Six Water Priorities for the Biden Administration
We must address our daunting equity issues for water & sanitation at home — and take advantage of the massive opportunities to create water abundance here and abroad.
The incoming Biden administration will be facing a plethora of challenges next January. But two challenges that cannot drop off its to-do list are 1) addressing equity issues for water and sanitation in the United States, which impact millions of people, and 2) cultivating some of the massive opportunities we have to create water abundance both here and abroad.
Below: My six priorities for the Biden administration in tackling the equity and abundance challenges.
Equity: Priorities
1) The Pandemic & Urban Water Access
What’s the problem?
Many cities face water equity gaps between their richest and poorest areas — gaps that are being exacerbated by the pandemic. With businesses closing and associated job losses, more and more people in 2021 will be getting their water shut off.
Solution?
Social infrastructure programs (building better revenue for utilities by building customer credit and bill paying) will be as important as physical infrastructure (patching old pipes). Keep the faucet on and build healthy bill-paying skills for the future.
Call-to-action for Biden administration
Fund programs that work on public debt consolidation/forgiveness — perhaps across multiple utilities — and capacity and credit-building programs as detailed by Melody Wright in last month’s Watershed.
2) Utilities in Rural Communities
What’s the problem?
Sanitation services and infrastructure are non-existent in many rural communities on reservations, along the U.S.-Mexico border and in the rural South — a problem largely unknown to bicoastal elites. Not so coincidentally, these regions are central to the #BLM movement as well as those who support the border wall. Delivering services in these regions that replicate approaches used for centralized urban conditions won’t work; the regions are too decentralized. But if we don’t solve the problem, more than 2 million Americans will continue living in squalor because of this issue, as my recent interview with MacArthur Grant winner Catherine Coleman Flowers highlighted.
Solutions?
The solutions won’t be one-size-fits-all — they’ll be as disparate as the regions themselves. Small-scale distributed technology, however, will be at the heart of all of them. We need federal funding to de-risk the market for these solutions and unlock innovation. We also need investments in social and physical infrastructure simultaneously and in parallel.
Calls-to-action for Biden administration
- Invest in R&D for decentralized technologies that are easy to use.
- Direct federal funding toward organizations that carry out community assistance programs focused on building out the local capacity and social infrastructure necessary to create standards and maintain the technology to deliver those standards.
3) Understanding Access in the Context of Migration
What’s the problem?
The colonias along the US-Mexico border will have their already sparse and stressed water and sanitation systems stressed beyond their capacity if the new administration relaxes border restrictions with Mexico.
Solution and call-to action for Biden administration
Provide transition assistance to these communities to help them scale their water services to serve larger and transient populations.
Abundance: Priorities
1) Keeping China’s Infrastructure Advances at Bay in Low-Income Countries
What’s the problem?
China’s reach and potential impact on natural resources is global — and its efforts apart from the Belt & Road initiatives often fly under the radar. One example: In Latin American countries such as Ecuador, governments are mortgaging their oil fields in the Amazon for ill-conceived clean energy projects such as hydropower. Similarly, Chinese companies are partially funding the hydrovias in the Amazon. The United States needs to recognize that China’s global infrastructure incursions challenge water sustainability, with potentially massive consequences for hundreds of millions.
Solution?
Science diplomacy and capacity building — we need to build local natural-resources management development capacity through tech transfer and training. We also need to help create multinational decision support platforms in order to put local governments back into the driver’s seat of their own natural resource management.
Calls-to-action for Biden administration
- As a first step, grant foreign assistance for multi-stakeholder platforms such as the Mekong River Commission (MRC) and International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) that do science-based transboundary water management.
- Next: Create an exchange program among transboundary bodies to exchange best practices. For instance, the MRC could be an invaluable resource for similar incipient transboundary river management organizations in places that are strategic for U.S. foreign policy including the Nile, the Amazon and elsewhere. U.S. Department of State programs like the Mekong-U.S. Partnership are fundamental diplomatic tools for achieving this goal.
2) Developing an Actionable U.S. Fire Management Plan
What’s the problem?
If the United States wants to shore up our existing water storage in existing infrastructure, we have to figure out how to manage forests better. We need to accept that forests will change over the next half-century — and we need to make that transition easy. It’s not giving up, but change is already in motion. We don’t want to add catastrophe to calamity. We need to protect what we can to prevent the catastrophe
Solutions?
Improve forest health through strategic thinning and other science-based interventions. We also need to think through which forests are salvageable and which aren’t and facilitate transitions for the ones that aren’t to new types of vegetation that are more fire-resistant.
Call-to-action for Biden administration
Institute and fund interagency cooperation so that, instead of paying for an expensive disaster during and after the wildfire, we pay beforehand for a less-costly strategic prevention of the disaster. For example, the Army Corps of Engineers manages the forest lands in all Department of Defense installations (bases) in the Colorado River Basin. Coordination of management of these lands with US Forest Service (USDA) and research funding to develop the strategy for co-manangement of forests for water resources is key.
3) Hurricanes and Capturing the Increasing Floodwaters to Come
What’s the problem?
2020 was another preview of the new hurricane normal for the U.S. Gulf and East Coasts. We should expect more storms and storms with bigger flood potential to be hitting our coasts in years to come — and we need to prepare for all that water.
Solutions?
We should be adapting storm-prone regions to increasing extremes. This requires shifting our focus from storage above to below ground, using empty aquifers as storage vessels, proactive about stockpiling water below ground for the droughts to come.
Call-to-action for Biden administration
Fund natural infrastructure investment through agencies such as the Army Corps and the Bureau, matched by state agency investments. Coordinate that natural infrastructure with built infrastructure. Create a paradigm to take advantage of climate-driven extremes rather than being victimized by them.
For more information about ASU Future H2O’s work and research on creating opportunities for global water abundance, visit our website and subscribe to our newsletter.
