It’s Time for Standards of Practice in Water Resources Planning

Fifteen years ago, we formalized a disciplined planning approach that we termed Shared Vision Planning. Although we found it immediately beneficial in our planning studies, we wondered whether what we had invented would be short-lived. Perhaps we had invented the water management equivalent of the IBM Selectric? For those readers under the age of 50, the Selectric was an amazingly advanced electric typewriter that was invented about $20\text{years}$ before the first Apple computer. It turns out that we need not have worried; the consequences of not planning adequately are now headline news, so the idea of disciplined planning—considering the consequences of a decision before it is made—has a renewed luster. We worry, though, that today’s planners are unaware of the planning accomplishments of the past. The fact that much has changed since the 1970s does not mean that previous knowledge is worthless, only that the old lessons must be updated if they are to serve as modern templates for water resource planning.

The Water Resources Council established rules for federal planning $30\text{years}$ ago. In 1973 the Council produced Water and Related Land Resources: Establishment of Principles and Standards for Planning (P&S) (U.S. Water Resources Council 1973). The P&S integrated federal guidelines from the 1950s, the systems and economic analysis approaches of the Harvard Water Program from the 1950s and 1960s, and lessons learned from two major water planning studies conducted as a result of droughts in the northeast in the mid-1960s. The P&S was subjected to review and comment in the Federal Register before being issued in final form. This open debate ensured that the final P&S was representative of the state of the practice. An apprentice planner in the late 1970s could become educated by reading the P&S, along with the numerous case studies, how-to manuals, and research papers that served as companion pieces to the P&S. The mix of academic rigor, practicality, and publicly garnered consensus made the P&S the best guideline for tested, internally consistent water resources planning. However, P&S was configured for the design of federal water projects. It does not provide similar guidance on managing drought, operating reservoirs, or deciding which local water supply project to permit.

Shared Vision Planning, as we created it, modified the P&S planning process and added collaborative model building and modern public involvement techniques. The use of shared vision planning is increasing; and for every study labeled shared vision planning, two or three others use an essentially similar approach (but not the label). Now is an excellent time to assemble the emerging approaches that have universal appeal to planners and that can be applied to a broad range of problems.

In more than a half-dozen significant water management areas, such innovative and disciplined planning is needed. The Clean Water Act called for regional planning to manage TMDLs in the early 1970s, but success has been slow and limited. Drought management has improved markedly in the previous $20\text{years}$ but often needs to be better integrated with water supply planning. Today’s water supply planning is controlled as much by Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act gamesmanship as by planning and trade-off analysis. A viable paradigm for ecosystem restoration and protection planning has not emerged, and planners too often recommend the largest project affordable, with few means of measuring project performance. Environmental investment strategies, which are based on the notion that society has limited resources to apply to environmental improvements and therefore needs to assess the benefits and costs of projects, are few and far between. Although conjunctive management of groundwater and surface water has long been touted as a good idea, the need is more tangible than ever. But it will take planning to design an investment strategy for the instrumentation and models that we need to understand groundwater and base-flow conditions. By now, the impacts of flooding in the United States should be greatly reduced. However, After all the dams and levees, floodplain management, and flood insurance, the United States suffers more flood damage per capita than it did $50\text{years}$ ago. Many agencies have some part of the responsibility, which is to say that no agency has the responsibility to solve the problem in a systematic way. And although planning efforts have been under way at many major reservoir systems since the late 1980s, few have led to substantial changes in operating rules or storage allocations.

Climate change will certainly exacerbate many of these problems, making disciplined and participatory planning even more important. We should not trust risk assessments that are based on the assumption of a stationary climate, but what is the best way to accommodate uncertainty about tomorrow’s climate in decisions made today? We can safely say that projected warming by 2100 will rob many western cities of significant snowpack storage, but climate change will not arrive instantly or monotonically, so when should investments in new storage or passage of an ordinance for xeriscaping in a particular city occur? In what year can we reduce reservoir flood storage set aside to hold newly melted snow so that we can store water to protect against summer droughts?

We are not alone in the belief that water planners should publish best practices. The National Science and Technology Council’s Committee on Environment and Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Water Availability and Quality (SWAQ), has outlined A Strategy for Federal Science and Technology to Support Fresh Water Availability and Quality in the United States (SWAQ 2007), a strategy that recommends federal research toward developing collaborative tools and processes for solutions to the water problems of the United States.

We do not recommend the revitalization of the Water Resources Council, as many others have done. The idea is an appealing one, but there are good arguments against it; perhaps the best is that creating a new layer of bureaucracy is not politically feasible. We think that the new principles have to be developed by people connected primarily by their expertise and interest in water resources planning.

We believe that the use of a collaboratively built web site, a sort of limited access “wiki” is a viable alternative. This wiki (as in Wikipedia, the free Internet encyclopedia edited by readers) will invite and allow the type of collaboration needed for such principles to have credibility. The Institute for Water Resources of the Corps is making plans to develop just such a water wiki. The Corps will provide basic information on a preliminary site and then invite and support limited online editing.

Finally, we believe that this journal can play a central role in developing new standards of practice. In recent decades, this journal was arguably the best for water resources planning and management. It is important that this journal remain true to it title and promote and nurture papers devoted to the challenging topic of water resources planning. Only a small fraction of the papers in this journal are devoted to planning. We hope that planning papers will be encouraged as the scholarly and practical values of such papers are again recognized. One immediate contribution that ASCE could make that would be of great value is to collect and distribute without restriction the great planning papers of the past.