Climate change has profound implications for managing freshwater resources and the people and species dependent on those resources, but water management long predates any awareness of anthropogenic climate change. Indeed, large-scale water management has been one of the great themes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries worldwide. Many of the largest construction projects in human history have been attempts to
consume, control, allocate, and regulate water, perhaps most notably the construction of tens of thousands of dams and irrigation infrastructure. Moreover, extensive industrial and domestic consumption and discharge, pollution and the conversion of perhaps half of all wetlands globally to