During a 2008 panel for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s launch of a report on water and climate, a hydrologist and an engineer called for additional monitoring and research to detect and attribute the effects of anthropogenic climate change. The third member of the panel, a frustrated World Bank infrastructure lender, declared in response, “I can’t wait thirty years for precise science to tell me how much global warming contributed to a particular drought or flood. I want to see climate adaptation programs based on non-precise decision making. I need to make investment decisions now.”

Economic development must occur, but climate change is making sustainable development a much broader and more plastic concept that is harder to define and achieve. Conservation science should play an essential role in facilitating the transition to more flexible approaches to natural resource management by focusing on the issues that deeply concern policymakers and profoundly modify ecosystems, especially over long time scales. Climate-sustainable water resource management should be part of the long-term strategy of the conservation community to help economies and terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems to adjust to an uncertain future. Given the risks for human communities and ecosystems from climate change, ecologists working in the developing world need to think more like development economists, and economists need to think more like ecologists.