2004 Julian Hinds Water Resources Development Award Lecture1
Publication: Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 131, Issue 4
Thank you very much for this award. I am honored to be given this award and humbled to find myself in the company of those who have received it in the past. As with most awards, the accolades should go to many other people, because when we are most successful we are working as part of a team, and the teams with which I have been associated have always been packed with outstanding individuals. I thank them all.
If you rated disciplines by the challenges they face, water resources would be at or near the top. Over the past we have met and engaged, both at home and abroad, many water challenges. We have improved the quantity and quality of water provided to the public; we have kept our ports, harbors, and waterways in business; we have eliminated billions of dollars in potential flood damages; and we have nursed the nation through numerous severe droughts.
Over the last , we also found new challenges—dealing with and understanding the environment and correcting environmental problems that we unwittingly created. We have had to learn to deal with the public, to recognize the wide variety of stakeholders that want be involved in water management; and we have had to keep up with fast moving technologies that offer us capabilities we would not have dreamed about even a few decades ago.
But we have a long way to go. There is much to be done at both the national and the international level. In the United States, problems with water—droughts, floods, climate change, navigation shortfalls, ever-threatened water quality, and riverine and estuarine ecology—are in the headlines on an almost daily basis…and the infrastructure that supports these systems is rapidly deteriorating. On the international scene, water is a source of conflict and discord, and in many areas an unfulfilled basic human need.
We in the water business are going to have to deal with some very tough problems over the next decades.
•
Drought is a continuing problem across the country, and moving to crisis proportions in the West. If the Colorado Basin drought does not soon break, all of the basin states face significant shortfalls and a political nightmare in living with the low-flow aspects of the Colorado compact. Power pools in Lakes Meade and Powell could disappear in just a few years, and Arizona’s Central Arizona Project might find itself without water. Bills to deal with advanced planning for drought have been raised and left on the table in Congress year after year. Last year the Congress gave over $3 billion in emergency drought relief aid to U.S. farmers and ranchers to mitigate the short-term problems but took no action to solve the long-term challenges of drought.
•
Coupled with the drought are strong concerns that, in many areas, there will not be enough water in the long-term for municipal and industrial use. Climate change is certain to exacerbate these demands for new supplies. To add to the challenge, potential terrorist activity could threaten supplies that we have. We are finding new ways to “market” water and are using underground storage to our advantage, but there are many unanswered questions with regard to both.
•
Many of our ports are operating at the margin in terms of channel depths. These are the gateways to domestic and international trade and are critical to the mobility of our armed forces. The infrastructure supporting our inland waterway system is aging and, in some cases, may be undersized to deal with the years ahead. We are in the infancy of understanding how we evaluate large navigation projects whose life may be a century and whose environmental impacts may be felt for an even longer period. Witness the current struggles over the Upper Mississippi System, where the Office of Management and Budget seeks forecasts of system use.
•
Annual flood losses in the United States continue to grow in spite of nearly of federal flood control and more than of the National Flood Insurance Program.
•
We continue to see wetlands drained and converted to other uses at a loss rate of annually. The Fish and Wildlife Service lists 1,260 plants and animals as threatened or endangered.
•
EPA’s year 2000 look at U.S. water quality indicated that of assessed rivers and streams did not meet water quality standards. And EPA rates U.S. coastal waters as fair to poor, with 44% of estuarine areas in the United States impaired for human use or aquatic life. And, in November of last year, EPA’s Assistant Administrator for Water reported that EPA was unable to make a definitive assessment of water quality in 2002 because it was not supported by adequate assessment and monitoring programs.
•
Our own ASCE Report Card for America’s Infrastructure graded water infrastructure between D and . Not just repair is needed. Significant upgrades, especially in water treatment, will be needed to deal with “changing conditions.”
•
And look at the other challenges we now face:
◦
Dam removal. Thirty thousand small dams are marginally safe and will have to be rehabilitated or removed. How will these removals be accomplished and what will be the decision criteria?
◦
Adaptive Management. We are now adaptively managing major work or system operations on the Colorado, the Missouri, and in the Everglades, and are considering or have initiated adaptive management for numerous other rivers. But do we fully understand what adaptive management means?
