Systematic Assessment of Water Sustainability at U.S. State and Region Scales
Publication: Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 141, Issue 12
Abstract
Accurately conveying sustainability status and trends in a way that is understandable to broad audiences is a critical responsibility of state agencies. The difficulty in doing this lies in several important areas: stakeholder involvement, basis in science, selection of representative indicators, scoring relative to social priorities, recognition of uncertainty, and reporting in easily understood formats. The purpose of the study described here was development of a comprehensive system for measuring and reporting water sustainability at watershed, regional, and state scales. An analytical framework developed to quantify water system sustainability indicators for California was included in the California Water Plan Update 2013 and tested at multiple scales in multiple stakeholder settings. The novel scoring system compares measured condition against desired and undesired target conditions. Indicators were organized according to social goals and more conventional domains (e.g., water supply reliability). Uncertainty was represented as a combination of confidence in the strength of the indicator, natural variation, and measurement error. An online decision support tool was developed to contain an encyclopedia of more than 1,800 sustainability indicators and the results of their use at watershed, regional, and state scales as part of Water Plan Update 2013. The authors conclude that the indicators framework and the online decision support tool can be used in any comparable system in the world.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a contract (agreement # 4600007984) between the California Department of Water Resources and the University of California, Davis, and an agreement between the U.S. EPA and the California Department of Water Resources (agreement #X7-00T60401-0). The authors thank Vance Fong and Don Hodge of EPA Region 9 for their invaluable and thoughtful assistance. The authors also appreciate the assistance of Celeste Cantu, Jeff Beehler, Rick Whetzel, Peter Vitt, and Mark Norton of the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority and Mike Antos, Nancy Steele, and Deborah Glaser of the Council for Watershed Health. Lara Lacher and Susana Cardenas at UC Davis deserve gratitude, as does Kamyar Guivetchi, chief of the Division of Statewide Integrated Water Management, California Department of Water Resources, for his consistent support and thoughtful guidance on the project.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 141 • Issue 12 • December 2015
Copyright
© 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: May 2, 2014
Accepted: Apr 10, 2015
Published online: Jun 9, 2015
Discussion open until: Nov 9, 2015
Published in print: Dec 1, 2015
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