WaterWired

Paper: 'Diverse Paradigms of Residential Development Inform Water Use and Drought-related Conservation Behavior'

I just caught this recent (18 November 2020) open-access paper by Kimberly J. Quesnel, Saahil Agrawal and Newsha K Ajami: 'Diverse paradigms of residential development inform water use and drought-related conservation behavior', Environmental Research Letters 15(12) (2020) 124009.

Read the article online by clicking here. The links below may not take you to the reference but to the original Quesnel et al. paper.

Download Quesnel_2020_Environ._Res._Lett._15_124009

Download ERL_15_12_124009_suppdata

Abstract
Widespread urbanization has led to diverse patterns of residential development, which are linked to different resource consumption patterns, including water demand. Classifying neighborhoods based on urban form and sociodemographic features can provide an avenue for understanding community water use behaviors associated with housing alternatives and different residential populations. In this study, we leveraged built environment data from the online real estate aggregator Zillow to develop neighborhood typologies and community clusters via a sequence of unsupervised learning methods. Five distinct clusters, spatially segregated despite no geospatial inputs, were associated with unique single-family residential water use and conservation patterns and trends. The two highest-income clusters had divergent behavior, especially during and after a historic drought, thus unraveling conventional income–water use and income–water conservation relationships. These clustering results highlight evolving water use regimes as traditional patterns of development are replaced with compact, water-efficient urban form. Defining communities based on built environment and sociodemographic characteristics, instead of sociodemographic features alone, led to 3% to 30% improvements in cluster water use and conservation cohesion. These analyses demonstrate the importance of smart development across rapidly urbanizing areas in water-scarce regions across the globe.

Introduction
Today, 55% of the world's population lives in urban areas with the percentage expected to grow to 68% by 2050 (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division 2019). As residents move away from rural areas and into cities, suburbs, and towns, many different patterns of residential development and urban form are emerging, in turn affecting urban system sustainability (Jabareen 2006, Pandit et al 2017, Pickett and Zhou 2015). Variations in population density, housing structures, and neighborhood configurations are linked to different energy use patterns, transportation behaviors, and public health outcomes (Berrigan and Troiano 2002, Ewing and Rong 2008, Güneralp et al 2017, Stokes and Seto 2019). Housing features including urban versus suburban communities (Breyer and Chang 2014), infill development (Sanchez et al 2020), changing building and landscaping codes (Brelsford and Abbott 2017, Garcia and Islam 2019), and nontraditional housing arrangements (Barnett et al 2019) can also lead to heterogeneous residential water use behavior, which has direct implications for water resources management.

Simultaneously, sociodemographic characteristics like income and education levels often explain variations in residential water use (Schleich and Hillenbrand 2009, Shandas and Parandvash 2010, House-Peters and Chang 2011, Brelsford and Abbott 2017, Quesnel and Ajami 2017, Fan et al 2017). Together, built environment and social features provide the building blocks for defining neighborhoods and communities for urban water demand assessment and planning (Jackson-Smith et al 2016, Stoker et al 2019), which in turn dictate water supply and infrastructure investment decisions at city to neighborhood scales (House-Peters and Chang 2011, Stoker and Rothfeder 2014, Gurung et al 2016). These characteristics are also critical for understanding water conservation behavior during drought (Fielding et al 2012, Polebitski and Palmer 2013, Mini et al 2015), when strategic resource management is particularly critical.

Grouping residential customers for water resources planning and management requires linking bottom–up, household-level data about the built environment with top–down Census block-group or tract scale features. Built environment and social data can also be acquired through customer surveys (Randolph and Troy 2008, Harlan et al 2009, Willis et al 2013, Hannibal et al 2018), but these can be expensive, time-intensive, and limited in scope. Some researchers have successfully accessed assessor records on homes and parcels (for example: Chang et al 2017, Brelsford and Abbott 2017), but this data is generally challenging to obtain in bulk, digitized formats and must be acquired on a city-by-city or county-by-county basis. Around the US, a few agencies have moved to publicly available digital records like New York's Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output (PLUTO) database, which can be used for building-level water demand studies (Kontokosta and Jain 2015), although these are not yet common.