◦
Ecosystem restoration. This has become a key component of many projects, yet we are far from agreement on what restoration means and how it can be accomplished. Restore to what previous condition?
◦
Public Involvement. Stakeholders no longer want to let engineers develop and run water projects. They want to be involved in planning from the beginning and to share in decision making—especially when they are cost-sharing. We need to understand how this is really going to work and how it will affect our current planning approaches.
◦
Basin planning. We gave up most basin planning in the 1980s, when the Basin Commissions were eliminated. Now we have gone to watershed planning, but much watershed planning is limited to relatively small watersheds, focuses on water quality, and does not bring in many other water problems. Who will do the planning to coordinate multiple watershed plans?
◦
Nonstructural engineering. The nation wants more nonstructural approaches to water problems and we need to respond. We are certainly not there yet.
◦
Conflict resolution. We need, as engineers, to be involved with solving the issues surrounding the primacy of one water use over another, the rights of natural systems, and the rights of Native Americans. The impact of these differing viewpoints can be seen in the nearly of disagreement over management of the Missouri River (it is now in the hands of a judge in Minnesota), the decade-long debate between North Dakota and Minnesota and the Canadian Province of Manitoba over construction of an outlet from Devils Lake [N.D.] into the Red River of the North, the struggles over control of the Klamath Basin, and in the nearly four years that Alabama, Georgia, and Florida have been working, unsuccessfully, to allocate waters of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint Rivers. If the current drought in the West continues, we certainly will see significant disputes in the Colorado Basin.
International challenges are equal if not greater than our domestic challenges. By 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population is likely to live in countries with moderate or severe water shortages. The potential for conflict is obvious. The UN statistics about water are frightening: an estimated 1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water; 2.5 billion people have no access to proper sanitation; and more than 5 million people die each year from water-related diseases. We need to ask ourselves, With much of the world living in prosperity, why are we letting this happen?
What then can we do as water professionals about these challenges? I would argue that, collectively, we can make a difference and that we need to do three things:
First we need to increase our teaming with nonengineer water professionals. Most would say that we already do this, but I was surprised at the result of a recent symposium involving engineers and scientists working on Coastal Louisiana restoration. Attendees noted that engineers and scientists have different attitudes and approaches to problem identification and problem solving. To many people (especially engineers), engineers appear to be in the center of the work and scientists appear to be outside. Engineers and scientists need to be equal team partners in the development of the program, working together from the beginning and being focused on accomplishing the mission. The groups must gain respect for each other’s paradigms, approaches, and culture.
Second, as a team, we need to rapidly deal with the new challenges we face, taking full advantage of new technologies to help us meet these challenges. We need to conduct research where we do not have good answers, and we need to find funding support at all levels of government for research and for the actual work that must be carried out.
Lastly, we need as a team to educate and influence key decision makers to deal with water challenges of the 21st Century in both policy terms—preparing effective legislation—and in funding—providing the resources needed to deal with the problems we have identified both at home and abroad.
We have no U.S. water policy. The relationships among federal, state, and local governments are poorly defined and there is no coordination of water activities at the federal level.
Many engineers do not believe it is their job to go political, but who is better able to describe the problems and the solutions than the engineers and their teammates who ultimately most solve those problems. When was the last time you tried to influence the public or your elected officials about engineering issues? We need to beat down some doors and get things moving.
We can be proud of the accomplishments of water resources professionals—I certainly am—but we must all recognize that the 21st Century will provide us new and increasingly complex challenges. We must be prepared to deal with them. Meetings such as this and individuals like you in the room can and will make a difference.
The good news is, we will all be busy. The bad new is, we will all be very busy.
Good luck and thank you again for this honor.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 131 • Issue 4 • July 2005
Pages: 251 - 252
Copyright
© 2005 ASCE.
History
Published online: Jul 1, 2005
Published in print: Jul 2005
Notes
Presented at the World Water and Environmental Resources Congress 2004, June 28, 2004, Salt Lake City, Utah.
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.