Drought and water resource management

[00:00:28]

KARL EISENHOWER: Good afternoon, and welcome to SciLine’s media briefing on drought and water resource management. I’m Karl Eisenhower, SciLine managing editor. Today we’ll cover drought conditions and both surface and groundwater shortages across the United States and how climate change affects these issues. If SciLine is new to you, we are philanthropically funded and editorial independent nonprofit based at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. All of our services for journalists are free, and our mission is to make scientific evidence and expertise accessible for journalists across all beats. That might be stories explicitly related to science like news about vaccines, or in an election year, it could be topics like voting access. There’s scientific research on all kinds of topics that can ground your reporting and evidence.

One programming note, today, we’re specifically talking about water shortages. Two weeks ago, we hosted a similar briefing on water quality, in particular, the roles of agricultural and wastewater pollution and of algal blooms. You can find the video and transcript of that briefing on sciline.org, and I think one of my colleagues is posting the URL for that in the chat that you can look for that right now. There are other resources for journalists on sciline.org. You can click the blue I need an expert button anytime you need to speak with a scientific expert for your story, and we’ll look for a source with the right background to answer your questions before your deadline.

I’m joined today by three experts who study various aspects of water resources and water management. I’ll let each of them introduce themselves and their areas of research. Dr. Trent Ford.

[00:02:10]

TRENT FORD: Good afternoon, good morning, wherever you’re coming from. My name is Trent Ford. I’m a climate scientist based at the State Water Survey at the University of Illinois in Champaign, Illinois. I also serve as the state climatologist for the state of Illinois. So I lead a good large team on drought monitoring, drought assessment across Illinois and work with our partner states across the Midwest as well.

[00:02:34]

KARL EISENHOWER: Thank you. Dr. Debra Perrone?

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DEBRA PERRONE: Hi, I’m an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I study water resources. My background in formal training is in water resource engineering and my informal training is in water law and policy.

[00:02:53]

KARL EISENHOWER: Thank you. Dr. Elizabeth Koebele?

[00:02:56]

ELIZABETH KOEBELE: Hi. My name’s Elizabeth Koebele. I’m an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada Reno, and I’m an environmental social scientist by training. In my research, I use interdisciplinary approaches to understand how different entities across levels and sectors interact to govern water, especially in the Colorado River Basin in the Western US. So thank you for having me today.

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KARL EISENHOWER: Apologize for mispronouncing your last name. That’s Koebele.

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ELIZABETH KOEBELE: No worries at all. Thank you.

[00:03:28]

KARL EISENHOWER: All right. Thank you. Before we begin taking attendee questions, I’m going to ask each of our panelists a few questions myself. Journalists, you can submit your questions at any time during the briefing. Just look down the bottom of the screen for the Q&A icon. Please let us know if you’d like your question directed to a specific panelist. We’ll be posting a recording of this briefing on a website later today and a transcript will be added in the next couple of days.

Dr. Trent Ford, we’ll start with you. How is climate change altering precipitation patterns and contributing to long term drought across the United States?

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TRENT FORD: Drought is complex. We can just start there, and so its interactions with climate change are equally if not more complex. Actually, the clearest connection between climate change and drought is not so much through altered precipitation patterns, but both in the U.S. and globally is through warmer temperatures causing increased evaporation. That’s irrespective if you’re in a more arid climate like the desert Southwest or a humid climate like we have here in the Midwest. Warming trends have enhanced evaporation, so how much water is leaving the land going up to the atmosphere as gas. That can more frequently and more rapidly reduce surface water availability.

Think about reservoirs, losing water directly through reservoirs, streams, as well as losing moisture from the soil through transpiration as plants uptake that water. So therefore, having warmer weather, especially during the summertime, can intensify drought and magnify drought impacts during periods of low precipitation. Now, specifically for the cool season, warmer temperatures during the winter has also caused less precipitation to fall as snow. This is, again, all across the United States, but in the western U.S., this is a particularly troubling trend where warm season water supply is largely driven by the consistent and slowly melting snow pack. So therefore, reduced snow pack, like we’ve seen this year, reduces water availability during the warm season, which can exacerbate drought, even with abundant winter rain because of that lack of snowfall.

One more connection that I do want to mention is that scientists have observed these nationwide trends in increasing precipitation variability. So it’s not wetter necessarily or drier, but meaning larger swings between wet and dry periods. This creates this need for water storage during drought years, as well as flood mitigation periods of heavy precipitation. Here in the Midwest, seemingly, we go from one to the other. There’s no in between. So this additionally heavy precipitation during or following drought also reduces how much water gets into the ground into the soil and reduces the effectiveness of that soil moisture recharge, which paradoxically, can increase our vulnerability of drought in our agriculture and ecological systems.

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KARL EISENHOWER: Are there different types of droughts and does the type of drought depend on the region in the country?

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TRENT FORD: Yeah. There are many different types of droughts. Droughts are most often differentiated by the systems that they impact. So we have this traditional classification of drought that includes meteorological drought. That’s just not enough rain. Agricultural drought when we see impacts to agricultural systems. Hydrological drought, impacts to streams, water resources, aquifers. Ecological drought, impacts to our natural ecosystems, and then socioeconomic drought, which is drought that causes some impact to social or economic human systems.