New websites like Zillow, Redfin, or Trulia that aggregate and digitize records from multiple sources, including public agencies, offer the possibility to overcome this historic obstacle, but these sources have yet to be leveraged as a tool for analyzing urban water use. Together with Census information, this housing data can be used as an alternative to traditional sources to develop a holistic depiction of communities within a city, a spatial-scale which provides the granularity of within-city information while being more practical than customer-level analyses. This research aims to demonstrate the value of combining data on single-family residential housing features and urban form from Zillow with Census data to identify residential community groupings. In turn, these classifications can help water resource decision-makers better understand their customers' water use behavior, design optimal conservation policies, and plan for future resources needs and allocation.

We performed our analysis within a single utility—exploring high-resolution data within a small area to gain insights into behavior not possible at more aggregated scales while discovering information that can be applied in a broader context. Our study area, the City of Redwood City (Redwood City) is situated on the San Francisco Bay peninsula in California and represents a microcosm of diversity—in 2017, block-group level median household income within the service area ranged from less than $40 000 (including several block-groups classified as Disadvantaged Communities) to over $220 000. The San Francisco Bay Area represents a region with varied and evolving water supply and demand regimes, making it a particularly valuable place to study urban water with lessons for other growing, semi-arid and arid regions across the Western U.S. and the world (Gonzales and Ajami 2017b). In our study, we focused specifically on single-family residential water use, which accounts for 65% of California's urban water use (California Department of Water Resources 2016) and about half of Redwood City's potable use (City of Redwood City 2015). Redwood City demand is seasonal, with higher use in the summer due to landscape irrigation.

Our research takes place over a 10-year period from 2008–2017 which included two     historic droughts and an economic recession. In particular, the 2012–2016 drought was one of the most severe in California's history (U.S. Geological Survey: California Water Science Center 2018). The drought was not only exceptional hydrologically, but also in terms of state and local political actions, public awareness, and news media coverage that led to high drought saliency and has been associated with high conservation rates (Quesnel and Ajami 2017, Gonzales and Ajami 2017a, Bolorinos et al 2020). This historic drought provides an important setting for examining not only the drivers of water conservation, but also rebound once mandatory restrictions were lifted and the drought was declared over (Gonzales and Ajami 2017a, Bolorinos et al 2020). Evaluating water conservation during the 2012–2016 drought, an extreme event more likely to occur in the future, provides an opportunity to evaluate changing residential water use behavior across customers under escalating climatic and policy regimes.

Cutting to the chase...

Discussion and conclusion
This research demonstrates the coupled role of urban form and sociodemographic characteristics in water use and drought-related conservation behavior. A crucial finding of this study is the importance of the built environment when classifying urban water customers and creating residential neighborhood typologies useful for water use and conservation analyses and developing demand management strategies. Traditionally, many researchers have stratified customers by income, finding that affluence is associated with high water use, high levels of drought-related conservation, and subsequently high conservation backslide post-drought. These water use characteristics are typically linked to more wealthy customers having bigger lots and therefore using more water outdoors. However, this study proves that income does not always correlate to high water use, and that affluent residents choosing to live in dense, new developments have very different water use patterns and water use behavior.

We bypassed previous data constraints faced by researchers, utilities, municipalities and other public agencies trying to better understand how built environment factors are linked to water use by utilizing data from an online real estate aggregator. By obtaining customer-level information from the Zillow ZTRAX database, this research for the first time demonstrates the possibility for this kind of platform to serve as a new tool for incorporating housing features into water use analyses. City and county assessors are legally required to fulfill public record requests and provide data in response to inquiries, but acquiring these individual datasets for comparative regional, state, or national assessments can be prohibitive. Thus, using aggregated data generated by Zillow and similar websites can provide a gateway for widespread analyses, for example opening the door for multi-city or even multi-state studies. These new websites offer a way to access built environment data uniformly in one place instead of filing separate records request for each service area of interest. While this research presents an alternative to traditional methods for obtaining information about the built environment, water use data remains sparse and challenging to acquire (Chini and Stillwell 2016, Josset et al 2019).

