 Hello everyone. As Chair of the Geographical Sciences Committee here at the National Academies, it's my pleasure to welcome you to this year's Gilbert White Lecture. My name is Pat McDowell. I'm Professor Emerita of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. Before I introduce today's speaker, I want to share a little bit about the Geographical Sciences Committee. We are a standing committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The National Academies are non-profit organizations with a dual mission to honor the nation's top scientists and to provide objective independent advice on science, technology, engineering, and medicine. Established at the direction of President Lincoln, the National Academies have been providing these services to the country for over 150 years. The Geographical Sciences Committee provides advice to society and to government at all levels using the methods of spatial analysis and representation. We address the geographical dimensions of human-environment interactions, spatial location and concentration, and place-based research and policy at all spatial scales. The committee also fosters international cooperation by serving as a liaison to other national geographical organizations, including as the official U.S. liaison to the International Geographical Union. The committee is supported by funding from the National Science Foundation. Here's the current membership of the Geographical Sciences Committee. And here are some of the geographical issues we've tackled in the last three years. Today's lecture series is named for and honors the memory of Gilbert White, a geographer, a leader in natural hazards research, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Gilbert White was a celebrated professor in the academic world and an influential leader in national and international efforts to improve the response of governments to hazardous natural events, especially those involving flooding. He's been called the father of floodplain management. He served in various capacities here in Washington for eight years in the Roosevelt administration, on the Mississippi Valley Commission, on the National Resources Commission, and for the Bureau of the Budget. In the last five years of his life, from 2001 to 2006, he served as a member of the FEMA steering committee for evaluation of the National Flood Program. Before I introduce today's speaker, I want to mention a few logistic items. Martin will speak for about 30 minutes, and then we'll have the remainder of the time for Q&A. You can submit your questions at any time in the Q&A box located at the bottom of your screen. Simply type your question in the box at any time and click send. The webinar is being recorded. Please understand that any questions you submit may be read aloud and included in our recording. A link to the recording, as well as a copy of the slides will be posted on our website. Now about today's talk on a water policy for the American people revisited. In 1950, Gilbert White led the President's Water Resources Policy Commission, identifying a set of groundwater challenges facing the nation. Over the intervening 70 years, the US has been transformed technically economically and socially, yet many of the visions White and the Commission, many of the visions of White and the Commission were prescient. Many recommendations were implemented, others ignored, and some only now being recognized and appreciated. As importantly, new water issues have emerged, which challenged communities, regions, and the nation. Today's lecture will revisit the context of the 1950 report, along with the trends and events of the intervening seven decades. We'll also look at the present reality of water in America and identify some of the water policy issues, most pressing for the coming decade. Finally, it will explore the need and potential for a new era of engaged science in formulating a new water policy for the American people. Martin Doyle is a professor at Duke University, who focuses on the science and policy of rivers and water in the US. His work ranges from fluid mechanics and sediment transport to infrastructure finance. In addition to his role as a professor, Doyle has served in both the Department of Interior and the US Army Corps of Engineers, where he worked to translate between science and policy of water management. Doyle has published many journal articles and law reviews, as well as two books, The Source from WW Norton in 2018, A History of America's Rivers, and Streams of Revenue with Rebecca Lave from MIT Press in 2021. A look at how environmental markets are changing how we restore ecosystems. Doyle has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an early career award from the National Science Foundation, and been recognized as a Covley Fellow from the National Academy of Sciences. We're very pleased to have you with us today, Martin, and now over to you. Pat, thanks so much for inviting me to do this, and I'm really, really honored to be in any way associated with Gilbert White. And I want to recognize the work of kind of a trio of us that have been chipping away at some of these questions myself, Warren Patterson and Erica Small, who are all three of us are here at Duke University. And like a lot of geographers and water policy types in America and worldwide, we sit in this shadow of Gilbert White, and he cast this very long shadow both intellectually as well as in policy circles. And the picture that we usually have of him is something like this towards the end of his career, usually sitting in front of a beautiful babbling brook in Colorado somewhere. And I think that the, the effect that he had was both as this intellectual giant in terms of his scholarship. But along with that, that he maintained this role of science in the service of society that position the geographical sciences and environmental sciences, very prominently in how and translating how their work could actually affect society and policy specifically. And