Now, additionally, scientists have recognized snow drought, which is this unique case of drought defined by a deficit in snowfall or snow pack. Now the thing about snow drought is we could have what would be considered a wet winter by precipitation standards by getting enough rain, but not having enough of that snow, as I mentioned before, generating that snow pack melt and water resources for the Western U.S. can create a snow drought. Additionally, we have this increase in the recognition of flash drought. Now, that is a drought that intensifies or onsets more rapidly than we think about. Now, the idea of flash drought came from flash flooding, but we’re talking about very different timescales. Flash flooding is something that happens minutes to hours. Flash drought onsets in weeks to maybe a month or so, but reduces that time available for early warning.

I will say that irrespective of the region, droughts are most often caused by this prolonged persistent weather condition that includes clear skies, little to no precipitation, often caused by what we call anticyclones in the upper atmosphere that can cause areas of high pressure on the ground. These high pressure systems, usually, no problem. People actually associate them with really nice weather. But if they persist to weeks to months, then they can actually block incoming weather systems that would create precipitation, it can involve in a drought. So sometimes folks will hear about blocking highs, omega blocks, things like that. That’s referring to a particularly strong type of high pressure system that initiates drought all over the world.

Now, I will say one more thing that recent research has delineated something called anthropogenic drought. Now, all the droughts that I’ve talked about so far have really been initiated by weather and climate systems, right? We don’t have enough precipitation, we get an anticyclone high pressure system, we get drought. This recent research on anthropogenic drought is drought that is primarily caused by humans. Quick example to differentiate that.

Imagine a reservoir that’s really undersized, providing water for a community that’s experiencing growth in water demand. Population growth, growth in energy, whatever it may be. As that water demand for human use increases, it can cause an increase in drought frequency just because the reservoir is undersized. So by poor planning of water resources, it actually generates more frequent drought. So it’s not necessarily a weather climate phenomenon as much as it is just a human phenomenon. So I just want to separate that anthropogenic drought from those other types of droughts that we mentioned.

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KARL EISENHOWER: So you talked about winter rainfall not substituting for winter snow. Where are we seeing that change and what’s driving that change from snow to rain?

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TRENT FORD: So like I mentioned, the Western U.S. is really where we depend on that snow pack. Here in the Midwest, in the upper Midwest and the Northeast, if we get a relatively wet winter with little snow pack, there may be impacts to recreation, but overall hydrologically we don’t see the impacts they do in the Western U.S. because a lot of those water systems, especially in the Colorado River, depend on that slow, consistent snow melt during the warm season. So snow pack plays that key role in storing water during the winter and then slowly releasing it during the summer. As I mentioned with the warmer temperatures, especially in late spring and early summer, we’ve seen less snow pack overall and earlier snow melt, meaning that we can actually get a rush of water during the spring, but then less overall water availability for energy production, for drinking water, for agriculture later on in the summer. So that warming trend that I mentioned way at the beginning, that’s really what’s primarily driving these trends in snow pack that create water resource problems for the Western U.S. and other arid regions around the world.

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KARL EISENHOWER: What resources do researchers use to monitor drought conditions? Are there resources that reporters can turn to if they want to stay on top of what’s going on with drought in their region?

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TRENT FORD: There are so many tools and indices or indicators that researchers, practitioners use. There’s meteorological drought indicators, like something called the Standardized Precipitation Index, soil moisture information, stream flow information, reservoir height. It actually is overwhelming, even for a researcher, let alone for somebody who’s only got maybe a few minutes a day to spend on it. So a good place for reporters to start in my mind, is the National Integrated Drought Information System or NIDIS. Their website is drought.gov. That’s all it is drought.gov.

This site has a myriad of drought information that’s selectable by region and state. So if you work in the panhandle of Oklahoma, you don’t have to worry about what’s going on in Montana unless you’re flying up there for vacation. You can go straight to the panhandle of Oklahoma. There it is. So all the contact information for local drought resources are available on those state pages as well, drought.gov. So it helps you go from national scale down to the scale that we often think about with local.

At the same time, I do want to make mention of the U.S. drought monitor. It is the most widely used source of drought information nationally. The drought monitor is created each week by a single author. That author changes weekly. It’s based on lots of different drought indicators, supplemented by local reports. For reporters, the drought monitor is a great source of information on current drought extent severity. It is not a forecast. It is a current depiction.

However, while the drought monitor is a good place to start, I do encourage folks to dive deeper to understand the details of the current drought that their region may be facing. You can either do this by going to that drought.gov, or I also encourage, and this is a little biased, but reaching out to the state climatologist in your relevant state, and their information is all over. I encourage folks in Illinois to just Google state climatologists in Illinois. You’ll find me. Because oftentimes, they’re the ones who are leading in the monitoring of drought in that state. So if they can’t answer your question, they can get you to the person who can.

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KARL EISENHOWER: The state climatologists are a great resource in every site. That’s a great tip for reporters. Dr. Perrone, let’s start with the basics. What is groundwater?

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DEBRA PERRONE: Karl, thanks for asking that question. So when I talk about groundwater, I really like to have a visualization because groundwater is a really complex resource. So groundwater is the water that’s stored under our feet. So here you can see I differentiate between surface water or the river and groundwater, and it’s often referred to as an invisible resource because we can’t see it. So there’s a lot of commonalities between groundwater and river water, but there are some differences, and there’s this common perception that groundwater is basically this river that’s flowing underneath our feet and it’s actually just a little bit more complex than that.

