The future of water, energy, and land availability and their security is of paramount importance. A climacteric challenge toward the future sustainability of these precious resources is to identify where and when they may become substantially limited in the coming decades and what are the key drivers. For example, the sustainability of water resources are affected by many factors that include: population, wealth, climate - as well as interactions with energy and land use and the human systems that manage them. Yet, prediction systems are challenged by uncertainties in models and observational support as well as the practical and theoretical limits-to-prediction of the Earth's systems. This limits any one forecast of a potential future as actionable information - and the scientific community has moved toward risk-based assessments to provide a likelihood of outcomes - to the fullest extent possible. To highlight these important interactions, Adam Schlosser will present a synopsis of recently published and ongoing analyses from experiments with the MIT Integrated System Model (IGSM) that includes modules which track land use, energy use, as well as water resources for large, managed river basins. The numerical experiments address future risks in a global context but this talk will also focus regional lenses over the United States and a large portion of Southern and Eastern Asia. Overall, the insights gained from the experiments point to actions, which can mitigate and/or adapt to risks and thus protect future energy, land, and water resources from undesirable futures.

The Planets and Life: Human and planetary perspectives lecture series is hosted by MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

The Earth’s geologic record demonstrates that the environment is naturally changing. The fossil record shows that many species did not survive major environmental changes. For a modern society to thrive, it must be aware of the grand planetary changes that can occur over hundreds to millions of years. Perhaps equally important is our genetic flexibility to adapt. In this multi- disciplinary course, a series of lectures and panel discussions will explore the grand environmental changes – from a natural planetary perspective – that might endanger the survival of the species Homo sapiens. We will investigate: 1. Planetary processes that have the greatest capability to significantly alter our environment on short and long timescales, based on both our knowledge of Earth’s history and our theoretical understanding of planet evolution. We will study processes between the deep interior (e.g., volcanism, tectonics), the surface (e.g., desiccation, glaciation, erosion), the oceans (e.g., acidity, ocean volume), the atmosphere (e.g., ozone hole, oxygen levels, pollution), and the biosphere (e.g., new metabolic pathways). 2. How adaptable humans are to environmental changes based on our history as a species and our genetic adaptability. 3. How much we as a species can negatively or positively impact the crucial planetary processes that are necessary for our own survival.