certainly the past two Gilbert White scholars are casting equally broad and important shadows. Don Wright, the chief scientist at Esri from two years ago and last year. Butta Baduri who leads the Geospatial Science and Human Security group at Oak Ridge National Lab who are continuing this tradition in the geographical sciences of profoundly important intellectual scholarship combined with science and the service of society. And it's this model that Gilbert White will graph Reds woman and other prominent geographers have really set up for our discipline that I hope I'm able to continue in some way. So this kind of congenial feature or picture of Gilbert White. I currently like to think of him as this picture on the right as I'm what I like to imagine as a surly academic, because his career was so prominent at such an early stage, just to give you a sense of what he was like at the time he was my age. He had finished a PhD and worked for the Roosevelt administration. He had been in World War two, helping as a pacifist resettled refugees which still got him captured and interned by the Germans. He had then come back to the United States and then the president of a university, then an endowed chair University of Chicago then gone on and started the natural hazard center at the University of Colorado, all the time he was my age. And I think in some ways that I need to get up earlier work later in order to work at the pace and scholarship that he did. But as importantly or more importantly he was part of this group. This, that was published January 1 of 1950 that Pat referred to of releasing this report the report on the president's water resources policy commission. And what this did was set a framework, a national vision or a national policy on what was going to be the role of the federal government, especially on managing water, developing water resources doing things with water over the coming decades. What they started to lay out was a set of recommendations but importantly at that point in time in 1950. They say very explicitly that the broad assumption on which this is based is that of an expanding economy. We have achieved an extent expect to achieve in the future of constantly rising standard of living for a growing population. And so if we look into the over the next coming decades. What we start to see is that water policy in the United States has evolved through different areas. I'm going to go through those areas very briefly and then really hunker down into our present era. But the era that will or that Gilbert white really pivoted and was part of this pivot into was from 1950 to 1980 and we can think of that as kind of the baby boomer generation of both our population as well as our infrastructure and our water development. The US population grew dramatically from 1950 to 1980 and the water serving infrastructure water resources development of this era grew dramatically as well. The number of dams almost tripled during this era the number of bridges went up steadily along with things like sewer pipe surface roads and even offshore oil and gas platforms. The point being that this was an era when we grew in the United States in terms of infrastructure and to put a mental image in your mind about what the 1950 to 19 era kind of sweet spot of Gilbert whites career was think of a big western dam. This was really. We built. We built a lot of stuff and we built a lot of dam specifically. Now, one of the other things that the president's commission said 1950 was that the rise of water resources policy to meet ever changing conditions provides one of the great examples of the effectiveness of a democratic society in meeting the widely varying needs of its people. And in this case they were talking about the geographically differing needs across this great continent. In a way, our varying needs are also changing through time. And so if the 1950s and 80s were prioritization on developing water resources. That started to change the 1970s and certain certainly into the 1980s. And so the 50s through 80s was an era of building the era from 1970 or so through 2010 we might consider this window of time of an era of conservation and restoration. A really simple metric of this and one that's close to my heart is the number of dams that have been removed over the past four decades has been rising as quickly as the number of dams were constructed during the big building era of the 1960s and 70s. And so the mental image that we might have for this era is the removal of big prominent dams on the Elba River in the Pacific Northwest. And this is we started to realize the environmental damage that was being done and we started to do things about that. So we have a changing set of priorities, we have a changing set of activities nationwide, and we start to adapt from that. And so, about a few years ago on the order of five to 10 years ago as I was kind of post tenure and starting to relax as it were. And I started to think about what is going to be the meat of my career and what we're going to be the big challenges in water resources policy and science. Over the next couple of decades that I really need to be focusing on the three priorities that I really laid out for myself were these were large scale restoration was one adaptation to climate change, being the second and third modernizing of water data so imagining kind of a Google look for water or a smart water grid. And I was like, this is what water science and scholarship and policy needs to be about. I was very bullish on these these three things. And then, then Flint happened. And it's not so much that Flint happened as much as what Flint, in the same way that building a Glenn Canyon dam or removing of the dams on the Elba River symbolize something. The Flint water crisis symbolize something bigger than just the crisis of Flint itself. And this really pivoted the way I certainly was thinking and it made me more aware of some of the growing problems and some of the growing issues