So groundwater is actually the water that’s stored in between the spaces of grains, like clay and sand, or in between the cracks and rocks. Again, this is in between the materials that are underneath our feet. Now, like water in rivers, groundwater flows. The difference, is that the water that’s flowing underneath our feet is flowing in between these spaces of material or in the cracks, between the materials. What you probably notice here is that I actually am showing the groundwater flowing to our river. This is because groundwater is a really important resource for rivers. Groundwater in undisturbed natural systems often flows into our rivers and is an important component to river flow.

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KARL EISENHOWER: So one way to visualize it, is it’s saturated soil that behaves like a sponge. Is that a good way to think about it?

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DEBRA PERRONE: Possibly. So the way that I like to think about it is that if you had a glass filled with a bunch of different particles, a bunch of sand, and other materials that you would see if you digged a hole in the ground, it would be the water that fills all of the little pore spaces, all the voids in between the different materials that you have.

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KARL EISENHOWER: What are the consequences of over pumping from groundwater sources?

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DEBRA PERRONE: That’s a great question. So again, really important to have these visualizations. So as we construct our well and we pump water up to the surface, we actually change the flow dynamics under our feet. So here you can see that what we end up doing is we end up pulling water from our rivers into our groundwater system. So if we do that enough, we end up causing our groundwater levels to decline so significantly that that river is no longer connected to groundwater. Here, you also see that there are a number of other impacts that declining groundwater levels cause. We also have a dry well.

So basically, you’re no longer able to pump water to the surface. That’s going to impact things like your agricultural supply, or the access to water in your house, so you’re no longer able to get drinking water or water for showers in your house. On the left hand side, you could also see that we have some impacts on ecosystems. So there are some ecosystems that actually depend heavily on groundwater resources. So when we deplete or overuse our groundwater supply, what ends up happening is that those ecosystems can no longer tap into our groundwater supply, and it actually leads to some of them dying off.

So we talked about two. So we talked about water inaccessibility, and we talked about surface water depletion, but there’s actually a number of other consequences of depletion. Two other ones that we talk about are seawater intrusion and degraded water quality, and these have similar dynamics. So on the left hand side here, you see that I changed our river to a coastal area with salty water. So as we pump water near a coastal area, we could actually be pulling that salty water into our fresh water groundwater system.

Eventually, we could actually pull that saltwater up through our well. It basically ruins our water supply. A very similar dynamic can happen if you basically change salty water to contaminated water. So you could basically pull a contamination plume through the subsurface and up through your well. So it’s really important to watch where you are pumping groundwater, where our saltwater resources are, and then also where there may be contaminant or contamination issues.

The last consequence of depletion that people really like to talk about is land subsidence. This is basically when you over pump your aquifer in areas where you have clay. So clay is very good at compacting, and so basically, as you’re pulling the water out in between the pore spaces or the voids between those clay particles, you’re basically causing compaction and as a result, the land actually sinks. That has huge consequences for our infrastructure. It’s very costly. So that would be the last big consequence of depletion that we talk about.

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KARL EISENHOWER: How can drought on the surface push communities and agriculture to rely more heavily on groundwater below the surface?

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DEBRA PERRONE: That’s a great question. So when we talk about drought, there’s actually basically a double hit. So drought impacts how much water we have for supply, so it reduces supply, and this is really important for groundwater. So when we don’t have precipitation, that means we don’t have water to recharge our aquifers. So you can think about an aquifer and recharge very similar to the battery on your phone. So when the battery on your phone gets low, you need to recharge that battery.

Well, when the water in our aquifer, our groundwater system gets low, we need to recharge it with precipitation. So when we don’t have that water available when there’s a drought, then we actually have a decrease in the amount of water that we can recharge that aquifer. On the demand side, we get hit because a reduction in precipitation means that we have less water available for rain fed crops, natural irrigation. It also means that we probably have less water in our rivers. So that means that people turn to groundwater as this backup supply. So groundwater gets hit both because less water being recharged and a greater demand.

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KARL EISENHOWER: So how does climate change contribute to these shortages that you were just describing?

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DEBRA PERRONE: That’s a great question. So groundwater is going to lead to basically less predictable events as well as more intense events. So these droughts are probably going to last for longer periods, and at the same time, we may possibly get floods that are more intense. So rather than seeing a really intense flood every hundred years, we may see that flood happen every ten years. So basically, the combination of the lack of predictability and the greater intensity makes it very hard to manage our resources. That means that we need to be better at managing both the demand side as well as the supply side, and that includes things like infrastructure as well as management and policy through regulatory approaches.

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KARL EISENHOWER: I’m going to jump ahead to one of the questions we got from a reporter. This is from a reporter at the New Hampshire Bulletin. In those illustrations you showed, there was a lighter blue layer at the top and a darker blue layer at the bottom. This question is what the dark blue layer represented.

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DEBRA PERRONE: That’s a great question. So that dark blue layer is representing, basically it’s called an aquitard, so a place where we don’t really have the water being stored. So I’ve simplified this. What’s underneath our feet is actually quite complex. So in some cases, there’s actually no cracks in rocks, which means that we’re not expecting the water to move through that area.

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KARL EISENHOWER: That’s helpful. Thank you. Then finally, what does that mean for agriculture and communities if groundwater continues to decline faster than it’s recharging?