As this is the first research to use Zillow in water demand research, there are a host of avenues for future research. For example, our study was set within one utility, but the potential for Zillow truly lies in its ability to cross administrative borders. For example, where cross-city and multi-city comparisons in different counties previously required obtaining data from each individual jurisdiction, Zillow or other online aggregators store this data in one central location. Having one central database also provides the benefit of data consistency.

Additionally, here we focused primarily on neighborhood clustering to inform residential water use modeling at the monthly scale, but future studies could explore how emerging databases, online platforms, and data aggregators with high spatial and/or temporal resolution can be coupled with higher temporal resolution water use data from smart meters to better understand and predict water use and conservation. These insights could then be used to develop short-term and long-term demand management strategies. Another avenue for future research would be to investigate how different emerging urban form paradigms including infill development, peri-urban, and suburban designs shift both short- and long-term water use behavior. Land managers and water managers often do not coordinate or even talk to each other (Gober et al 2013), but with these new developments and unprecedented urbanization, there is increasing pressure for integrated planning and management.

This research lays the framework for future big data-driven urban water research and provides evidence for the implications evolving urban form on water use. Our results also point out future paths of more water-efficient urban development. Cities all over the world are expanding at rapid rates, and there are many different ways for them to develop. Here, we showed that dense housing patterns and new houses, regardless of the size, can result in lower water use than traditional sprawl. However, these low water use communities also have lower conservation rates and sometimes faster post-drought water demand rebound, and actions must be taken to account for this reduced water system flexibility. City planners and water managers must work together to develop cities of the future that house an increasingly large portion of the population and meet the wide-range of sustainability-oriented goals critical to addressing 21st century urban challenges.

Good stuff!

Enjoy!

"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker (quoted in @TheMVTimes via @TheWeek)

Paper: 'Avereting the Global Water Crisis - Three Considerations for a New Decade of Water Governance'

My friend and colleague Ross Hamilton (we are both on the Steering Committee of the Global Water Partnership) co-wrote this excellent
paper with Cora Kammeyer and Jason Morrison) and sent me a copy: Averting the Global Water Crisis: Three Considerations for a New Decade of Water Governance, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Volume 21, Fall 2020, pages 105 - 113. 

Download Averting the Global Water Crisis GJIA Nov-20

Here is the first section to whet your appetite:

Water is the most essential resource on the planet. Not only do we need it for basic survival, but our economies and natural ecosystems also rely on it. Governance structures for water management in many countries are weak and fragmented; institutional and administrative rules, practices, and processes are inadequate. The resultant challenges are of a nature and scale that truly constitute a global crisis.

Today, over two billion people live in regions where water demand outstrips supply, and it is anticipated that by 2050 there will be five billion people (half the global population) living in these "water-stressed" regions. Over 80 percent of the world's wastewater is returned to rivers and oceans untreated, polluting waterways and causing damage to ecosystems and human health and livelihoods. Overextraction and pollution of water have significantly affected the environment, with over 60 percent of ecosystem services being degraded or used unsustainably. In addition to the intrinsic value of nature, this degradation represents an annual loss of USD $3–5 trillion in natural capital. Lastly, while water has been internationally recognized as a human right, 2.1 billion people still lack access to safe drinking water, and 4.5 billion lack access to adequate sanitation services like clean, functional toilets.

Examples like the water contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan; record-breaking drought in California; the "Day Zero" crisis in Cape Town, South Africa; and the water crisis in Chennai, India, demonstrate that these severe water challenges are widespread and mounting. If the current evidence of crisis is not daunting enough, these challenges are only expected to be further exacerbated by climate change and the addition of one billion people to the global population by 2030, equating to an expected 40 percent increase in water demand.

