The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University received $2.48 million in federal appropriations, secured by U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, on Feb. 9. This is the second round of funding secured by Doggett for the center that will go toward the Climate Change Impact on Water Initiative, as previously reported by Community Impact.

"Climate change threatens everything we love about Texas. The impacts that are expected to come on our water resources, quality, impacts to our economy, to our cities, to our environment are anticipated to be enormous so this work fits perfectly into what we to [at the Meadows Center]," Executive Director of the Meadows Center Robert Mace told Community Impact.

Mace wears many hats both at the Meadows Center as executive director and chief water policy officer and at Texas State University as a professor in the department of geography and environmental science. He is also spearheading the initiative with the primary goal of helping people understand water and the environment so they can make informed decisions about their future, he said.

"The key thing about this project is to fill gaps as there is not publicly available information about what climate change means in regards to water resources," Mace said.

Once completed, the initiative will launch an interactive map that will allow anyone anywhere in Texas to get climate projections on their exact location.

"What we're bringing to the table is the information about what climate change projections means for our local water resources, whether that be a river, reservoir or an aquifer; and allow a person to see, in a very easy to understand way, what it means," Made said.

Mace said he also wants this project to provide information to the policy makers and decision makers.

Doggett held a press conference in June to announce the $2 million in federal appropriation and the climate change initiative; however, the funding was not under contract until around October. In the four months since the funding cleared, Mace has been able to bring aboard a hydrogeologist, a climate science coordinator and a doctoral student.

"We are striving to start having parts of it available by the end of this year," Mace said. "Overall, we're looking at three to four years to have that information put out there. Step one is looking at the best way to bring the global climate model information down to a local level."