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DEBRA PERRONE: That’s a great question. So it means that we have to do a lot more planning, and we need to basically think through demand management. So do we want to cut back the amount of water? Do we want to change how we irrigate? Do we want to change our crops? It means that we have to think about what supply we have and how do we manage both the use of our groundwater and our surface water and what it means when we use either one and how they affect each other because they are connected.

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KARL EISENHOWER: Thank you. Dr. Elizabeth Koebele, how are water managers and policymakers adapting governance strategies in response to increasing water drought and long term water scarcity?

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ELIZABETH KOEBELE: Sure thing. I’m really happy. I feel like both of my colleagues set up a lot of my answers to these questions really well. So I’m going to hopefully make a lot of ties back to the things that have already been said. I think when we’re talking about adaptation to drought and longer term water scarcity, one of the easiest ways to think about it is to look at the different adaptation actions different sectors take to manage these challenges.

So I’ll just briefly go over a couple sectors and call out some different techniques, and I’m happy to talk more about how any of them work during the Q&A. But these might just be things that reporters want to look out for as they think about new technologies or new approaches to report. So we’ve heard a lot about agriculture, and where I live in the Western United States, agriculture uses about 80% of our total water supply. So it’s a huge opportunity sector for adaptation. In the agriculture sector, adaptation can look like irrigation efficiency upgrades or even in other places in the US, the addition of irrigation where farming has typically not used it. Switching to more drought tolerant crops, intentionally recharging groundwater aquifers, which we just heard a little bit about.

Then, sometimes it means even temporarily or permanently fallowing land, and thinking about the policy side, this may or may not be compensated. Some folks are forced to fallow their land, other folks might participate in programs where they get paid to fallow their land in order to help manage drought in an area. In the municipal and in industrial sectors, I’ll mainly talk about municipal sector, a lot of our adaptation strategies relate to the introduction of new technologies. So we think about things like our low flow shower fixtures and our low flow toilets that promote conservation and efficiency in our homes. We see cities do things like invest in water recycling and reuse and potentially even desalination plants, cities diversifying their water sources when possible through things like desalination.

We can also use in the municipal sector some behavioral strategies like changing water rates to send signals to customers about how much water they use during droughts. Then really important in the municipal sector, cities are creating drought plans and implementing drought plans that take individual actions that are important for their context. So many of you may live in places where you are restricted from watering your lawn on certain days of the week or during certain periods of the year. That can be a really important drought adaptation strategy and something to communicate more broadly to the public. I also want to mention that we’ve heard drought impacts the environment as well, and I think we don’t often think about adaptation strategies that support the environment during drought and water scarcity. But we do have governments and organizations that work to do this by things like dedicating flows to certain stretches of streams through their policies or adapting flow releases from dams to benefit species or sometimes even benefit recreation, protecting specific sources of water that support groundwater dependent ecosystems. So there are strategies to help manage the impacts of drought on the environment as well, in addition to improving watershed health overall.

The last thing I’ll say here is that across sectors, two key adaptation strategies that I just want to put on your radar because I think that they’re very cutting edge and important right now for managing drought in a lot of places are the first one is water markets, which are essentially institutional arrangements that allow for trading of water among water users, depending on their needs. There are so many different designs to these markets, but they’re becoming an increasingly popular strategy in lots of places. Then also using improved data, which is increasingly collected through remote sensing techniques, like satellite data that can help us better understand where we’re using water, how that water is evaporating into the atmosphere, which we’ve heard a little bit about, how our aquifer levels are changing. So all of these things can help us adopt a drought and shift the way we govern water under drought conditions.

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KARL EISENHOWER: So you talked about things like low flow shower heads and water use to reduce pressure on overstressed systems. How effective are those strategies?

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ELIZABETH KOEBELE: So I think, particularly in the municipal sector, we’ve seen amazing success with these strategies, and I’ll speak to the Western U.S. and use an example in my home state here. But first, before I go into that, I want to briefly mention that in a lot of Western cities in particular that have been focusing on conservation and efficiency for probably a longer period of time because they’ve been facing drought for a longer period of time, they’ve essentially done something that we call decoupling population growth from water use, which means that you can add people at a steady rate to your city, and that doesn’t necessarily increase your water use as much or proportionately. So for example, in Las Vegas, where I live, we like to think or a lot of people like to think about Las Vegas as this extravagant city in the desert with all these big fountains and things like that. But in Las Vegas, we’ve seen the population grow by over 800,000 residents in the last 25 years, and our overall water consumption has actually decreased by 30% during which I think is really indicative of how well these strategies work.

One other mention of the benefits of these strategies is the reason they work is really because we are able to target indoor water use efficiency. So again, continuing my Las Vegas example, in homes and casinos and businesses and other indoor water uses, that’s about half of the water Las Vegas uses, and 99% of that indoor use is captured, recycled, and returned to the reservoir that supplies the city’s water. So we are so efficient at using and recycling this indoor water use. Outdoor water use in the municipal sector tends to be harder to reduce, but Las Vegas and other cities have done things like we call them cash for grass incentives. So paying people to rip out their lawns and remove water intensive irrigation or irrigated landscaping, things like that, switch to zero scaping. All of these things can help reduce our outdoor water use and contribute to improved water efficiency in the municipal sector. That’s really helped a lot of Western cities, and it served as an example to a lot of Western cities of ways that they can manage drought with the way that people use water in their homes and businesses.

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KARL EISENHOWER: So you were just talking about how one city is managing its water resources. But in many cases, water resources are shared across states, agencies, tribes, farms, cities. How do those competing demands, how do they get weighed?