that are present in the United States water system. And I started as I started to dig into this. One of the things that I realized was that our mental image of even building in America is actually somewhat flawed. We think about national water development and we think about all of these people hanging off of the edges of dams in the Tennessee Valley or in the Pacific Northwest or in the Western United States. When we build water resources we're building dams or maybe we're building big bloodies. But in fact, most of the construction throughout the 20th century was of the lowly lowly sewer treatment plants so wastewater treatment drinking water facilities sewer pipes. That's actually it when we have a mental image of what's getting built, it should actually be this local water infrastructure, the lowly water utility. That should be the mental image of the 20th century building era. So I want to unpack this a little bit. And if we just look at how we're spending money. So data from the Congressional Budget Office on the left of this graph is water resources so this is Dan's love these kind of big water storage types of infrastructure. So water utilities so drinking water, wastewater and sewage and increasingly storm water. And in terms of total public spending federal government state government local governments all rolled together, we're spending about three to four times as much on water utilities over the 20th century as we did on water resources. So, just in terms of what we're doing, we're spending more we're doing more on water utilities, and the rate of growth of public spending on water utilities has been astronomical compared to the rate of growth that we're doing on water resources. So, if we think about what we're doing we need to think about water utilities for water management. Now, along with that. One of the things that the Presidential Commission in 1950 also noted was the importance of separating out the different levels of government. So they say, how great a share of this investment in water resources development should be financed by the federal government and what should be the division of responsibility between the many agencies of federal state and local government, private groups and individuals are matters of proper concern to every citizen. In other words, who should be responsible for this type of building. Again, if we parse this data out a little bit more what we start to see is that most of the public spending is actually being done by actually by local governments and state governments. The orange line is spending by the federal government blue line here is by the state and local government and what we see is that the federal government has actually been stagnant for water resources and it's actually been declining since 1980 for for water utilities. So the Clean Water Act was passed in 1973 and that's the increase in spending for the local government for water utilities. And after the incoming Reagan administration in 1980 the amount of federal spending that's gone to water utilities has declined. So what's happened has been a surge in the demand for spending at the state and local level. This is really important and I'll get to it again in another couple minutes. But the amount of spending by state and federal governments on water utilities has increased by about a factor of four over the past two to three decades. And so, if we think about what should our policies be. Our budgets are effectively priorities and if we're looking for a water policy over the coming few decades, then any new national water policy needs to address local water infrastructure and local spending on water infrastructure and the challenges associated with those. So, I want to dig into that topic specifically for the next few minutes. The first thing that we need to realize is how the United States is changing compared to how it was in 1950 1950 the population, the United States was growing dramatically, but now the population is changing in different ways. So this is data from the US census that's put together by Lauren Patterson here at Duke, and a really simple way to think about population not just growth or shrinking but also in terms of its distribution is to look at. What was the maximum population for a particular place, so a blue dot here represents the year of maximum population was in recently basically in the 2010 to 2020 range. A red dot or a very dark red dot indicates that the year of maximum population was actually in the 1970s. So one of the things that you see is California, Oregon, Washington, Texas, some areas in Florida as well. The current day is the year of maximum population that is, we are bigger now in some of these places than we were in the 1970s. But one thing to notice is through the Great Plains to the Mississippi Delta and on up into the upper Midwest, there's a lot of red and orange dots, indicating that the population was larger in the 1970s than it was, then it is currently. And in fact, if we zoom in a little bit into that upper Midwest quadrant, one of the things that we start to see is a couple patterns, not surprisingly, city centers had a bigger population in 1970 than they do now, people have moved into the suburbs that's not too surprising. But one of the other surprising or potentially surprising things in this trend is notice throughout the rural regions of these states, how many orange and red dots there are. So the American population is actually moving out of the city centers into the suburbs, but they're also moving out of the rural communities and towards these cities as well so we're getting this very large spatial reorganization across communities in the United States. On top of that, we're also getting a change in the economics of these different areas so again census data but instead of just population also income data. I'm just going to focus on the top right the bottom left so on the top on the y axis we have medium and medium income on the x axis we have change in population