Chapter 24 Forest-Water Interactions Under Global Change Julia A. Jones, Xiaohua Wei, Emma Archer, Kevin Bishop, Juan A. Blanco, David Ellison, Mark B. Gush, Steven G. McNulty, Meine van Noordwijk, and Irena F. Creed 24.1 Introduction This chapter aims to characterize the effects of global changes on forest-water interactions and water availability to ecosystems and people. It synthesises current understanding of the implications of present and anticipated changes to forests and tree cover for local and global hydrology and provides an overview of contemporary global change processes and their interactions with forests and water. It focuses specifically on natural and human disturbances and their effects on biotic and abiotic properties of forests and their consequences for hydrological processes. Forests are dynamic on time scales of years to centuries and beyond, as a result of natural and anthropogenic disturbances. Large infrequent disturbances, both natural and human, may significantly modify forest characteristics and post-disturbance forest succession on a seasonal timescale, to decades, and to millenia (Foster et al. 1998), with corresponding effects on associated hydrologic processes. Natural forest This chapter was adapted from the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) report titled ‘Forest and Water on a Changing Planet: Vulnerability, Adaptation and Governance Opportunities.’ J. A. Jones College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (CEOAS), Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA X. Wei Earth, Environmental and Geographical Sciences, University of British Columbia (UBC), Kelowna, Canada E. Archer Centre for Environmental Studies/Department of Geography, Geoinformatics and Meteorology, University of Pretoria, Hatfield, South Africa K. Bishop Department of Aquatic Sciences and Assessment, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 D. F. Levia et al. (eds.), Forest-Water Interactions, Ecological Studies 240, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26086-6_24 589