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ELIZABETH KOEBELE: That is such a good and complex question, and I won’t be able to dive into all of the legal history behind that question right now. But I will say that authority over water management in many places, and especially in the West, is really widely distributed. So we have federal rules, state rules, local rules, different rules for water quality versus quantity. Then these are all born out, especially in the West, through this really complex legal system of water rights that allow individuals to use certain amounts of water during certain times of year. I look at this from the political viewpoint and the governance viewpoint as being a very fragmented system.

It makes it really hard to develop and implement comprehensive water policies, even in one sector, even in just the agricultural sector. It’s really hard because there are so many different people who have authority over the way that they use water. I will highlight this a little bit more later, but I think that this really requires that we build collaborative partnerships among different types of users of water systems and in different places. So one other thing I’ll add here is that adaptation policies are also really context dependent. I’m thinking not only in regard to the hydrologic context of the area, but also in regard to the political context.

So we need to think about things like if you’re in the West and there is a water rights system, our water rights work like property rights. They’re something you own and can use. So we therefore have to design policies that align with that system, which means that we often design policies that are like incentive based rather than regulation based in a lot of cases because we’re asking people to opt in to voluntarily or in exchange for compensation, potentially, conserve. So this structure of all of these different users just makes it really, really complicated to manage water, and I think we have to remember that we have to design policies and governance structures that fit to context when we’re thinking about managing these problems.

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KARL EISENHOWER: Well, thank you for all that background. We’re going to take questions from reporters in a moment, a reminder that if you do have a question and you haven’t submitted it yet, there is a Q&A box at the bottom of your screen where you can send in your question. So I’m going to begin by asking all three of you when a reporter is reporting on water scarcity issues, what’s the most important context for them to understand for the big picture on this? Dr. Ford.

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TRENT FORD: This is a great question. I think the local context of the combination of the weather and climate forcing of the drought, the systems either response to the drought, whether it be water systems, ecosystems, whatever it may be, or contribution to that water scarcity. Then as Dr. Koebele just mentioned, just all of that interaction within the context of the political and physical systems that we live in within each region are really, really important. So just as a quick example, oftentimes I’ll see folks apply a national narrative to a local location. Oftentimes that doesn’t work. We miss a lot of the important details that are responsible for where we are at right now with the water scarcity problem in certain locations. So that local context is super important.

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KARL EISENHOWER: Thank you. Dr. Perrone.

[00:34:15]

DEBRA PERRONE: I’m going to mimic what Dr. Ford just said, the local context. So the local scientific setting, the customs, the politics, what’s going on there, and then putting that into context with what’s happening regionally and then maybe pulling that up to what’s happening in the state and then pulling that up what’s happening generally around that area, where those resources are interconnected. So if we’re talking about groundwater, groundwater is stored in what we call aquifers. So we’re talking about a local groundwater system, maybe looking at the states that share that aquifer. If we’re talking about a river, the states that share that watershed or that water basin. So I do think that understanding the local context first, but then also pulling that up and understanding that broader regional scale for that resource is also important.

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KARL EISENHOWER: Thank you. Dr. Koebele.

[00:35:14]

ELIZABETH KOEBELE: I love these answers that are forcing us to look at context. I think I’ll add to this by echoing something that I started to mention before, but it’s just the importance of thinking about creative partnerships and collaborations in these unique local contexts. So because our governance system is so fragmented, but also at the same time because impacts of drought really ripple across sectors pretty quickly, we have to remember that our river systems, our water systems are really interdependent. I think as a result of this, and something we could continue to leverage more, is promoting unexpected partnerships. So maybe in a time where a farmer isn’t going to be able to get all the water that they need to irrigate their crops, maybe they’re willing to opt in and fallow their field for a season, and lease the rest of that water for environmental protection in their area, and then they both benefit, right? The farmer probably makes more money than they would with a smaller crop. The river gets to keep some water in it and support species during drought. I think that these sorts of examples of creative partnerships are just a really important thing to remember as we go forward, given how interconnected all these sectors are as they deal with drought and long term water scarcity.

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KARL EISENHOWER: All right. Our first question here is from the Washington State Standard, and it’s about implementing desalination plants. Dr. Perrone, I think you mentioned that earlier. What are the pros and cons for coastal states that are looking into desalination?

[00:37:00]

DEBRA PERRONE: I think that every type of water supply we have has trade offs, and so desalination is expensive, that’s one of the big issues with it is that it’s very energy intensive and expensive. There’s impacts to marine systems and so we also need to watch out for that. I think more generally, we need to be thinking about how that desal water fits into the broader water portfolio that we have. On the positive sides, it means that we’re not depleting our groundwater resources, and we’re not taking water out of rivers, which is great for other beneficial uses. So for the environment, it’s really nice to have water left in our rivers. I think that there’s trade offs, the biggest being the expense and the energy intensity and the impact to our marine systems.

[00:37:58]

KARL EISENHOWER: Anyone want to add anything to that? Well, if I’m counting correctly, we have three questions so far about water and data centers. Just plug for SciLine here, we’ve done a couple of media briefings and some experts on camera sessions on data centers that do mention the trade off between using electricity for cooling and using water for cooling and the pros and cons of that. But I just want to see if any of you have any experience on water use and data centers. The question from the Georgia Recorder specifically talks about regulation happening at the state level versus the local level. For people reporting on data centers in their communities and want to understand the water impacts, what should they know?

