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OTHER VOICES
Paths to 21st Century Water Management
By G. Tracy Mehan III
This review of three publications originally appeared in the January/February 2010 issue of The Environmental Forum, a policy journal published by the Environmental Law Institute. NEIWPCC sought and received permission to reprint it in IWR due to the importance of the article and of the writer. G. Tracy Mehan III was U.S. EPA’s assistant administrator for water from 2001 to 2003. Currently, he is a principal with The Cadmus Group, a Watertown, Mass.-based provider of research and analytical services.
One could be forgiven for imagining a contemporary revision of Shakespeare’s famous line “let’s kill all the lawyers,” and substituting in their place water and wastewater engineers.
Today, there is increasing concern for protecting aquatic ecosystems as well as human health and the economy, greater attention to nonstructural as well as structural solutions, more emphasis on demand-side as well as supply-side management techniques, and a growing sense that we are simply feeding the elephant in the room. That is, we have an expensive legacy infrastructure very much akin to the mainframes which were up-ended by the rise of personal computers.
These legacy systems are not adequately supported by municipal politicians who would rather have a root canal than raise water rates to a level necessary to maintain their utilities’ infrastructure for its entire life cycle, including replacement costs. By almost every measure available, the United States has the lowest water and wastewater rates of any developed nation. No wonder there is so much angst about an infrastructure investment “gap” in our water sector.
Of course, engineers are extremely important to the effective management of water systems. Even green solutions or low-impact development techniques that seek to emulate natural processes of retention, filtration, and evapotranspiration in urban settings demand careful design, siting, and scaling to be effective.
Yet, more and more landscape architects, biologists, foresters, and economists are having their say as traditional engineered approaches no longer meet our environmental, economic, and social needs. Indeed, the best and brightest of the engineering profession recognize the crucial role of an integrated, interdisciplinary approach that aims to protect the watershed as well as maintain hard infrastructure; adopts practices which mimic nature; engages in robust civic education to communicate the importance of full-value, full-cost, and conservation pricing; and begs, cajoles, and often compels customers to use water-efficient fixtures and drought-resistant plantings.
“Water management has typically been approached as an engineering problem, rather than an economic one,” say Robert N. Stavins, a Kennedy School environmental economics professor, and Sheila M. Olmstead of Yale and Resources for the Future.
In their white paper for the Massachusetts-based Pioneer Institute, Managing Water Demand: Price vs. Non-Price Conservation Programs (Pioneer Institute, 2007), they argue that water supply managers are “often reluctant to use price increases as water conservation tools, instead relying on non-price demand management techniques.” These would include actions such as requiring low-flow fixtures and restricting particular uses, which, while good things in and of themselves, are not as cost-effective as “using prices to manage water demand.”
Olmstead and Stavins review the literature on water pricing and the mysteries of price elasticity. Their conclusion? “On average, in the United States, a 10 percent increase in the marginal price of water can be expected to diminish demand in the urban residential sector by about 3 to 4 percent,” say the authors. “Price elasticity of residential water demand is similar to that of residential electricity and gasoline demand in the United States.”
Olmstead and Stavins highlight a key limitation of non-price approaches. Water savings are usually smaller than expected due to “behavioral responses”; i.e., customers taking longer showers with low-flow shower heads, flushing twice with low-flow toilets, or watering lawns longer under day-of-the-week or time-of-day restrictions. They cite a recent study of 12 American and Canadian cities which suggested that replacing two-dayper- week outdoor watering restrictions with drought pricing could achieve the same level of aggregate water savings, “along with welfare gains of approximately $81 per household per summer drought.” Low-income customers can be helped through rebate programs “inversely related to household income, or some other measure.”
The movement away from an exclusive reliance on supply-side solutions and toward demand-side management techniques, such as pricing, non-pricing or hybrid programs, is very desirable. However, Canadian proponents of the “water soft path,” or WSP, believe an even more radical approach is required, one that places ecosystem integrity at the heart of water management and governance.
