Managing Water Stress and Climate Risk in South Florida

The special collection on Managing Water Stress and Climate Risk in South Florida is available in the ASCE Library (https://ascelibrary.org/jwrmd5/managing_water_climate_florida).

Mounting pressure on water resources due to growing demand, hydrologic extremes, and climate change is threatening the sustainability of fresh water resources at different spatiotemporal scales around the world. Understanding multifaceted tradeoffs associated with managing multipurpose water systems, namely meeting competing and sometimes conflicting objectives, calls for interdisciplinary scientific approaches rooted in water resources systems analysis.

The special collection entitled “Managing Water Stress and Climate Risk in South Florida” in the ASCE Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management (JWRPM) aims to advance interdisciplinary understanding of ecological and socioeconomic tradeoffs of water management in South Florida under various drivers of change. The challenges facing future water resources management in this region represent many characteristic features of water sustainability concerns in economically and ecologically important coastal areas in an era of increasing anthropogenic and climatic stressors. South Florida’s population of 6.2 million is expected to increase to 7.4 million by 2045 (Rayer and Wang 2021). Saltwater intrusion and rapid sea level rise (SLR) have already impacted the region’s urban drinking water supplies. South Florida’s water infrastructure is managed to minimize the risk of flooding during wet periods and to reduce the adverse impacts of droughts—particularly saltwater intrusion—while maintaining the integrity of low-lying and highly-valued natural environments such as the Everglades. In some cases, wet season flood control measures in one basin can contribute to the need for dry season water restrictions in other parts of the system, creating water quality problems in vulnerable estuarine ecosystems as well as in the spatially connected network of urban, agricultural, and ecological subsystems.

The papers in this special collection blend insights from water resources management, hydrology, climate science, geospatial sciences, ecology, sociology, environmental policy, and economics to inform adaptive water resources management to cope with adverse impacts of climate change and unsustainable growth.

Sikder and Mozumder (2020) assess public perception of climate risks along with preferences for adaptation to climate change, an imminent threat to the Florida Everglades and the variety of unique ecosystem services it supports. Synthesis of the responses registered through an online survey vehicle illustrates how sociodemographic factors and outdoor recreation choices coupled with geographic features of respondents’ primary residence shape their perceptions of the seriousness of climate risks and the importance of mitigation and adaptation.

Brown et al. (2020) investigate the connection between users’ attitudes toward climate risks, their perceived value of ecosystem services, and their expressed desire to mitigate risks. Findings of psychometric characterization of attitudes toward climate risk used within an economic discrete choice model help elicit public willingness to pay (WTP) for better fishing and ecosystem health through augmenting freshwater inflows in the Florida Everglades.

The challenge of stochastic simulations of future daily rainfall through 2100 in South Florida is addressed in Cioffi et al. (2020) through a nonhomogeneous hidden Markov model conditioned on upper atmosphere circulation variables. Projections indicate increased intra-annual rainfall variability with fewer, more extreme rainfall events in the region.

Ghanbari et al. (2020) project chronic and acute coastal flood risks in terms of flood extent and depth and monetary losses to buildings over a range of SLR scenarios. Accounting for the nonstationary nature of coastal flooding into the future, the paper also contrasts the risks of repetitive nonextreme flooding with acute extreme events, using current sea-level conditions as a baseline.

Possible hydrologic improvements as part of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) and other potential restoration actions are examined by Paudel et al. (2020). CERP is a multibillion-dollar effort to reverse the human-made alteration of the hydrologic and ecological characteristics of the Everglades. The authors document substantial improvements to the hydrologic system under a range of restoration scenarios, with spatially variable restoration benefits across the Everglades landscape.

Finally, Weisskoff et al. (2020) take a retrospective look at water demand forecasts in South Florida in the context of Everglades restoration through an economic lens. By comparing actual water demand trajectories with early forecasts that assumed a lasting hypergrowth of urban and agricultural water use in South Florida through 2030, the paper offers a critical account of the key reasons for the success or failure of long-term, model-based water demand projections.

It is our hope that the scientific contributions featured in this special collection inform the dialogue about adaptive measures to safeguard water resources sustainability in South Florida and beyond.