UO professor Katie Meehan has been named a Fulbright Nexus Regional Scholar for 2014-16 and will use the award to continue her research on social and behavioral adaptation to climate change in Mexico.

Meehan, a geography professor, will be studying the institutional challenges of implementing water supply alternatives in Mexico City. The Fulbright program selects 20 distinguished scholars and researchers who conduct individual research and participate in group collaborations on climate change.

Scholars explore renewable energy, social and behavioral adaptation, climate change effects, biodiversity and food and water security. They conclude their collaborative project by meeting in Washington, D.C., to share the policy-relevant results of their research.

After learning that she had been selected, Meehan said, “It was terrific; I felt over the moon.” Meehan said that it’s really exciting to have external validation; however, she is looking forward to collaborating with scholars from Brazil and other parts of the Western Hemisphere.

Meehan will travel to Brasilia, Brazil, in mid-August to meet with the other 19 scholars. The Fulbright Nexus award is limited-residency, so Meehan will continue to teach her regularly scheduled classes, and she’ll travel to Mexico City next summer or fall to work on her individual project.

Meehan said implementing water supply alternatives, such as rainwater harvesting, is not easy — several challenges arise with big cities. How states and governments facilitate and encourage people to do rainwater harvesting on a wider scale is an issue because more than just neighborhoods suffer from water insecurity or shortages.

The issue of getting people to adopt technologies in greater numbers is a big institutional challenge in Mexico City because of its massive population, Meehan said. Ensuring that people are producing a safe and high-quality product is another challenge facing states and governments.

“People have been harvesting rainwater and using it since the Aztec times so it’s not that it’s like a new technology. But there are people that are developing better, more efficient, more aesthetically pleasing ways for households to do this,” Meehan said.

Meehan said in times of drought, like the current one in the West, countries that are plugged into large-scale water grids should have water supply alternatives in place. Water supply alternatives in Mexico City, such as water collected from rainwater harvesting, are used in different ways.

“They don’t use this water to drink,” Meehan said. “They usually drink bottled water — even poorer households do that. You don’t need drinkable water to do household chores, but in America we flush drinking water down the toilet.”

Meehan hopes to develop a system that will monitor water quality through cell phone technologies, and that’s one thing she’s going to research during her three-month project in Mexico. Meehan doesn’t know what the focus of her group project will be, but she hopes that their research will affect U.S. policies.

“Because we are plugged into this kind of broad-scale universal water grid, we don’t really have a lot of wiggle room in terms of supply alternatives,” Meehan said. “Because there are lots of coexisting big- and small-scale systems in Mexico City, I think we have a lot to learn from places like that.”

―By Corinne Boyer, Public Affairs Communications intern