The mining industry is especially water intensive, creating well-documented impacts on water quality and availability. Nevertheless, many of the newly proposed critical minerals and metals (CMM) mines around the country are located in water-scarce regions, each with complex and overlapping water policy frameworks that intersect with both federal and state regulations. This grant funds a project that aims to investigate underexplored questions related to critical mineral mining and water scarcity in the Great Basin region, a hydrologic basin centered in Nevada and covering much of the western United States, which is both water-scarce and mineral-rich, particularly in lithium. The region faces substantial CMM development interest, but there is also a long history of water conflict, resource extraction, and marginalization with the region's many Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities. The research team will study how different mineral extraction methods might impact local water resources, ecosystems, and communities; how overlapping water governance structures might affect the siting and permitting for CMM mines; and how affected communities might respond in different ways. Grant funds will support seven mixed-methods case studies of mining communities across the Great Basin. Case study communities will span three Nevada counties and will address different mineral types, mine status (planned, permitted, and operating, including both low- and high-conflict cases), and extraction method. Case studies will combine document analysis with semi-structured interviews with a broad range of community leaders and members, regulators, and industry representatives. In addition to producing academic papers and policy briefs, the research team will also develop an interactive, online mapping platform that depicts the location of mining projects, Indigenous territories, land management jurisdictions, and stressed groundwater aquifers to help visualize the impacts of mining development at the individual mine and regional levels. Finally, the team will host three participatory community workshops to disseminate findings back to community members and to solicit input on alternative future approaches for equitable mine siting and benefit sharing.