Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management

Payments for watershed management link upstream inhabitants whose actions affect water resources with downstream water users. This paper evaluates the effect of plausible shifts in watershed land use on hydrologic services on the Kona coast of Hawai’i Island by measuring vegetation effects on hydrologic fluxes, modeling land-use change impact on the water-supply aquifer, and evaluating the local water department’s associated pumping expenses. Transitions between native and plantation forest will have a 25–40% greater impact on the aquifer than the transition from pasture to either forest type. However, for all transitions, the value to the water department is just 2–5% of the opportunity cost to landowners. To provide context for these findings, the effects of these land transitions on carbon storage, provision of native bird habitat, and land stewardship are assessed. Estimates show that delivery of other services does not always increase when water services increase and suggest that the value of impacts to these other services are greater than effects on water. In Kona, as in any watershed payment project, the particular physical and social context determines which services are valuable.

Key integrated components of the Texas sustainable water management enterprise include a regional and statewide planning process, water rights permit system and other water allocation mechanisms, process for establishing environmental flow standards, and water availability modeling system. These statewide endeavors mandated by the Legislature are implemented by a water management community comprised of state, local, and federal agencies, private industry, stakeholders, interests groups, consulting engineering firms, and university researchers. Texas is a large state with a rapidly growing population, declining groundwater supplies, intensifying demands on limited surface water resources, extreme hydrologic variability including severe droughts, and very diverse climate, geography, economic development, and water management practices. The Texas experience is illustrative of fundamental concepts and issues involved in state-level efforts to achieve sustainable water management.

Assessing how well public policies support and advance sustainable planning and practice is an area of increasing interest, particularly with respect to resources management. The relationship between energy and water resources, commonly known as the energy–water nexus, is one such resource management area in which policy plays a major role. To evaluate the sustainability of specific policies, three recent energy–water nexus bills from the U.S. Congress were assessed based on five sustainability considerations, as follows: (1) creates new knowledge and/or resource management strategy that advances towards the goal of sustainability, (2) allows for flexibility in technology and management options, (3) promotes policy integration between different departments and agencies, (4) matches appropriated budget with anticipated savings or revenue, and (5) considers the long-term for reevaluation. Using these sustainability considerations, the energy–water nexus policies exhibit many characteristics of sustainable policy. These same sustainability considerations can form a strong foundation for formulation of sustainable public policy that maintains quality of life for current and future generations.

Sustainability is commonly recognized as an important goal, but there is little agreement on what sustainability is, or what it requires. This paper looks at some common approaches to sustainability, and while acknowledging the ways in which they are useful, points out an important lacuna: that for something to be sustainable, people must be willing to work to sustain it. The paper presents a framework for thinking about and assessing sustainability which highlights people working to sustain. It also briefly discusses Integrated Water Resource Management and the example of the California Water Plan to explore what such a perspective brings that is overlooked in other approaches, and how this approach might be pursued. Ultimately, this framework argues that a system can only be described as sustainable if people’s work to sustain the system is biophysically possible, socially possible, and if people would freely choose to do the sustaining work.

Saving water saves energy. Consequently, implementing integrated water management (IWM) measures that reduce potable water consumption, stormwater runoff, and wastewater generation can potentially translate into significant energy savings. In this paper, the energy savings associated with IWM measures of rainwater harvesting and gray-water reuse are estimated, both at national and local utility scales using published data. At the national scale, it is estimated in this paper that up to $3.8\mathrm{billion}\mathrm{kWh}$ and $270 million can potentially be saved annually by replacing landscape irrigation and other outdoor water uses through rainwater harvesting alone, and up to $14\mathrm{billion}\mathrm{kWh}$ and $950 million in combination with gray-water reuse. Similarly, in Charlotte, North Carolina, the local water utility can potentially save up to $31\mathrm{million}\mathrm{kWh}$ and $1.8 million annually. However, annual energy and associated cost savings per household are low at either scale, ranging between 1 and 120 kWh with associated cost savings of less than $10. These results are discussed in terms of energy savings’ role in IWM policy considerations and promotion of sustainable water use in urban areas.