The global water crisis is mainly a crisis of governance. Poor management and allocation of water resources by governments, communities, and water users leads to negative water outcomes like depletion and pollution. Past and current approaches to water governance have created many of the challenges we face. New approaches are needed to reverse negative trends and improve the ecological sustainability, human equity, and economic efficiency of water management. In this paper we discuss the background and recent developments of global water governance and put forth three key recommendations for reform in the coming decade, including improving groundwater governance, integrating water and climate governance, and establishing the appropriate role of the private sector in water governance.

Enjoy!

“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” – Ambrose Bierce

CRS Report: 'Wildfire Management Funding - FY2021 Appropriations'

Nice CRS InFocus two-pager (29 October 2020) by Katie Hoover: Wildfire Management Funding - FY2021 Appropriations'.

Download CRS_Report_Wildfire_Mgmt_FY2021_Appropriations_29Oct2020

Click on the graphics to enlarge them.

Introduction
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service (FS) and the Department of the Interior (DOI) are responsible for wildfire response and management across the federal lands within their respective jurisdictions. Both FS and DOI generally receive annual discretionary appropriations for wildfire management activities through the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies appropriations bills. Wildfire management funding for DOI is provided to the department-level Office of Wildland Fire.

Wildfire management appropriations fluctuate annually but began to increase in the late 1990s and rose markedly after FY2000 (see Figure 1). A significant portion of the annual fluctuations and overall increase in funding is related to fire suppression costs, which vary considerably and may be high even during years of relatively mild wildfire activity. For more information, see CRS Report R46583, Federal Wildfire Management: Ten-Year Funding Trends and Issues (FY2011-FY2020).

For FY2020, Congress appropriated a total of $6.105 billion in discretionary appropriations for wildfire purposes for FS and DOI (see Table 1). This amount included $3.848 billion in regular funding (P.L. 116-94); $7.0 million in emergency supplemental funding to address issues related to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic (P.L. 116-136); and $2.250 billion pursuant to the wildfire adjustment (P.L. 116-94), discussed below.

More material left. Happy reading!

Enjoy!

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

CRS Report: 'Federal Wildfire Management - Ten-Year Funding Trends and Issues (FY2011-FY2020)'

Katie Hoover wrote this very timely and important CRS report (28 October 2020): Federal Wildfire Management: Ten-Year Funding Trends and Issues (FY2011-FY2020). 

Download CRS_Report_Federal_Wildfire_Mgmt_28Oct2020

Click on the graphics to enlarge them.

Summary
Wildfire management is a series of coordinated activities to prepare for, resolve, and recover from wildfire events. The federal agencies responsible for wildfire management include the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service (FS) and the Department of the Interior (DOI). FS carries out wildfire response and management across the 193 million acres of national forests and national grasslands; DOI carries out these activities on more than 400 million acres of national parks, wildlife refuges and preserves, Indian reservations, and other public lands. The federal agencies also coordinate wildfire response activities with state and local governments as needed. 

Both FS and DOI generally receive annual discretionary appropriations for wildfire management activities through the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies appropriations bills. Wildfire management funding for DOI is provided to the Office of Wildland Fire (a department-level office). Both FS and DOI receive wildfire appropriations through similarly structured accounts, programs, and activities, though FS’s account structure changed several times between FY2011 and FY2020. The funding generally falls into four categories: suppression, preparedness, reduction of wildland fuel (e.g., biomass, vegetation), and other wildfire activities. Suppression is the work associated with wildfire response and includes postfire emergency stabilization measures. Preparedness comprises a range of tasks to ensure readiness for wildfire response, including workforce preparation, equipment and resource management, and wildfire outlook conditions forecasting. Fuel reduction is a wildfire prevention activity intended to mitigate the risk of catastrophic fires. Other wildfire activities include site rehabilitation, federal assistance programs, wildfire research, and facility maintenance, among others; the activities funded in this category varied between FS and DOI over the 10-year period. 