density from 1980 until 2018. The blue dots indicate communities that are increasing in population and increasing in income. These are basically communities or cities that are getting bigger and they're getting richer. The red dots are communities that are getting smaller and having a smaller median income. So these are communities that are getting smaller, and they're actually getting poorer through time. So when we think about America now and projecting into the next few decades, we can't make the same projection that Gilbert whites group did in 1950. And is, we can't make this assumption that we have an expanding economy, and that we've achieved and expect to achieve in the future, a constantly rising standard of living for a growing population. In fact, what we have to face, the reality that we have to face in America is that we're getting these two Americas, we're getting a growing and enriching America and we're getting a shrinking and increasingly poor America as well. So these are actually geographically separating. So, what does this start to look like as we dig into water utilities. Okay, so let's think about a city that had its maximum population in the night in 1970, and it grew a lot of its infrastructure, especially its water in water utility infrastructure in the 1970s and 80s 20 to 30 years goes by and its infrastructure may not have been enhanced or improved upon. So it has aging infrastructure. One of the realities of aging infrastructure is it may not start it may not meet all of its intended purposes, as well as it did in the past and so we start to see things like safe drinking water act violations or clean water act violations basically sewer overflows. So if we look at a series of cities around the United States that has stagnant or declining population. One thing that we also start to see is that they have a large number of consent decrees. So these are basically lawsuits where the city has to put invest a certain amount of money into its infrastructure. So the top one there, the city of St. Louis, Missouri has a consent decree for $4.7 billion to update its water infrastructure. Its population in the city center over the past 40 years or 50 years has declined by 51%. The suburbs around it have increased by 11%. Now, this may seem like well population in the metropolitan region of St. Louis has been growing, but for comparison, the population in the United States over the same time period has in has increased by about 60%. So the metropolitan region of St. Louis is increasing, but it's doing so small, much more slowly than the United States, and its city center has actually lost about half of its population, and it has a $4.7 billion price tag on its water utility. So going down a little bit, if you look at Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, or Youngstown, Ohio, it's not just that they have an expensive infrastructure upgrade that they need, or just that their city center population has been decreasing. Also, the broader metropolitan region in these areas has also been decreasing. So there's a loss of population in an increasing price tag that goes along with that. So looking to a series of cities specifically, in this case some work by a PhD student, Erica Small, who looked at 25 specific cities in Pennsylvania that have stagnant or declining population. What she did that was very clever was dig into the actual municipal bond offers. So, a city is no longer getting much grant money from the federal government, as we saw a couple slides ago. So instead, what the city needs to do in order to build out its infrastructure or update its infrastructure is to borrow money on the municipal bond market. When they do that, they release these municipal bond documents. And Erica's dug into these documents and looked at the credit rating. So basically, how stable of an investment does Moody's or Standard & Poor's think these water utilities are to be able to repay this debt to build the water and sewer infrastructure. And what she's found is over the past 10 years, there's been a gradual decline in the rating of these city water utilities, which means that investors no longer have as much confidence in the ability of these cities to pay off their debt. What that does is increase the cost of capital. So a city has to borrow money to build on their infrastructure, but now that capital isn't as secure. And so the lenders of that money ask for higher interest rates on that, which again increases the costs on the city. So if we roll these things together, what we see is a broad trend for stagnant and declining cities is that the cost of services are increasing, aging infrastructure, there's increasing litigation, and there's increasing regulations from environmental regulators. Number two, there's decreasing ratings of debt, which means that there's increasing cost of infrastructure finance on these particular utilities. There's decreasing or even no support from the federal government for some of these cases. We'll talk about that in a little bit. And fourth, we have decreasing population and that's often tied also to the loss of industrial and commercial water users. And so the end result is that these cities with stagnant or declining populations have a residual customer base, which itself has to pay for all of these costs. And what that means is that a per resident cost of the water services are going up. That is, the water bills are going up because all of these costs are increasing and there's fewer and fewer residents to actually pay that local water bill. So again, Erica's, she's dug into these data. One of the things that she's found is that we're starting to see and we're seeing a fairly dramatic increase in the cost of water services, basically your water utility bill. So from the same 25 cities from 2000 to 2010, the rate of inflation was about 2.2%. The rate of increase annual rate of increase of water bill, the median annual increase was about 5.5%. So 5.5% increase per year in the