What will Arizona’s water supply look like in the future? How will the state ensure abundant water for the needs of future generations? What innovations will help achieve water sustainability and what are the choices that will have to be made? These are some of the questions addressed at #AZwaterfuture: Tech, Talk, and Tradeoffs, the Water Resources Research Center’s 2016 Annual Conference.
On Monday, March 21, the University of Arizona WRRC assembled a conference of water experts, professionals, students, and the interested public to peer into Arizona’s water future. With about 275 people attending from all across Arizona and the southwestern states, the conference explored novel ideas and approaches in the areas of technology, communication, education, and policy.
The main task of the conference was framed by keynote speakers Anne Castle, a former Assistant Secretary for Water and Science at the U.S. Department of the Interior, and Lisa Beutler, an expert in leading complex group problem solving efforts. Castle, currently a senior fellow at the Getches- Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment at the University of Colorado, brought the bad news that our old “security blankets” were worn and cannot be depended on to provide water security in the future. We can no longer assume that the future will look like the past and we will have to adjust our planning to changing conditions that include perhaps a 50 percent reduction in runoff to the Colorado River by the end of the century. We can no longer count on our large reservoirs to protect us from water shortages. Consistently taking more water out than is flowing in on average will, and is, depleting the water stored in these reservoirs. Finally, the laws that protected water users in the past are now too inflexible for current needs and new institutions for water banking and exchanges are needed.
These new challenges present the kinds of problems that Beutler, Public Affairs Specialist with MWH Global, characterized as “wicked”; that is, they do not have a single solution. As Beutler put it, “One and done will not work anymore.” Instead, solutions to wicked problems must be approached through a mitigation framework where people with an interest in the outcome collaborate on finding actions that are adaptive in a world that is full of unknowns and the future is not predictable. Beutler’s prescription for addressing wicked problems provided a new way to think about the water situation. “Hundreds of people can be brought into the conversation,” she said.
Bringing people into the conversation about water was the goal of conference speakers during the communication and education portion of the conference agenda. Cody Sheehy, Video Producer of “Beyond the Mirage” introduced the project that aims to engage people of all ages in learning and sharing knowledge about water problems and potential solutions. A video-based web experience encourages internet users to watch their choice of short video clips, assemble them into their own mini-documentaries, and share them on social media. “Beyond the Mirage” is a unique platform for expanding the water conversation.
Balancing the use of social media with person-to-person communication was Lisa Shipek’s message. Executive Director and Founder of Watershed Management Group, Shipek related lessons learned from her experience in building support for a long-term watershed restoration vision. People will get involved who learn how their personal stories are part of the bigger picture, who are invited, encouraged, and connected through consistent communication.
As Kerry Schwartz, Director of Arizona Project WET observed, “Education needs to change with communication.” A panel of educators on the cutting edge of new methods in promoting learning in the next generation of leaders and citizens provided a hopeful message to conference attendees. DaNel Hogan, Director of the STEMAZing Project noted that pre-K through 8th grade is not too early to ask students how to fix problems. “No one has told them it can’t be done.” Giving students the tools of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) will help fill the pipeline of experts who will be needed for future solutions to Arizona’s wicked water problem. Other speakers highlighted programs for providing these tools in the Pendergast School District and Red Mountain High School to enrich education for middle and high school students. The Maricopa Community College District has focused on post-secondary school students, and the conference attendees learned about efforts to create job-ready graduates who want to make an impact on community sustainability.
Technological innovation is one pathway to water sustainability, and the conference panel on the use of technology presented multiple options from drip irrigation to producing designer waters for specific uses. The water portfolio of Aurora, Colorado diversified through an innovative arrangement to share water with farmers as well as a $700 million recycled water system, which uses a multi-barrier approach to water purification. The West Basin Municipal Water District of Southern California also looked to recycling for diversification. Recycled water is not dependent on hydrology, so it provides a measure of drought resistance. The West Basin recycling facility produces five different kinds of water “fit for purpose”: for cooling towers, for low pressure boilers, for high pressure boilers, and for recharge to a drinking water aquifer. Each purpose requires different levels and types of treatment.
