Road to 2050: Visions for a More Sustainable Future

There are two ways to embrace the future: we can passively let the future happen and react to it, or alternatively we can actively shape the future by taking specific steps that will beneficially effect the state of the world and the resources available to those living in the future. To take a more active approach toward shaping our future, we need to have a vision of what kind of a future we want.

Approximately two years ago, we encouraged some 50 experienced professionals in environmental and water resources engineering, ecology, and economics, employed by consulting firms, academia, governmental, and nongovernmental agencies, to create such visions on the basis of optimistic expectations. These visions are now in a book (Grayman et al. 2012) that attempts to identify just what we can and should do over the next few decades to shape the future that we would like to see and inhabit in the year 2050. The book’s goal is to motivate some thinking about how we as a society want to achieve a more perfect world. It considers sustainability and how we develop and manage our natural and cultural resources to benefit both our and future generations. We guess what future generations would tell us about how we should develop today and manage our water resources and environment, so that they, our children or grandchildren, some 40 years later, will be better able to meet their needs, achieve their goals, and improve the quality of their lives.

Our visions fit into three broad categories: Planning and Policy; Education; and Science and Technology. Pervasive themes in the collection of visions for 2050 include (1) managing water resources variability (floods and droughts) considering nonstationarity; (2) providing adequate and reliable supplies of clean water, food, energy, and sanitation to expanding populations, especially in urban areas; (3) developing new options for addressing water and environmental management issues provided by rapidly advancing technology; (4) changing our educational system considering technological and economic factors; and (5) planning and managing water and environmental resources with adaptable, robust, and integrated approaches.

It is relatively easy to create alternative visions of an ideal 2050 but much harder to get society to reach a consensus vision and to meet the challenges of achieving that vision. We often focus on satisfying short-run goals to the exclusion of longer-term ones. An example of this type of challenge from the book concerns the aging and deteriorating water resources infrastructure in the United States (Grayman et al. 2012):

In the US, aging, broken or under-designed wastewater collection and treatment systems discharge billions of liters of untreated wastewater into surface waters each year. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that $390 billion (today’s dollars) will be needed over the next 20 years to update or replace existing systems and build new ones to meet increasing demands (ASCE 2010). Just where is this amount of money going to come from? How will the necessary political support be created and sustained over the next 40 years? Do we need to wait until the failure rate and associated inconveniences exceed some threshold before people say enough? Perhaps we need to market this gaping long-standing need in infrastructure (and not just water-related infrastructure) as a “war” on infrastructure decay … Can we develop and implement a sewerless technology? Can we eliminate the use of sewers and the use of treated high quality water to transport wastewater from our toilets to wastewater treatment plants? Can wastewaters from urban apartments and office buildings be “treated” on site, eliminating, in a cost-effective way, the need for sewers in urban areas? Can we think of cities that are green with vegetation that effectively and substantially reduces the need for stormwater sewers and instead promotes runoff infiltration into the ground? As a vision for 2050, why not? Indeed steps in this direction are already being taken in various cities of the world.

As noted in the book, visionary projects are an engineering tradition, and can be major drivers of economic development. Examples of such visionary projects include the Erie Canal, Hoover Dam, New York City’s water supply reservoirs and aqueducts, and the California Aqueduct that brings northern California water to southern California. Such grand projects of the past demonstrate our capability to be visionary; and future grand projects that involve structural and nonstructural components and that serve multiple purposes, objectives, stakeholders, and institutions are no less challenging and will require no less vision and leadership from both professionals and politicians. However, the sorry state of our infrastructure and the unwillingness of the public to pay for essential infrastructure maintenance, replacement, and research demonstrate that ignoring this challenge now can lead to sacrifices of long-term growth and employment opportunities. All too often our political leaders fail to demonstrate long-term vision and tend to pander to short-term, self-interests. The only way this is going to change is for us, the public who elect our political leaders, to change.

In the next four decades, will we be able to achieve any of the positive visions for 2050 presented in our book? Our success will depend on how well professionals from a range of disciplines can effectively work together to show the public, including its decision-makers, these visions and how they can be achieved. Trade-offs between expenditures that yield immediate modest short-term benefits and expenditures that yield far larger long-term benefits will need to be made, and we will need to deal with risks and uncertainties by adapting our visions and strategies to changing environments and social goals. Although these challenges are intimidating, we should seize the opportunity to contribute as much as we can toward conquering them.

Robust planning and decision-making methods will be essential to deal with the substantial uncertainties associated with the future, including the implementation of flexible or adaptive development and management strategies and making incremental decisions, rather than undertaking large-scale changes. These adaptive measures will allow for incremental or directional change in the future, as considerations of reliability, vulnerability, knowledge, experience, and technology dictate, which also may include delaying implementation of potentially harmful measures while exploring options and building the necessary standards and regulatory environment.

Because the long-term future may be dominated by factors that are very different from current ones and hard to imagine on the basis of today’s experiences, long-term planning must confront the potential for surprise. We can imagine futures different from the present through narratives about the future, whether fictional or historical. Such scenario planning provides a framework for “what ifs” to examine multiple views of the future together with their uncertainties, but all scenarios suffer from ultimately being wrong because we cannot forecast 40 to 50 years from now and predict the future environment, needs, goals, and beliefs. Still, we must seek robust strategies that perform reasonably well for a wide range of plausible scenarios and that allow adaptation over time to a changing environment.

We often hear of medical breakthroughs that result in significant health improvements 20, 30, or even 50 years in the future. The same cannot be said for the water and environmental field. Most of our research and development is expected to provide paybacks within periods of a few years or maybe a decade at most. However, we must establish more forward-looking research and development programs that include (1) governmental and private investments that value work that does not necessarily result in immediate gains, (2) academic acceptance of research that is far more speculative, and (3) increased emphasis on creativity at all levels of education and research. As a profession, we are not very successful in obtaining the support for, and accepting the risks of, taking on really forward-looking research. Our academic institutions are key to addressing this need because their job is not only to teach knowledge, but to create it as well. Instead of focusing research efforts on marginal improvements in well-established processes, algorithms, or planning procedures that are safe, fundable, publishable, and able to be completed in the “normal” time for a master’s or doctorate degree, we must increase our efforts to work with leading industries, government research laboratories, and universities on more risky projects aimed at achieving advances in the physical, chemical, biological, and social sciences, and in engineering technology. This approach may be “bumpy,” with some failures or steps backward at times, but we must invest in forward-looking research and development if we are to achieve our optimistic vision of 2050.

It is our challenge to make our positive visions a reality and to perform the research needed to make that happen. We are the researchers, whether in academia, industry, or government service; and we are the peer reviewers of research proposals, and the members of advisory panels of funding agencies. We must have the courage to make a significant change in the types of research we engage in today.

Our visions of what we wish to see in 2050 in the water resources and environmental field may differ, and certainly they will evolve. That’s appropriate. We believe what is important is that we all have our visions, that we as a community strive for a consensus vision, and that we work hard to achieve it.