Developing Sustainable Water Resources Management

Sustainability is "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". However, our observations suggest that public policy and program efforts in the United States often overlook opportunities to make water resources truly sustainable. In contrast, municipalities are aggressively pursuing multiple efforts to use energy sustainably. This paper presents an informal survey of 20 municipalities to identify apparent gaps between efforts on developing sustainable energy and water supplies. Municipalities were selected to be included in the survey based on population, geography, and third party "sustainability rankings". We then performed a qualitative analysis on the survey findings to identify differences in the approaches and level of commitment for water and energy resources among the surveyed municipalities. The second part of this paper provides methods for raising awareness and increasing actions towards making water a more sustainable resource.