[00:38:45]

ELIZABETH KOEBELE: So this is a hugely contentious issue in lots of places right now, and I think it’s important that we do try to understand the impacts of data centers better. You mentioned, Karl, a little bit about the electricity use. That’s one thing I want to draw attention to is that, yes, there are internal uses of water in data centers, but data centers are often causing in a lot of places, a bigger spike in electricity demand than we’ve seen in a really long time. To me, that’s even more stark than their direct water use because water is needed to generate that electricity. So I think, when we’re thinking about water for data centers, we shouldn’t necessarily just be thinking about the water that’s used in data centers, but the water that feeds into the electricity system.

That is so complicated and so hard to measure, so it makes it challenging. The one other thing I’ll say about this is, I think that the attention to data centers and water use for data centers is important. A lot of communities, my community just put a moratorium on data centers in the last week. I think that we also need to think about that in the context of our other water uses, though. So I mentioned in the Western United States where we have seen a lot of data centers being developed because of the favorable weather conditions for them, that 80% of our water goes to agriculture, right?

So data centers are in the municipal and industrial sector. Yes, they’re going to create localized increases in demand, but they are a much smaller use of water than the primary uses of water in the Western United States. I would argue that they’re a hot topic. There’s lots of attention being paid to them, those sorts of things, but that if we’re really going to solve some of the deeper problems associated with drought and long term water scarcity at least in the Western United States, we really need to be thinking about where most of our water is used and thinking about solutions for agriculture water use and agricultural efficiency and those sorts of things. So it’s a challenge there we want to talk about and report on and reflect our community’s needs to understand this really important topic, but I think we also need to contextualize that in the story of what the bigger water uses are in a given region.

[00:41:17]

KARL EISENHOWER: Anyone want to add to that?

[00:41:20]

TRENT FORD: Can I just say real quick that I agree with everything that Dr. Koebele said. The question itself, I think, was from somebody from Georgia, and it’s weird. If folks are out in the Western U.S., it may seem odd not to have very strict water use rules, but a lot of the Southeast, Northeast, and Midwest part of the U.S., it’s the “Wild West” for water use. So I think that the data center question brings into this larger issue of reconciling where our water is going, where it’s coming from. That’s something that the water rich states in the Eastern U.S. haven’t necessarily had to grapple with at least consistently or frequently. So I think this brings into the importance of water resource planning, both at a local level and at a state level to make sure that we can do that accounting as our water demand portfolios change now and into the future.

[00:42:22]

KARL EISENHOWER: So, Dr. Koebele, you were mentioning water used in thermal power plants to generate steam. They need a fresh water supply. Water is also used for hydropower. So we have a question from a freelancer in Washington State. How do you think reductions in water supply will affect power availability in states that rely on hydropower?

[00:42:42]

ELIZABETH KOEBELE: We’re definitely already seeing effects on hydropower generation in the Colorado River Basin. Again, I’m not trying to give a cop out answer, but it’s really important to look at the local context of your river system because I don’t think that there’s one singular answer. I will mention that in the Colorado River Basin, we have the two biggest reservoirs in the U.S., Lake Mead and Lake Powell, and as those levels drop, our hydropower production has continued to drop as well. Alongside that, we’re also seeing challenges associated with our infrastructure at dams that have historically generated hydropower. This is a really big problem at Lake Powell right now. So it’s an important issue, but I think the specific ways that it’s happening and the specific solutions are very context dependent. I don’t know off the top of my head exactly how much of a hydropower reduction we’ve already seen in the Colorado River Basin, but I can say that both of our reservoirs are between 20 and 30% full at any given month in the water year in the last few years, and that makes it really challenging to use water for basically anything except for fulfilling supply. So we need to think about the consequent effects on hydropower generation as well.

[00:44:11]

KARL EISENHOWER: So you mentioned the Colorado River states. We do have several questions about that. The Mountain West News Bureau is asking a provocative question. Which states are doing a great job with water use, and which states need to improve? Are Lower Basin states forced to do more simply because of their hotter, drier climate?

[00:44:29]

ELIZABETH KOEBELE: I’m totally happy to take the provocative question in part because I grew up in the Lower Basin, I went to school in the Upper Basin, and now I live in Nevada, which we call the Switzerland of the Colorado River Basin. I get to always celebrate Las Vegas and the example I used earlier. I don’t live there. I live up in the northern part of the state, but Las Vegas is really seen as the water leader for efficient urban water use in the city. We’re thinking not only now about how do we promote conservation and efficiency, but we’re starting to think about how do we promote smart growth related to water and doing all sorts of creative things, we passed regulations that are now facing some pushback, but you’re not allowed to use Colorado River water to grow non functional turf, so like turf that no one actually uses, that’s in your medians. So we’re coming up with some really creative solutions here.

I think the Lower Basin states have been forced to do more as far as conservation and efficiency simply because they use more water in the Colorado River Basin. That said, I would say, overall, it’s probably more of a sector question than a states question. So I think, as I mentioned, the municipal sector uses only about 20% of our total water and has had a lot more technological innovation in part because they have what we call junior water rights. Their water is likely to get cut off sooner in times of drought. So they have had an incentive to figure out how to conserve and use water really wisely. In agriculture, we have more senior water rights.