water bill. From 2010 to 2020, annual rate of inflation was about 2%. The rate of increase in the water bill was almost 7%. So this is increasing the rate of water bill increase is increasing faster than almost anything in the economy, including tuition from private universities. So all of these costs are increasing on a fewer and fewer number of people that are sitting there. This is why if you're, if you are one of the nerds that actually reads the water literature reads the think tank reports, one of the topics that's really starting to gain an increasing amount of attention, attracting a lot of attention is the issue of water in the United States, whether it is a think tank report, a series of articles in the New York Times of the Guardian, and an increasing number of prominent journals starting to cover this topic as well and it's because a growing number of cities are really challenged with this topic. So, that's at the broad level I want to dig in just for a few minutes on what this actually starts to look like and this is some work that I've been doing with Lauren Patterson here at Duke University. And so what we wanted to do was look spatially and really dig into the details of what water affordability looks like. And so we've done is pull together a collection of data we have about five states that we're working on actively now. We've got Carolina and Pennsylvania largely done Texas in California are going right now and they're, we've got a big chunk of them done but the looting. We're moving at the pace of master students and so we're getting it done as fast as we can. And then we're just starting to work on Oregon as well. But what Lauren did was with all of these data is we're putting together a combined metric that was developed by the American Water Works Association will walk you through this metric briefly because it's very powerful once it's put together. On the we take a utility and we take the census data and the census data for all of the customers that are served by this water utility we look at the poverty prevalence in that shoe graphic area. So for on the x axis, each one of these dots is a single water utility in the state of North Carolina. And so for this particular one here we might have a poverty prevalence of around 50%. So 50% of the people in this utility live at or below 200% of the federal poverty limit. So this is poverty prevalence. On the y axis we have the household burden indicator. This one takes a little bit more explanation but we're going to take 100 people from the lowest income to the highest income to those 100 people we're going to grab the, the 20th person there so this is the 20th percentile of income we're going to call that person Bob. And so Bob makes is living at 20th. He's at the 20th percentile of the income. What the HBI is is how much of Bob's income is spent just on water bill just on his water bill. And so if Bob he's making 20th percent. Let's say that he spends 5% of his water of his of his monthly income just on the water bill, then that gives us a dot along the 5% line and if he lives in a community with 440% poverty prevalence, then he's in this big cluster of dots here. So we can take these two together and we can say on the far top right of this graph are communities that have high poverty prevalence that also have high water bills on low income residents. In the bottom left we have communities that have fairly low poverty prevalence but also have fairly low water bills for the for the low income. What notice that for some of these for some of these communities, there are communities here that have poverty prevalence upward 50 and greater percent. We're also this 20th percentile this person Bob who's living with a fairly low income or very low income is spending 1520 even 25% of his monthly income, just on his water bill to get by on that. So we're going to take these colors and then we're going to map these out throughout the state of North Carolina what we're able to do is start to look at the entire state and say where are the challenging communities where the communities that have a disproportionate number of people who are genuinely struggling with their water bills and so we can see a larger growing communities like Charlotte Raleigh and Wilmington, North Carolina, potentially because of their growth potentially because of other reasons. They have a low household burden and poverty prevalence. We start to see some of these brown communities in here as well. So my own community Hillsborough, North Carolina the finest town of America. What we start to see is that has both a combination of high poverty prevalence as well as a fairly high household burden indicator. But what we can also do is use the finer granularity of census data and actually dig into these individual communities and start to see how the spatial distribution of water affordability challenges starts to map out. So in this case Greensboro, North Carolina what we start to see using this finer granular data is that water affordability is not as big of a challenge in the Northwest quadrant of Greensboro as it is in the eastern quadrants of Greensboro. There's a group of students here at Duke that are starting to now start to dig into this data as well for things like racial data and other socioeconomic indicators to start to try to pull out some of the long term implications of issues of environmental justice to see how water affordability is mapping on to some of these other topics as well. Now, all of this has been assuming 4000 gallons per month, which is about what household of 2.5 people would use at 50 gallons per day and tweak that just a little bit. And we're going to use a simpler metric that may that may translate a little bit better. And he's kind of said, let's let's simplify the metric. And let's just say a household that is living on minimum wage, how many hours at minimum wage does it take to pay your water bill for a community. And so for all of the utilities in North Carolina that's