making it ungoverned. Integrated water management approaches that recognize and incorporate informality are needed to reduce vulnerability to water scarcity and flooding.

Significance The US government’s cocaine interdiction mission in the transit zone of Central America is now in its fifth decade despite its long-demonstrated ineffectiveness, both in cost and results. We developed a model that builds an interdisciplinary understanding of the structure and function of narco-trafficking networks and their coevolution with interdiction efforts as a complex adaptive system. The model produced realistic predictions of where and when narco-traffickers move in and around Central America in response to interdiction. The model demonstrated that narco-trafficking is as widespread and difficult to eradicate as it is because of interdiction, and increased interdiction will continue to spread traffickers into new areas, allowing them to continue to move drugs north., Counterdrug interdiction efforts designed to seize or disrupt cocaine shipments between South American source zones and US markets remain a core US “supply side” drug policy and national security strategy. However, despite a long history of US-led interdiction efforts in the Western Hemisphere, cocaine movements to the United States through Central America, or “narco-trafficking,” continue to rise. Here, we developed a spatially explicit agent-based model (ABM), called “NarcoLogic,” of narco-trafficker operational decision making in response to interdiction forces to investigate the root causes of interdiction ineffectiveness across space and time. The central premise tested was that spatial proliferation and resiliency of narco-trafficking are not a consequence of ineffective interdiction, but rather part and natural consequence of interdiction itself. Model development relied on multiple theoretical perspectives, empirical studies, media reports, and the authors’ own years of field research in the region. Parameterization and validation used the best available, authoritative data source for illicit cocaine flows. Despite inherently biased, unreliable, and/or incomplete data of a clandestine phenomenon, the model compellingly reproduced the “cat-and-mouse” dynamic between narco-traffickers and interdiction forces others have qualitatively described. The model produced qualitatively accurate and quantitatively realistic spatial and temporal patterns of cocaine trafficking in response to interdiction events. The NarcoLogic model offers a much-needed, evidence-based tool for the robust assessment of different drug policy scenarios, and their likely impact on trafficker behavior and the many collateral damages associated with the militarized war on drugs.

The association between increasing water intensive land-cover, such as the use of turf grass and trees, and increasing water use is a growing concern for water-stressed arid cities. Appropriate regulatory measures addressing residential landscaping, such as those applied by Homeowner Associations (HOAs), may serve to reduce municipal water use, joining other water-use reducing measures under consideration by arid cities. This research assesses quantitatively the role that Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions (CCRs) applied to landscaping by HOAs play on water consumption. Statistical comparisons and models of n=1973 parcels in Goodyear, Arizona, USA, reveal that: HOA yards have less vegetation cover and those households use less peak-season water (July) than those households in non-HOA neighborhoods. This hold true even though the HOA CCRs regulate only the minimum required front-yard vegetation and most residents maintain more than the minimum vegetation level. Furthermore, front-yard landscaping tends to be mimicked in the backyard such that total yard landscaping tracks best with total household water use. Results of the study suggest that HOA landscaping regulations have the potential to reduce peak-season water use by up to 24% if CCRs were to set maximum vegetation regulations rather than minimum and if compliance were enforced. Lowering residential water consumption in this way potentially involves tradeoffs with the cooling effects of vegetation and its consequences on the urban heat island effect, on energy use, and on home values.

This research is motivated by the compelling finding that the illicit cocaine trade is responsible for extensive patterns of deforestation in Central America. This pattern is most pronounced in the region's large protected areas. We wanted to know how cocaine trafficking affects conservation governance in Central America's protected areas, and whether deforestation is a result of impacts on governance. To answer this question, we interviewed conservation stakeholders from key institutions at various levels in three drug-trafficking hotspots: Peten, Guatemala, Northeastern Honduras, and the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica. We found that, in order to establish and maintain drug transit operations, drug-trafficking organizations compete with and undermine conservation governance actors and institutions. Drug trafficking impacts conservation governance in three ways: 1) it undermines long standing conservation coalitions; 2) it fuels booms in extractive activities inside protected lands; and 3) it erodes the territorial control that conservation institutions exert, exploiting strict “fortress” conservation governance models. Participatory governance models that provide locals with strong expectations of land tenure and/or institutional support for local decision-making may offer resistance to the impacts on governance institutions that we documented.