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General Interest
Water managers tackle adaptation and resiliency at workshop
February 11, 2008
By Stephanie Doster
Collaborating with experts and colleagues, more closely integrating the concept of climate change with engineering, and offering economic incentives for conserving energy and water will be essential to effectively managing water supplies in Arizona, according to a group of water managers and experts who gathered for a recent workshop on adapting to climate change.
In addition to the numerous other suggestions and needs voiced for securing the region’s future water supplies, the roughly fifty water managers, experts, and engineers who attended the workshop made one thing clear: ensuring resiliency and maintaining water supplies in an era of climate change is fraught with hurdles and institutional constraints.
Addressing adaptation is critical, organizers said, because climate change is underway, carrying with it potentially profound implications for water in the West as a growing population and competing social and economic demands vie for the precious resource.
As opposed to climate change mitigation, which typically refers to efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, adaptation refers to responses to changes that are forced by the effects of increasing temperatures on the hydrologic cycle and the environment.
“We know we’re committed to a certain amount of climate change, even if we could magically cut emissions that contribute to global warming, so we don’t have a lot of time to figure this out,” said Kathy Jacobs, director of the Arizona Water Institute, one of the workshop sponsors. “This workshop is about setting up a knowledge system and a community to take advantage of what we know today and to focus our research agenda on what’s important to people.”
Representatives from businesses, environmental organizations, universities, small local communities, cities, states, and federal agencies attended the workshop, which was held February 4–5 at Biosphere 2 near Oracle, Ariz. It was designed as a first step toward helping western water managers pinpoint adaptation strategies to increase the region’s resiliency to the effects of climate change on groundwater and surface water supplies.
Water managers included hydrologists who make decisions about releases from reservoirs, to community water providers whose main water supplies come from groundwater. Virtually all water managers face the challenges of keeping up with growth while abiding by federal and state regulations.
Breaking into a number of groups, the participants exchanged ideas and explored solutions for improving water monitoring, using less water through increased efficiency, and more closely linking technology and engineering to climate change and resiliency.
Workshop organizers plan to release a summary of the meeting and a more extensive report with recommendations. These findings will be available on the Arizona Water Institute (http://www.azwaterinstitute.org) and ISPE (http://www.ispe.arizona.edu/) websites.
Climate models agree that winter precipitation in the western and southwestern United States and in northern Mexico will decrease in this century as winter storms bypass the region to the north. To make matters worse, the West has seen a steady downward trend in late spring snowpack because of warmer temperatures and earlier snow melt. Snowpack acts as the region’s natural water reservoir and is critical in the dry period that follows winter. An earlier snow melt means less water flows down streams during the summer peak demand season, so a decline in snowpack and streamflow would cut into water supply resources. And with warmer-than-average temperatures continuing into summer, population growth and demand for water would spike further still.
“We’re going to have to deal with how to make up for less snowpack and how to adapt. We could build bigger dams, store more water, conserve water, and a variety of other strategies,” said Gregg Garfin, deputy director for science translation and outreach for The University of Arizona’s Institute for the Study of Planet Earth, another workshop sponsor. “This workshop is about building an instant community that can share information and innovation, and being able to do that is one of the cornerstones of moving toward adaptation.”
In addition to the Arizona Water Institute and the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth, the workshop was sponsored by the Knowledge for Sustainable Development project at Harvard University, the Enhancing Water Supply Reliability on the Colorado River project with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and the UA’s Water Resources Research Center.
Brad Udall, a speaker at the workshop and director of the University of Colorado-based Western Water Assessment, said adapting to climate change will require broad collaboration because of the complexity of the issues and the number of interests involved.
“It’s going to be venues like this where we are going to come up with solutions,” Udall said. “This is a really important issue, but this is America, and we solve our problems by talking them out. We will get it done.”