all these dots this is a box and whisper diagram so I'm looking at the, at the median here. In the median utility in North Carolina, someone working at minimum wage would have to spend 11 hours at minimum wage to pay their water bill each month. So whether that's too much, not enough, whether it's about right that's a value judgment, but that's what it is. That's at 4000 gallons a month. If we start to pull that apart a little bit more one of the things that we start to see is that it really starts to raise some red flags. And then say instead of two and a half people living in a household at 50 gallons a month what if we just tweak that a bit to where we say there are six people living in a house and they're using 60 gallons a month maybe their water fixtures aren't quite as efficient. That household would use only order of 10 to 12,000 gallons a month. If we now take that 10 to 12,000 gallons a month and we start to look at how much that is within North Carolina, about 75% of the utilities in North Carolina so the bulk of them. The utilities that are using 10,000 gallons per month that are working at minimum wage would have to work on the order of 50 days per year. So in other words, four days per month to pay for basic water services. So, the value question or the policy question starts to become, is it reasonable to expect low income residents in a community to work four to five days per month, simply to pay for their water bill. Rolling this back a little bit. If we start to look at not just at the household but at this community and at the water utility. And we think about these water utilities that are in communities that have stagnant or declining population. What we realize is that they're, they're, they're in a tri limit, they're in an unfixable situation. So, they have three things that they have to do, but in reality they can only do two of them, given their financial limitations. So they can invest in modernizing their infrastructure and they can maintain affordability for the low income people in their community. What they can't do then is repay all of their debt they basically run into fiscal stability challenges. So, maybe the optimized fiscal stability and maintaining affordability but what that means is that they won't be able to update their infrastructure or ensure that it's operating effectively. Or the third case could be that they ensure their fiscal stability their debt structures. They invest in modern infrastructure or an updating their infrastructure and the sacrifice that they're making is affordability for the low income residents. One of that they're facing is this, this long term effect of this tri limit is we're looking at a series of communities around the United States that will be facing municipal bankruptcy, or we're looking at some that have declining quality of water services maybe unsafe drinking water or an increased number of sewer overflows, or we're looking at a rising number of communities that no longer provide water that's that's affordable for the poorest in their communities. The utilities themselves are unable to make a full trade off of this because they simply don't have the resources to do this. So, what we're facing is, as we look at this question from the Presidential Commission in 1950 where Gilbert White and others said well which level of government should actually be responsible for these different services. So this is now facing a new question where utilities serving stagnant or shrinking population regions are in an impossible situation, under which the current national water policy approach no longer works. They can't provide safe drinking water and sewer services, while paying for it themselves while providing water for low income residents they simply can't do it. So this raises the question of, what is the responsibility of state or federal governments in this situation. So, over the past few months we've been really wrestling with this question and so you can read all about it in a report that Lauren Patterson really drove the ship on that was published by Duke and by the Aspen Institute. It's available now in a small book and you can get one for every member of your family. But the three things that we've identified, if the federal government is going to start playing an active role around this question of water affordability in the same way that the, that the federal government played an active role in developing modern water infrastructure in the mid 20th century. So the levers that they have available to them now actually exist. If they want to provide subsidies to the water utilities themselves and they can do that through the state revolving fund, which is a policy program that exists right now in EPA. Alternatively, they alternatively we provide subsidies to household in the form of right now we do it for energy and for food for energy we provide a low income household energy affordability program that could also be made available or potentially adapted for water affordability. In addition, we also provide supplemental nutrition assistance program or food stamps of the staff program. It's unusual when I think about it as a water person, we provide subsidies for energy and we provide it for nutrition, but we don't provide subsidies for household water affordability and these are some questions that we need to start thinking about on whether or not we actually want the federal government to be stepping into this realm. Let's just step back and close things out. I want to revisit the main thing that Gilbert white is really recognized for and why he received, not just membership into the National Academy but also receive the highest honor that our nation gives the National Medal of Science in 2000. And when he received that it was predominantly for his work on hazards. As, as Pat pointed out earlier one of the quotes as dissertation which really has had this this legacy in the discipline of geography and hazards research is in the gendered language of the mid 