Total combined FS and DOI wildfire appropriations fluctuated annually but increased from FY2011 to FY2020. On average, combined wildfire appropriations were $4.48 billion annually in inflation-adjusted constant FY2020 dollars, and the appropriations nearly doubled over the 10-year period. The FY2020 wildfire appropriation was $6.11 billion, the highest appropriation to date. Over the time period, the majority of the funding went to FS. Funding for suppression was $2.20 billion combined annually on average from FY2011 to FY2020, in constant dollars, and the FY2020 appropriation for suppression was $3.65 billion combined. On average, the agencies combined received $1.52 billion annually for preparedness, $590.7 million annually for fuel reduction, and $174.1 million annually for other wildfire activities (in constant dollars) over the period in question.

The funding trends over the FY2011-FY2020 period are attributable primarily to fluctuations and increases in appropriations for suppression, which accounted for nearly half of the average annual wildfire appropriation. During this period, Congress provided suppression funding to FS and DOI through multiple accounts, including the agencies’ respective Wildland Fire Management (WFM) and Federal Land Assistance, Management, and Enhancement (FLAME) Act accounts. The FLAME accounts received funding from FY2010 through FY2018. In addition, Congress provided suppression funding pursuant to the wildfire adjustment (also known as the wildfire funding fix), a budgetary mechanism that allows for an upward adjustment of the discretionary spending limits to accommodate a specific amount of spending for wildfire suppression. This mechanism, which first became available in FY2020, is most easily thought of as providing funds that are exempt from discretionary spending limits.

In addition to regular discretionary appropriations, at times Congress provided FS and DOI with additional, or supplemental, wildfire funding for a fiscal year between FY2011 and FY2020. Congress typically provided this funding to replenish an agency’s suppression accounts or to repay funds transferred from other agency accounts to cover emergency suppression costs. Congress provided supplemental appropriations in 7 of the 10 years from FY2011 through FY2020. In some years, this funding was designated as emergency spending and, as such, essentially was exempt from discretionary spending limits under a separate adjustment; in other years, the funding was not designated as emergency spending. 

Debates on whether, where, and how to provide additional funding for wildfire management have persisted for decades. From FY2011 to FY2020, congressional interest focused on the adequacy of program funding and the extent to which increasing suppression costs have reduced the availability of funding for other wildfire programs (and other FS or DOI programs more generally). The wildfire adjustment was intended to alleviate some of these concerns, at least temporarily. Issues pertaining to preparedness funding involve the number and effectiveness of aircraft available for wildfire suppression and the adequacy of efforts to recruit and retain federal firefighters. Issues related to fuel reduction funding include the scope and scale of fuel reduction needs, prioritization of treatments to the highest-risk locations, and effectiveness of treatments. Other wildfire funding issues include how much funding to provide for wildfire research, assistance programs, and postfire restoration. 

Lots of information.

Enjoy!

“If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?” - T.S. Eliot

CRS Report: 'Management of the Colorado River - Water Allocations, Drought, and the Federal Role' Updated: 13 October 2020

I call Charles V. Stern and Pervaze A. Sheikh the 'Dynamic Duo'. They produce top-notch reports on water and natiral resources issues. Take this CRS report (13 October 2020) about my favorite river: 'Management of the Colorado River: Water Allocations, Drought, and the Federal Role'.

This is an excellent report and a great way to learn about the nation's 'hardest working river'.

Click on a graphic to enlarge it.

Download CRS_Report_CO_River_Drought_Fed_Role_13Oct2020

Management of the Colorado River: Water Allocation, Drought, and the Federal Role
The Colorado River Basin covers more than 246,000 square miles in seven U.S. states (Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California) and Mexico. Pursuant to federal law, the Bureau of Reclamation (part of the Department of the Interior) manages much of the basin’s water supplies. Colorado River water is used primarily for agricultural irrigation and municipal and industrial (M&I) uses, but it also is important for power production, fish and wildlife, and recreational uses.

