Brian Joyce

Brian Joyce is a senior hydrologist at the Stockholm Environment Institute with more than 20 years of experience in planning and management of water resources both in the American West and in the international arena. Dr. Joyce has worked in more than 15 countries in Africa, the MENA region and the Americas with various agencies and institutions, including the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), The World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the German Development Agency (GIZ).

Dr. Joyce’s work has focused on the development of decision support tools for water resources systems, and he has participated in the development and application of databases and tools used for water resources analysis in a variety of settings worldwide. He frequently collaborates with stakeholders from various backgrounds to use analytical tools in pursuit of solutions that guarantee reliable water to support livelihoods, ecosystems, and economic activities and to protect vulnerable communities from water-related hazards such as floods and droughts.

Dr. Joyce’s recent work has included using SEI’s Water Evaluation and Planning Model (WEAP) to evaluate the possible impacts of climate change on the achievement of infrastructure objectives in seven African river basins, including the Congo, Nile, Niger, Orange, Senegal, Volta, and Zambezi Rivers. In Lesotho, he developed a WEAP model for the Orange-Senqu river basin, including water transfers from Lesotho to South Africa, and supported extensive capacity building to enable teams across the relevant Lesotho ministries to continue to use and modify the WEAP application to address emerging issues. To evaluate approaches for meeting environmental flow requirements in the Mara River in Kenya and Tanzania, Dr. Joyce developed an analytical tool, using the WEAP platform, to assess various management strategies across a range or climate, demographic, land use, and economic uncertainties.

Dr. Joyce’s innovative approach to water planning and management is evident in Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia, where he used WEAP to analyze water system performance based on current climate variability and water use patterns, and developed water decision support tools to identify strategies to improve future system performance under uncertainty that integrates climatic, hydrologic, agricultural and socioeconomic information.