20th century floods are acts of God but flood bosses are largely acts of man with the saying that these hazards these natural disasters are going to happen. And how society is affected by them are the result of decisions that society is making. So living in floodplains is one that he was the most vocal about and that floods are going to happen but the fact that we have communities living in flood prone areas. That's a decision by society that creates these hazardous conditions, potentially similarly living at the wild land interface interface where wildfires are prevalent. So in the intersection of decisions and natural hazards. He raised that, and he raised that that's a policy that's a set of policy decisions that we need to wrestle with. As we look into the coming decades, it may not be so much natural hazards that are causing these disasters or emergencies, we may start seeing a growing number of what we might call utility disasters and in fact these are growing and they're growing in communities as well as an economic impact. So, for instance, Flint is probably the most well known. This was a massive utility disaster. And it led to passage by passage by Congress of over $100 million is spending in Flint. It's not alone. We've also had led crises in multiple cities, harmful algal blooms that have shut down utilities from Florida to Oregon to Ohio, and an increasing number of utilities that are affected by forever chemicals or PFAS such as we've had with the Gen X crisis here in along the Cape Fear River in North Carolina. In the same way that natural disasters intersect with society to create these disasters under the Gilbert white mantra we're starting to see a growing number of these utility disasters, which are raising questions about whether or not the federal government or state governments should have a role or what what might that role look like. What we saw is that we're starting to see some emergencies being declared under the Stafford Act. And so this this fourth role of the federal government third role the federal government could actually be assisting local utilities during utility disasters. In 2016, or during the Obama administration was a series of declared emergencies, not the same as full on disasters under the Stafford Act but a series of emergencies where federal assistance was provided during a specific window of time for that. Before some pushback happens that this is the result of the Democratic administration. I should be clear that disasters and emergencies are something that most all political leaders look towards and in fact, following the fertilizer explosion in Texas. There was the request for an emergency declaration from FEMA during the Obama administration, Obama declined it. And he was lobbied very heavily by then Governor Rick Perry, Republican from Texas as well as the the senators from Texas as well, showing that there's a tendency for politicians and political leaders to request the federal government to step in under these types of emergencies. And I think we're likely to see that because if the past 50 to 70 years has seen anything it's seen arise in the willingness of federal government and especially presidential administrations to engage in these windows of time of emergencies and disasters. And as we have a growing number of shrinking communities, along with these utility related disasters. I think we're going to see an increasing engagement of the federal government through this disaster mechanism, stepping into these cases. So in closing, I just want to reflect again that if there was anything that the 1950s Commission saw. It was not just that the federal government would or should have a role. It was that there was some caution in that role, but also this recognition that in a dynamic society, like American society, the priorities or the needs of that society are going to change dramatically, whether geographically through space, or temporally through time, whether it's building dams, removing dams or responded to the responding to these emerging crises of local water utilities. So with that, I'm happy to finally stop and to turn the floor view and potentially start answering some questions. Thanks. Great. Thank you Martin for a really interesting talk that raised a lot of critical issues. We have a number of interesting questions coming in. With the first one. The first one is about the issue of combined storm and sanitary sewers the old technology that some communities are living with. Did you look at communities that are burdened with combined storm and sanitary sewers. Did you account separately for their costs, and whether that's a major source of the cost. You know, we haven't segregated that out so all of those are rolled together, except for the fact that on the one side that I had with a table that had the consent decrees. In many of those cases that the consent decrees are associated with CSO overflow so the combined sewers are one of the big costs on that so we are seeing very large costs associated with CSO is for sure. Great. Thank you. Here's another one. Could you comment on the availability and sustainability of water resources for increased demand on power generation, particularly nuclear power as it doesn't generate co2. Good question. I'm going to dodge as fast as I can but one of the things. I don't have a table in terms of the number of nuclear plants that we have power generation uses a pretty standard amount of percentage of our energy I don't have the numbers on the top of my head or the tip of my tongue. It has not been a growing demand for for water resources United States. And in fact one of the things that I've been curious about that I had always been hoping to learn, or the past couple months is how the defossilization or decarbonization of the grid. It's really affecting the demand for water as well. And as we move towards solar and wind, what are the water benefits of that conversion, but it still does rely. Nuclear power plays a significant role