David B. Brooks, Oliver M. Brandes and Stephen Gurman, editors of Making the Most of the Water We Have: The Soft Path Approach to Water Management (Earthscan, 2009), tip their hats to American thought leaders Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute and Peter H. Gleick of the Pacific Institute (and a contributor to this volume), both of whom inspired the WSP. They have assembled an interdisciplinary team to press their case that “the era of ‘endless’ fresh water is coming to an end” and “a 21st century approach to water management must move from a focus on large centralized reservoirs, higher capacity pumps, and longer pipelines toward an emphasis on decentralized, smaller-scale built infrastructure, alternative sources, such as rainwater collection, greater reliance on reuse and recycling, pricing and economic incentives, and highly improved efficiency in water use, as the starting point.”
Brooks et al. believe that cost-effective water savings of 20 to 40 percent are readily available, and several chapters explore a number of Canadian and other studies around the globe that they view as extremely promising.
The WSP is not simply a technocratic or valueneutral fix to a purely technical problem. A consistent theme in Making the Most of the Water We Have is that changing behavior or “social engineering” (an ominous phrase that actually appears in the text) requires a “value-laden” or “profoundly normative” political commitment to an ecosystem perspective over an anthropocentric view. In fact, “ecological sustainability is one of the WSP’s four controlling principles, along with treating water as a service, not just a commodity (a view typical of most theories of sustainability); matching the quality of water to the appropriate use (not everything we want to do requires potable water); and planning from the future back to the present, so-called ‘backcasting,’ an iterative process eschewing traditional planning which normally starts from the present and projects forward to the future.”
In a rousing, even controversial call to arms, the editors of this volume assert, explicitly, that “conventional cost-benefit analysis is not sufficient to ensure basic ecological resilience and eco-system health.” Rather, “environmental constraints are built in from the start to limit the amount of water withdrawn from natural sources and to establish conditions on the quality of water returned to nature.”
Ergo: “Major inter-basin transfers of water are not considered acceptable; they contradict the objective of living with the water you have. Similarly, if there are water resources that are valued for their beauty or for their cultural or religious significance, they must be placed off limits for development.”
Several chapters outline the vision, analytical method, and planning tools that could make WSP a reality. The various contributors do not want to banish engineers but integrate them into an interdisciplinary process which is more collaborative and views ecological, nonstructural and, yes, demand-side management concepts as paramount. A number of contributors are card-carrying engineers and proud of it.
Olmstead and Stavins would be pleased with the emphasis on metering and “realistic water pricing,” which these proponents of the WSP support wholeheartedly. Susan Holtz of the Canadian Institute of Environmental Law and Policy, and a contributor to Making the Most of the Water We Have, even has the spunk to utter the politically incorrect and selfevidently true statement that “the rhetoric of activist campaigns for water as a human right, and against privatizing water treatment, may encourage an attitude of entitlement toward water use and hostility to putting any price on it—making matters worse.”
Another indicator that traditional structural, engineered, and supply-side approaches to water and also wastewater management are making way for newer concepts is the recent report of the Aspen Institute’s Dialogue on Sustainable Water Infrastructure in the U.S., in which this reviewer was privileged to participate. Sustainable Water Systems: Step One—Redefining The Nation’s Infrastructure Challenge (The Aspen Institute, 2009) is very much concerned with discerning a “Sustainable Path” for the management of existing and future “hard” infrastructure, and setting out 3 principles, 10 recommendations, and 20 steps. Still, it advocates “that the traditional definition of water infrastructure must evolve to embrace a broader, more holistic definition of sustainable water infrastructure that includes both traditional man-made water and wastewater infrastructure and natural watershed systems.”
Besides tending to the concerns of physical structures, “a sustainable water infrastructure integrates these traditional components with the protection and restoration of natural ecosystems, conservation and efficiency, reuse and reclamation, and the active incorporation of new decentralized technologies, green infrastructure, and low-impact development to ensure the reliability and resilience of our water resources.”
The Aspen report argues for an inclusive definition of infrastructure that encompasses “rivers, lakes, streams, groundwater aquifers, floodplains, floodways, wetlands, and the watersheds that serve or are affected by water and wastewater systems.”
Instead of arguing over whether or not to kill the lawyers or engineers first, American water managers need to broaden the conversation and make sure all the relevant disciplines are at the table. Water is too precious. Infrastructure is too expensive. Life is too short.