The water apportioned to users on the Colorado River is widely acknowledged to be in excess of the river’s natural flows. Consumptive uses of Colorado River water typically exceed natural flows, causing an imbalance in the basin’s available supplies and demands. These trends are exacerbated by a drought in the basin dating to 2000, which has raised the prospect of water delivery curtailments and decreased hydropower production, among other things. In the future, observers expect that increasing demand for water supplies, coupled with the effects of climate change, will further strain the basin’s limited water supplies.

River Management
The Law of the River is the commonly used shorthand for the multiple laws, court decisions, and other documents governing Colorado River operations. The foundational document of the Law of the River is the Colorado River Compact of 1922. Pursuant to the compact, the basin states established a framework to apportion the water supplies between the Upper and Lower Basins of the Colorado River, with the dividing line between the two basins at Lee Ferry, AZ (near the Utah border). The Upper and Lower Basins each were allocated 7.5 million acre-feet (MAF) annually under the compact; an additional 1.5 MAF in annual flows was made available to Mexico under a 1944 treaty. Future agreements and court decisions addressed other issues (including intrastate allocations of flows), and subsequent federal legislation provided authority and funding for federal facilities that allowed users to develop their allocations. A 1963 Supreme Court ruling also confirmed that Congress designated the Secretary of the Interior as the water master for the Lower Basin, a role in which the federal government manages the delivery of all water below Hoover Dam.

Reclamation and basin stakeholders closely track the status of two large reservoirs—Lake Powell in the Upper Basin and Lake Mead in the Lower Basin—as an indicator of basin storage conditions. Under recent guidelines, dam releases from these facilities are tied to specific water storage levels. For Lake Mead, the first operational shortage tier (“Tier Zero”) under which Arizona’s and Nevada’s allocations are decreased by specified levels would be triggered if Lake Mead’s January 1 elevation were expected to fall between 1,075 feet and 1,090 feet above mean sea level. This operational tier is currently in effect, and this is expected to remain the case in the near future. As of August 2020, Reclamation projected a 49% chance, depending on the hydrology assumed, for additional curtailments (i.e., a Tier One or greater shortage) at Lake Mead by 2024.

Despite earlier efforts to alleviate future shortages, the basin’s hydrological outlook generally has worsened in recent years. After several years of negotiations, in 2019 Reclamation and the basin states transmitted to Congress plans to further alleviate stress on basin water supplies. Congress authorized these plans, known as the drought contingency plans (DCPs) for the Upper and Lower Basins, in April 2019 in the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan Authorization Act (P.L. 116-14). Among other things, the DCPs obligate Lower Basin states to additional water delivery cutbacks at specified storage levels (i.e., cutbacks beyond previous curtailment plans), commit Reclamation to additional water conservation efforts, and put in place plans to coordinate Upper Basin operations to protect Lake Powell storage levels and hydropower generation. Despite the success of DCP negotiations, many remain concerned about the basin’s long-term water supply outlook, including the potential for a compact call between the Lower Basin and Upper Basin that might lead to protracted legal issues. Future water shortages due to climate change, tribal water rights settlements, and state and local water supply development in the Upper Basin could exacerbate these tensions. A central question facing the basin’s decisionmakers is whether current “interim” guidelines will be renewed prior to their expiration in 2026, and what other changes might be made as a part of those agreements.

Congressional Role
Congress plays a multifaceted role in federal management of the Colorado River Basin. Congress funds and oversees management of basin facilities, including operations and programs to protect and restore endangered species. It has enacted and continues to consider Indian water rights settlements involving Colorado River waters and development of new water storage facilities in the basin. In addition, Congress has approved funding to mitigate water shortages and conserve basin water supplies and has enacted new authorities to combat drought and its effects on basin water users (i.e., the DCPs and other related efforts).

Enjoy!

"When shifting paradigms it is important to put in the clutch."- Unknown