They’re more likely safe in times of drought, and there has perhaps been less incentive in the agricultural sector to think about efficiency. It’s not that it doesn’t happen, it certainly does happen, and it definitely happens through creative partnerships. There’s a lot of partnerships in Southern California, where, for instance, the Palo Verde irrigation district fallows land and leases water to Metropolitan to provide water to some of the big urban areas in Southern California. So there certainly are plenty of initiatives there, but I think that’s really the sector we’re looking at as a place to improve water conservation and efficiency and probably reduce some overall water use, right? So water use and agriculture in the West is really important.

We grow a lot of crops. One of the things that is a common line we always say is if you’re eating leafy greens in the wintertime in the West, they were probably grown in Yuma, Arizona, where it’s nice and warm, and we can still grow our salad there in the winter. So plenty of fruits and nuts and all of these other really important crops grow in the Western U.S. That said, about 55% of our water use also goes to growing alfalfa hay, essentially feed for cattle. I think there’s a lot of room specifically in that area to make sure that our water is being used really efficiently, and we’re growing those crops in the areas that we can produce the most to meet our needs, but also do that with the lowest impact on our water systems.

[00:47:58]

KARL EISENHOWER: Shifting to some questions about the Midwest. We’ve got question from KMSU Public Radio in Minnesota. How realistic is it for a water rich state like Minnesota to sell water to other regions in need? Is this a practical solution that we need to think about?

[00:48:18]

TRENT FORD: I guess, the Midwesterner can start, although Dr. Koebele is a much more apt policy expert than I am. I’ll just say, from the Great Lakes perspective, and working in the state in which Chicago resides, the political landscape at the state and local level and the international politics that govern a lot of Great Lakes water use is not one that is conducive to selling water to different regions at this point. It is odd to be thinking about drought sometimes in what, again, is considered a water rich state. However, we have our own issues in the Midwest. Like I mentioned, the political landscape is not right now conducive to that out of region, even Minnesota selling water to Chicago or anything like that. So at this point, it’s something that would be really difficult to see.

[00:49:23]

ELIZABETH KOEBELE: I’ll just add that-, sorry, Karl.

[00:49:26]

KARL EISENHOWER: Before you jump in, I just want to add that we have a question from the Milwaukee Courier about whether drought affects the Great Lakes, so you may want to just help us understand that.

[00:49:38]

ELIZABETH KOEBELE: Sure. I completely agree with Dr. Ford. It’s very unlikely that we’ll see water being moved across major river basins for all of the policy reasons and all of the local needs reasons, right? People pitch all the time, could we put a pipeline from Mississippi to the Colorado? But we’re already dealing with challenges like saltwater intrusion and challenges with navigation on the Mississippi due to low water levels. Plus, I always like to remind people that waters really heavy.

Think about how heavy it is to carry a couple gallons of water, up a couple steps if maybe you live a couple floors up in an apartment. Moving massive amounts of water over huge distances, that water is really heavy. It’s really energy intensive. If we talk about things like desalination being energy intensive, I think we also need to apply the same logic to moving water these really far distances in a pipeline. I mean, we do it shorter distances in the Colorado River Basin, and it’s amazing how much energy that uses, and it just is another factor that makes it a little less, or I would say, unfeasible going forward in the future.

[00:50:53]

DEBRA PERRONE: If I may just add to that, it’s also very costly to build the infrastructure, and it would take probably years to decades to build the infrastructure to move the water from the Great Lakes region all the way over to a state like California.

[00:51:10]

KARL EISENHOWER: We’re very lucky today to have three great science communicators, so I have a science communication question. This is from Rocky Mountain Community Radio. How can reporters convey the scale of urgency and drought? How can we differentiate between outcomes such as agriculture taking cuts, fallowing fields, and major cities starting to turn off the tap? Any thoughts on that one?

[00:51:37]

TRENT FORD: I’ll start with a climate change perspective. So I mentioned the taking the national narrative and applying it to the local. It can be a somewhat easy thing to do, and in some cases, it matches, heat waves are getting more frequent everywhere. However, with drought, it doesn’t work that way, even when you don’t consider the complex interactions with human and social systems. So when conveying the importance and the urgency of drought, understanding the local context of drought, how drought in your area is changing with the change in the human landscapes and ecosystems.

That’s a big piece of it to communicate. What exactly is actually happening? Climate change isn’t everything. It’s certain things, and there’s certain adaptation strategies that work in certain areas. So being targeted with that messaging to resonate with people that you’re speaking to as opposed to striking a more vague message, I think is really important. That’s all I got.

[00:52:36]

ELIZABETH KOEBELE: I think the more you can bring it to localized impacts, the better. I couldn’t agree more. I do think that sometimes people are overwhelmed by the idea of climate change or it just feels very vague in what we’re talking about, these patterns changing. I say all the time, like what you said, Dr. Ford, about our drought is often caused by rising temperatures, not so much shifts in precipitation patterns, but what does that actually mean on the ground, right? I think there’s an important balance of telling stories about how drought’s impacting different sectors. I think we often might be drawn to telling the stories of this city is running out of water. We’re turning off the tap, but there’s lots of impacts, and highlighting some of the negative ecosystem impacts that come along with drought, I think are really important.

Highlighting some of the agricultural community impacts, right? Then also highlighting, again, those partnerships. I like to think about how we can come up with more solutions to this. So there was, for instance, a really great article out of Arizona that I was just reading the other day talking about how some of the bigger cities have created this water bank to help some of the smaller cities in times of need to try to sustain the overall economic benefits of the area. I think that was a really, really great example of showing how people who sometimes are portrayed as being competitors also have some common values and are linked through their shared water systems. So I think the more that we can highlight those examples, too, the better because that makes it really real for people, I think, to show people are giving up something in these times to try to deal with these bigger changes.

