Coded Water Conflict and Crisis Events in the Colorado River Basin, Derived from LexisNexis search 2005-2021

The data in this data release are from an effort focused on understanding social vulnerability to water insecurity, resiliency demonstrated by institutions, and conflict or crisis around water resource management. This data release focuses on the conflict in crisis aspects of work.

To characterize crisis a dual-prong, qualitative triangulation was used to identify and provide context for water conflict and other water-related events in the Colorado River Basin. The first prong was observation by research team members of nine public, recorded meetings of water control boards and official organizations in the Colorado River Basin. Discourse analysis was then used to identify major themes in these meetings, and integrated into data from the second prong of this project. The second prong was a search, cataloguing, and contextualization of articles from newspapers describing water-related events in geographic areas in the Basin based on methods established by Dr. Nathan Eidem. USGS applied this methodology to a new time period of data to extend the work. This kind of approach has value for examining Crisis on a continual basis toward identification of hotspots from conflict, identifying primary stakeholders, and who experiences crises.

This resulting dataset catalogues events in the Colorado River Basin (particularly the Upper Colorado River Basin in most cases) from 2005 - 2021. This table extends the the Upper Colorado Events Database which catalogues simiar events from 1970 - 2005. Events are defined as any interaction between parties that is action-defined, recorded, and made available to the public. The criteria for inclusion we used for the LexisNexis search is as follows: each event must be driven by some aspect or dimension of freshwater resources and occur within the study area. Each event is described comprehensively and coded with themes that correspond to themes from the first prong to provide proof of each themes contribution to conflict in the Basin (see Colorado River Basin Water Conflict Table). Given resource constraints some events were not fully coded but are included in the Uncoded Events table as a resource to other researchers in the future.