Low- and middle-income countries face dual challenges of improving livelihoods and managing their water resources in the face of climate change. This dissertation explores three ways that individuals and communities feel the impacts of changing water patterns and how they can possibly manage them. Chapter one introduces the challenges individuals, households, and communities face managing water resources and maintaining quality access to water. The second chapter explores the potential market for households and communities to use invasive aquatic plants to make compost and animal feed to improve agricultural productivity, improve water access points, and reduce parasitic infection. Using generalized second price auctions, I find that individual total willingness to pay for not-yet-marketed compost and animal feed from removed aquatic vegetation is higher when participants are informed of both the private (agricultural) and public (reduced parasitic infection) benefits of these products. If households use slack labor to produce compost and animal feed, the supply curves are quite flat suggesting that the welfare gains primarily go to compost and animal feed consumers. There appears to be sufficient demand for a local market for both compost and animal feed. The third chapter focuses on individual defensive investments to mitigate damage from natural disasters in the context of seasonal urban flooding in Dakar, Senegal. I use a randomized control trial to decrease the cost of investment through vouchers for either cement or wooden pallets for some firms in the study. Additionally, some firms are randomly assigned to attend a community meeting to highlight potential spillovers from investments. Firms who receive vouchers make defensive investments at significantly higher rates. However, only firms who attended the group meeting experience less flood-related losses. Firms located downhill of other firms who got vouchers individually are more likely to close due to a flood. These results suggest that coordination matters for defensive investments since uncoordinated investments can create negative spillovers for those nearby. Finally, the fourth chapter explores how changing seasonal water patterns impacts livestock systems in sub-Saharan Africa. Using remotely sensed data and a two-way fixed effects approach, I find that for households in Ethiopia, increased surface water availability allows households to increase the number of livestock they own, and they invest in more water intensive species like cattle and sheep. These results are driven by places that see a decrease in water over the study period. However, in Tanzania, the months without water matter. Households with longer periods without surface water nearby own less livestock. Furthermore, there is no effect of surface water availability on livestock holdings in Nigeria. These divergent findings highlight that the impact of changing surface water patterns with climate change will be context dependent.