This article presents a methodology that combines a process-based lifecycle assessment (LCA) with an economic input-output LCA (EIO-LCA) model to quantify the net present value (NPV) lifecycle costs (LCC), energy consumption, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with a water distribution system (WDS) pump. The methodology considers the manufacturing, use, and end-of-life (EOL) disposal lifecycle stages, as well as processes that are not typically considered, including discharge valve throttling, pump testing, deterioration, refurbishment, and variable-speed pumping. A case study is used to demonstrate the methodology, assess the implications of different operating scenarios, and determine the relative importance of different processes. Results show that a combination of refurbishment and variable-speed pumping is the most effective means of improving sustainability for the case. Analysis of the results shows similar composition profiles for energy consumption and GHG emissions with pump operation representing over 80% of each, whereas manufacturing and pump operation together represent the majority of the NPV LCC. Sensitivity analyses indicate that the planning period, reference target volume, electricity cost, and discount rate are the most influential parameters.

The City of Los Angeles, with a population reaching 4 million people in 2013, imports nearly 90% of its water from sources outside the city. However, climate change, population growth, competing demands, water quality concerns, and environmental restoration projects all have a large impact on Los Angeles’ dependency on future water importation. In this study, a system characterization was performed to assess each of the water sources that supply Los Angeles and the factors affecting them under present and potential future conditions. Additionally, water demand and conservation methods in Los Angeles were examined to understand their impact on the overall water supply system. Of the five main water sources that supply Los Angeles—Los Angeles Aqueduct, Colorado River, California Aqueduct, local groundwater, and reclaimed water—a majority will be impacted by climate change, water quality, energy, and cost constraints. While the expansion of water demand management and agricultural water transfers can help address the challenge of increasing demand, the impacts of climate variability and competing demands are likely to constrain their potential. The characteristics of the Los Angeles water supply system provide the basis for a system sustainability assessment that bounds the options for solutions to meet both a growing demand and the need for climate change adaptation.

Increasing variability in climate and environmental degradation call for an infrastructure design paradigm that considers both sustainability and resilience using performance-based metrics. This paper discusses recent progress in this direction, including recent and emerging infrastructure rating systems, design technologies and tools, and examples of sustainable and resilience infrastructure projects. Recommendations are made for new research, development of new technologies and tools, and policy changes needed to further advance progress towards integrating performance-based approaches across the entire design cycle. These include a call for improved models and tools to better evaluate the full suite of infrastructure costs and benefits, both internally and externally; multicriteria design to assess tradeoffs among all costs and benefits at multiple scales; and an iterative design cycle based on measurable performance criteria.

This paper describes the development and testing of a methodology to assess water vulnerability and stress called “Water Sustainability through Decision Analysis.” This method uses multicriteria decision analysis to measure water sustainability through a multidisciplinary lense and includes measures of water availability, demand, and policy. Assessing water sustainability is ultimately a decision problem that involves multiple stakeholders and perspectives. Uncertainty is an important and often-overlooked aspect of water sustainability. To fill this critical knowledge gap, the water sustainability through decision analysis method accounts for the uncertainty in the input data and unknown decision-maker preferences using stochastic multicriteria decision analysis. Addressing the problem of uncertainty helps to calculate risk and bypasses the problem of unknown decision maker preferences without resorting to equal or arbitrary weights for measures of sustainability. The method is applied to eight states in the southeastern United States. Georgia ranked high in water sustainability and Texas ranked low. The results provide a single outranking index and also highlight actionable items that can improve each state’s water sustainability.