High tech water conservation is another way to expand water supplies. Netafim, the company that invented drip irrigation more than 50 years ago, operates in an industry still in its infancy because the technology that directs water to plant roots and can irrigate and fertilize through the same system has not been adopted widely. It’s potential for saving water while increasing crop yields has yet to be realized. Farmer Dan Thelander has adopted drip irrigation for growing melons on 1,000 acres in Maricopa-Stanfield. The installation was more than twice as expensive as other forms of irrigation, but tillage savings and a tax credit offset some of the additional cost, and less water is used per unit produced. For other crops, the current economic equation faced by farmers works against widespread adoption.
On one end of the farming spectrum, space-age greenhouse technology is growing rapidly for specialty crop vegetables. Gene Giacomelli, Director of the UA Controlled Environment Agriculture Center, stated that there has been a 400 percent increase in greenhouse systems over the past few years. Chances are about 50-50 that the tomato in your salad was grown in a greenhouse using five to eight times less water than flood irrigated field tomatoes.
On the other end of the spectrum, Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a Hopi dryland farmer, invited the conference to think about agricultural water conservation in a new way. He uses intergenerational wisdom to gauge the needs of his plants and produces a harvest without supplemental irrigation in an area that receives six to ten inches of precipitation per year. He practices “conservation from the point of view of caring for a relative, not from a scientific point of view of conserving a natural resource.”
Johnson’s alternative way of looking at conservation highlighted the tradeoffs involved in choosing pathways toward water sustainability. He was part of a panel on tradeoffs that looked at what these choices involve and what they may mean for the future. Brian Bennon of the Inter Tribal Council of Arizona explained tradeoffs as compromise, something that Tribal Nations have been involved in to settle water claims with real water supply outcomes. The situation of the Tribes with respect to water quantity and water quality requires many tradeoffs such as claims for certainty, an assured quantity for a lower quality, and loss of control of small local water system for the stability of larger regional systems.
On the other hand, Amy McCoy of Ecosystem Economics asked the audience to look at tradeoffs as opportunities. “Shortage has not yet arrived; how it happens remains in our hands.” One solution to shortage illustrated by the City of Las Vegas, Nevada is aggressive water conservation programs that start with public education on the nature of the problem and what they can do to help. With funny and eye-catching public campaigns they have been able to save more than eight billion gallons of water per year since the program went into effect. As a result of these campaigns, people in Las Vegas see the value of trading water-wasting practices for conservation.
So, what are major water agencies and organizations doing about Arizona’s wicked problem? A final panel of the day with representatives from the Departments of Environmental Quality (ADEQ)and Water Resources (ADWR), the Central Arizona Project (CAP), and the Salt River Project (SRP) discussed this question with the WRRC’s Director and the audience. Each organization has responsibilities for a part of the problem. ADEQ has opened a rule making process that will create a framework for water reuse that includes potable reuse and protects public health. ADWR is leading a statewide initiative announced by Governor Doug Ducey with two tracks: listening to stakeholders in the state’s 22 planning districts and public meetings of the Governor’s Water Augmentation Council. CAP is taking incremental steps toward averting shortage and preparing the CAP system for potential future arrangements, such as stored water recovery and exchanges.
Marc Campbell of SRP diverged slightly to discuss the potential for ocean water desalination. This sparked discussion, with questions about how ocean water desalination would be done, how it would be paid for, whether we need to do both desalination and water recycling, and what we do before we get to desalination, if we do get there.
Discussion continued on the role of conservation, incentives to spur more agricultural conservation, educational campaigns and how to engage and inform the public, stormwater harvesting, and public involvement in decision making. The discussion reflected the multiple components of and perspectives on Arizona’s wicked water sustainability problem. It also reflected the multiple potentials solutions that may be applied in our work toward an adaptive mitigation strategy.