Water
America 2050's water program focuses on adapting and expanding the water resource policies of the last thirty years to meet the more complex needs of a new century. Changing settlement patterns, aging infrastructure, climate change, the global markets for agricultural commodities and fierce competition for scarce water supplies are posing distinct new challenges.An increasingly complex set of water problems requires a policy framework that encourages innovation and efficiency, the utilization of natural systems, and creative uses of market tools. We must eliminate perverse incentives and subsidies, aggressively promote integrated management of water supply, wastewater and storm water systems, and link water resource management to land use decisions.
The EPA has conservatively projected a gap of $534 billion, or about $27 billion a year, to meet unmet clean water and drinking water capital needs, and operations and maintenance over the next 20 years. These costs are likely to escalate with climate change impacts. The national water policy choices that will be made over the next several years will determine whether America's water resource managers, in the face of growing challenges and complexity, can produce safe drinking water for over 300 million Americans, dispose of their sewage safely, provide industry and agriculture with the water it needs, and do all of this and much more in a way that is both environmentally sustainable and economically affordable.
Draft Recommendations:
- Eliminate the bias in federal funding and regulation toward centralized, engineered water systems. Provide compelling incentives through federal programs to encourage states and localities to utilize the most cost-effective and environmentally sound non-structural solutions for drinking water, sewage treatment, stormwater/flood management, and irrigation needs.
- Reform federal policies that provide perverse incentives for unsustainable water resource use and investments, such as subsidies of pollution-intensive agricultural practices, promotion of vulnerable development on flood plains and in coastal zones, Army Corps of Engineer projects that destroy or disrupt natural hydrological systems, and suburban sprawl dependent on unsustainable use of groundwater resources.
- Develop and implement the means of pricing ecosystem services so that the value of forested watersheds and wetlands and other green infrastructure can be accounted for and managed appropriately. Require full accounting of ecosystem service costs/benefits as well as full life-cycle planning for any infrastructure - grey or green - funded with federal dollars.
- Integrate and coordinate the missions and programs of federal agencies such as Bureau of Reclamation, EPA, FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers, USDA's Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service, and others to ensure that they are equally supporting sustainable water system approaches. (And do the same within agencies like EPA, which has siloed drinking water, stormwater, and wastewater programs.)
- Substantially increase R&D funding in non-structural and decentralized technologies to ensure that the U.S. can compete with other nations who are far ahead of us in developing and utilizing integrated water technologies.
- Provide tax credits and other incentives to stimulate private sector investment and development of new green infrastructure technologies, improve economies of scale, and boost wide-scale implementation.
- Promote new models of watershed management at the regional and megaregion scale that link water resource management to land use decisions. Condition federal and state funds on this linkage, and provide other "carrots and sticks," to give integrated planning real impact.
Betsey Otto: botto@americanrivers.org
or
Rob Pirani: rob@rpa.org
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