Global challenges increasingly require interdisciplinary approaches to problem solving. This need should be facilitated by institutions of higher education. With increasing climatic and anthropogenic changes, graduate students must gain collaborative experience communicating and working across disciplines. The evolution of multidisciplinary problem-solving and global, sustainability-minded education provides the impetus for universities to reframe researchers’ understanding of the environment and reimagine the spheres of curriculum, research, teaching, outreach, culture, and management. This paper describes a successful multidisciplinary approach at the University of Utah, centered on the project-based Global Changes and Society course. This method has brought about changes within the university and improved linkages to the greater community. Of particular importance is the development and implementation of the course framework, which transitions over time to address region-specific sustainability objectives. The results, pitfalls, and recommendations from this evolving venture are highlighted through a series of universal examples, with the potential to be applied at any institution of higher education focused on adapting the culture, environment, and structure to facilitate multilevel sustainability.

To better prepare students to tackle the challenges of real-world problems, the authors developed a strategic approach to incorporate sustainable-design principles in the undergraduate curriculum to set a foundation of sustainability on which students could build throughout their academic careers. The plan through the four-year undergraduate curriculum involves creating an awareness of sustainable design in a required freshman introduction-to-design course and describing the science of sustainability and how students can apply sustainability principles in a new required sophomore-level course. The students are then prepared to consider sustainability in their civil engineering technical design courses during the third-year curriculum. In their fourth year, students apply sustainability principles in developing and evaluating design solutions during their senior capstone design course. Assessment of student learning showed improvement in students’ abilities to comprehend principles of sustainable design as set forth during Years 1 and 2, as shown through statistically significant increases in knowledge items for Year 1 and ability items for Years 1 and 2. Additionally, the authors plan to conduct a more detailed assessment of senior design submissions during Year 4 to better measure students’ abilities to apply and evaluate these principles through the design process.

The community of Ntisaw in Northwestern Cameroon originally partnered with the Engineers Without Borders chapter at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2008 to design a gravity-fed distribution network for an existing groundwater source. The system, which was completed in 2012, continues to provide year-round access to clean water via public tapstands placed at convenient locations throughout the village, thereby reducing the time and labor needed to carry water and the threat of waterborne disease. However, the source itself is still at risk from contamination from cattle fecal matter. To ensure the water remains clean, the community has completed construction of a wood and barbed wire fence around the catchment area. In partnership with Agence Nationale d’Appui au devloppement FORestier (ANAFOR), the Cameroonian forestry agency, Ntisaw has also begun planting a grove of Prunus africana (African almond) trees that will provide income for the community as well as protection for the catchment from wandering cattle. However, it is uncertain how much of an impact planting a large number of these deep-rooted trees will have on the unconfined aquifer that currently feeds the water system. Simplified models of the catchment were created using the modeling program MIKE SHE, a coupled surface-subsurface model that allows the modeling of infiltration, evapotranspiration, and surface water and groundwater flow. Model calibration was completed using existing field data previously measured on location. The calibrated model was then combined with information regarding the potential spacing, root depth, and leaf area index of the African almond grove. From this simulation, a qualitative analysis of the impact of mature trees near the existing water supply was developed, providing feedback for the appropriate spacing required to avoid negative impacts on the system. Although the results of these modeling efforts are specific to the catchment in question, the methods of analysis used to obtain them can be broadly applied to similar small-scale situations of water resource management elsewhere in the developing world.

Accurately conveying sustainability status and trends in a way that is understandable to broad audiences is a critical responsibility of state agencies. The difficulty in doing this lies in several important areas: stakeholder involvement, basis in science, selection of representative indicators, scoring relative to social priorities, recognition of uncertainty, and reporting in easily understood formats. The purpose of the study described here was development of a comprehensive system for measuring and reporting water sustainability at watershed, regional, and state scales. An analytical framework developed to quantify water system sustainability indicators for California was included in the California Water Plan Update 2013 and tested at multiple scales in multiple stakeholder settings. The novel scoring system compares measured condition against desired and undesired target conditions. Indicators were organized according to social goals and more conventional domains (e.g., water supply reliability). Uncertainty was represented as a combination of confidence in the strength of the indicator, natural variation, and measurement error. An online decision support tool was developed to contain an encyclopedia of more than 1,800 sustainability indicators and the results of their use at watershed, regional, and state scales as part of Water Plan Update 2013. The authors conclude that the indicators framework and the online decision support tool can be used in any comparable system in the world.