[00:54:38]

DEBRA PERRONE: On the communication side, I think just a real value for illustrations and artwork, videos, interviews, really showing what’s happening to people, having the people talk about the impacts on themselves. But then also the illustrations and the artwork that help people understand this complex scientific components of these things that could scare them off. I think that’s really useful.

[00:55:05]

KARL EISENHOWER: I got a question here from the Farm to Fork radio show. With agriculture being the dominant user of water in our country, what can be done to reduce that usage without losing production capacity? So short of fallowing fields, what can we do to conserve water in agriculture?

[00:55:25]

ELIZABETH KOEBELE: I think some of those other strategies of thinking about, okay, is there a more water efficient version of a crop that we can be growing or thinking hard about this is really hard environmentally, economically, but thinking about if we get 12 cuttings of alfalfa for X amount of water in Arizona and we got 4 cuttings for X amount of water in Colorado, where are the right places to grow these crops, and might there be some broader transitions there? We might be able to prevent things like fallowing on a large scale because fallowing comes with a bunch of negatives, too. It creates really negative impacts on rural communities. It creates really negative environmental impacts when we have invasive species and dust and all of these other problems that come along with it. So I do think that coming up with creative solutions to think about switching crops is really important.

In another example used from my home state is we had a program that people could voluntarily be paid to give up and retire some of their groundwater rights. So doing programs like that where maybe part of your water right, if you really want to maintain some of it and continue farming and making sure your operation is really productive, but there’s maybe some part of your water that you’re not using, you could potentially get paid for putting that water back in the system. So I do think there are a lot of creative strategies that we can think about. I also think that because so much of our water is used in agriculture, transitioning a pretty small amount of that, I don’t want to underestimate how stark the transition will probably need to be.

But transitioning a fairly relatively small amount of water out of agriculture can make a really big difference in some of the other sectors and can also maintain the overall productivity of agriculture. The last thing I’ll also mention is I think there’s a lot of great examples of thinking about more multi benefit uses for land. So whether that’s like agrovoltaics and using solar alongside farming or there’s some really great multi benefit land repurposing programs going on in the Central Valley in California. So thinking about these more ways to shift agriculture and diversify agricultural economies, but also make sure we’re saving water in the process and we’re not having all of these negative ripple effects that come with blunt solutions like fallowing is really important.

[00:58:14]

DEBRA PERRONE: I can add to that. In some places it could also be useful to invest in alternative irrigation techniques. So moving away from flood irrigation towards micro irrigation, especially if we provide the financial resources for farmers to adopt those more expensive irrigation systems. Then I think more generally, when we talk about agriculture, one thing that often comes to my mind is food waste. So if we reduce food waste, then even if we need, if we have more people that we need to feed, we don’t actually have to have more agricultural land because we could use that land to feed the people. So I think that’s something on the other side, just thinking a little bit farther away from what’s happening on the field, what’s happening on the table.

[00:59:05]

KARL EISENHOWER: So I’m going to ask one last question since we’re at the top of the hour, but I do want to let the reporters attending know that you’re going to be prompted to take a quick survey. It’s going to take you 20 or 30 seconds. Please take the time to do that for us because it does help us to plan and make these as useful as they can be for you. So in our last minute or so here, I’m going to ask each expert for what’s the one takeaway message you’d like reporters to have today, Dr. Ford?

[00:59:40]

TRENT FORD: I have to go first again, huh? I know I’m like a broken record, man, it’s local. Drought is local. It’s created by weather systems that are huge. They can span from Montana to Maine sometimes, but the impacts are local because they’re a manifestation of your weather, your water systems, your political systems, everything. So when reporters are thinking about drought, you can start up here and that’s a good place to start. Hey, we’re in a drought. But down here is where all of the really interesting tidbits come and a lot of the solutions come too.

[01:00:15]

KARL EISENHOWER: Dr. Perrone?

[01:00:18]

DEBRA PERRONE: It’s complex, and many of our decisions have trade offs. If it was easy, and we didn’t have trade offs, it’s very likely that we would probably have a solution. So when we’re in these situations where we have scarcity, it’s likely because there’s a number of trade offs that people have to make. It’s really important to understand what are those trade offs? What does the local science look like? What does the local social political system look like? That can help you start to understand what kind of trade offs people are making.

[01:00:52]

KARL EISENHOWER: Dr. Koebele?

[01:00:54]

ELIZABETH KOEBELE: I’ll just add that I think we need to think about drought as a long term change in our systems and not just a short term hazard that we need to address. So in the West, we’ve been doing this for a long time in other places in the East we are just starting to deal with drought, but we know that in a lot of systems, this isn’t something that’s going to go away. So we need to really take a long term perspective when we think about adaptation and changing our systems. There are certain parts of it that might seem a bit more intuitive, like building a new reservoir or something like that, but there are also shifts in our socioeconomic systems and our value systems and things that have come up in these conversations that I think we need to consider because this hazard is not something that is going to go away in a lot of places.

[01:01:50]

KARL EISENHOWER: All right. Well, please join me in thanking our three experts today. I know I learned a lot. We hope to see you all at our next SciLine media briefing.