John Wells, a friend and charter member of the IWRM Intelligentsia got this from the Water Foundation website.
Summary
The Sustainable Water Management (SWM) Profile is an assessment
tool to advance longterm water supply resilience and water resource stewardship at a regional scale. The Water Foundation completed extensive research within and outside the water supply community while designing this evaluation framework. The tool focuses on management actions that water supply agencies can take internally, with agency partners, and across their regions to improve the sustainability of water supplies. The profile provides standards for assessing stressors that cause water supply vulnerability, and for evaluating the responses of water supply agencies to these vulnerabilities.
This article explains how the SWM Profile was designed by the Water Foundation to meet the needs of the water community and makes recommendations for improving the effectiveness of the profile and similar assessment tools.
As the challenges facing water supply managers grow, standards that track progress toward sustainability become more important. The Water Foundation provides this article to share the lessons learned from the SWM Profile, in hopes that it will contribute to the work of other professionals in the field of water supply management.
Here is the SWM Profile from the Foundation's site (I have added the graphics):
Sustainable water management means using water in a way that meets current, ecological, social, and economic needs without compromising the ability to meet those needs in the future. It requires water managers to look beyond jurisdictional boundaries and their immediate supply operations, managing water collaboratively while seeking resilient regional solutions that minimize risks.
In 2012, the Water Foundation and its partners, including The Bay Institute, Environmental Science Associates, and Sonoma Ecology Center set out to create a tool – called the Sustainable Water Management (SWM) Profile – that helps water agencies measure water stress conditions on the ground and assess their progress towards sustainable water management by evaluating their management responses to these conditions. The group focused on developing a tool that can aid public utilities, residential and business customers, land use planning agencies, financial analysts, and state and federal agencies. Each of these stakeholders plays an important role ensuring sound water management, and the SWM Profile seeks to incentivize these stakeholders to work together to sustainably manage the waters of a region.
To develop and test the SWM Profile, the group:
- convened a team of experts to develop the tool, supported by an advisory committee;
- launched a pilot project in 2014 with Sonoma County Water Agency to develop and test the first version of the tool;
- used lessons from the pilot to engage a wide variety of stakeholders, including representatives from water agencies, the business and financial sector, state and federal government, NGOs, and academia, to get feedback and make improvements and resulting in a second version of the tool; and
- with the revised tool, launched a second pilot project in 2016 with Inland Empire Utilities Agency.
The resulting tool examines the water supplies an agency directly or indirectly relies upon. Using simple metrics, the SWM Profile identifies the vulnerability of water systems to key stressors (also known as risks or threats) in the areas of environment, supply, demand, and finance.
Based on this analysis, the SWM Profile then evaluates management responses to these stressors by the water agency and the broader region. Utilizing an objective points-based system, the SWM Profile determines where an agency and its surrounding region currently stand on the path to sustainability. The water supply agency and its region are assigned one of five ratings based on points earned for management responses to stressors. Ratings include: not rated, bronze, silver, gold, and platinum.
SWM Profile Lessons and Next Steps
In December 2019, the Water Foundation and its partners released a paper summarizing the SWM Profile’s application through two pilot projects and lessons learned over the course of its development and testing.
These lessons are gathered to help inform the development of SWM Profile-informed efforts, as well as other types of assessment efforts by water agencies and managers. For example, the Pacific Institute is leading several efforts that key off the SWM Profile, including a guidebook for elected leaders of water agency boards and municipalities and a SWM-based tool for retail water supply agencies. Additionally, Environmental Science Associates and the Bay Institute worked with the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority’s One Water, One Watershed (OWOW) Plan to develop a SWM-informed assessment of implementation of this sustainability plan, funded by the California Department of Water Resources as part of the California Water Plan Update 2018.
Read the full paper: The Sustainable Water Management Profile: An Assessment Tool to Advance Water Supply Sustainability
Additional Information: 2016 Inland Empire Utilities Agency Pilot
In 2016, Inland Empire Utilities Agency worked with the Water Foundation to conduct a pilot assessment of its water stress vulnerabilities and management responses. The agency received a gold rating.
Read a summary of Inland Empire Utilities Agency pilot.
Read the Inland Empire Utilities Agency’s full SWM Profile report.
Enjoy!
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