as does hydropower and Pacific Northwest as a base load source of energy. And so the continued provision of water for nuclear power is an important aspect of our national grid, primarily for this base load energy generation. Okay, thank you. Here's another one related to climate change. How should we plan ahead for the effects of climate change on water, spatio temporal availability. Will we need to consider retreating from areas of increasing drought, just as coastal areas may need to consider retreating from rising seas. I think that that's probably the multi trillion dollar question that the US is facing now. I think that the answer. We're certainly starting to see the realities, maybe not quite of migration away from coastal areas, but I think that we're seeing an increasing in the cost of coastal areas and of course as a municipal water person I think that the costs are going to be. The cost of municipal water infrastructure, getting water out of these lowland areas is going to cost more just simply for draining some of these areas in terms of moving away from arid or semi arid areas as climate change becomes real. I think it's going to have a similar effect. I think we're going to see the cost increase before we see people actually start moving. And so I think that the cost of living in places that are losing snowpack. When we start we are already seeing those costs starting to increase. But I think that those costs are going to be the precursor before we might start seeing migration. Look in the next year and certainly in the next 10 years, we're going to get a pretty significant test of this Lake Mead continues to decline. One of the primary buffers in the Western and the Southwestern water system. It's going to be a pretty significant drought year for the Colorado Basin. And so these conversations are going to become increasingly acute, I think over the next two to three years. But in terms of big migration. The costs are going to precede that. So I've dodged that question as well as I can pet. Okay, thank you. That's an interesting question more at the local level. Are there examples of cities that are effectively addressing the rising cost of water bills and accounting for socioeconomics and equity issues. So there's cities that are doing it right. And I suppose on a parallel note, we could also talk about state policies. Are there any innovative state policies that would be particularly effective. Yeah, this is a this is kind of the meat. So I want to be, I want to be clear. I find municipal utility directors to be some of the singular most innovative people I've ever worked with and ever known. They've been handed in some cases a near impossible task. And the cleverness and dedication with which they approach that task is just extraordinary to me. And so some of the things that we've seen Philadelphia water is a good example where they've developed a customer assistance program. Where they are very active in ensuring that low income residents are able to pay their water bill and they're just very, very assertive about that and trying to make sure that everyone is able to have water, which everyone should be able to have a water bill that's affordable. One of the other things that we're seeing is some utilities are being very innovative in how they do long term planning. So one of the great examples of this is Youngstown Ohio, which has had a chronically declining population. And one of the things that they've done has been very proactive in saying, you know what, we're not likely to have a growing population in the future. So our plans need to be for a smaller population. And if we plan around a smaller population, we can actually potentially decrease some of the costs that we actually have to bear. The other innovation that's happening is around the state revolving fund, which has always been. It's a subsidized loan program that EPA does for different states and there's a series of innovations that are happening about how to use the state revolving program for water affordability programs. There's a think tank in DC called the Environmental Policy Innovation Center they've been one of the main leaders in thinking of how to use the state revolving fund program, as well as alternative rate structures, and how to ensure that we have affordability. So I think to kind of embrace, I guess, America, the idea of America such as it is that states are the laboratories of democracy and I'd also say then that municipal governments are as well. And there are dozens hundreds even thousands of ongoing experiments, trying to figure out how to address this water affordability challenge. And we're kind of in the middle of it now. But we're seeing a lot of really interesting ideas floating around. Okay. That's great. One of our viewers mentions the California safe and affordable drinking water fund that was recently passed, which provides additional financial lift for struggling systems, and as whether you've seen other states heading in that direction. So so California is kind of the tip of the spear on this one. California is having to do some things a little bit differently because they have some, they have some some legislation about what they can and cannot do with their water bills. And so California has to do things through subsidies to the water utilities directly. Other states are going to have a little bit more potential flexibility in what they do. I think we're going to see states following a similar lead that might have that following up on what California has done. But again, they're trying one approach and I think it's a great approach that the water control board there is implementing right now. And I'm hopeful that that one is one that might cascade elsewhere. But I do think one of the other ongoing challenges that California has that other states have is over the past year we've had a moratoria on water shutoffs. And so one reality that we're going to be facing over the next six months is people have not some people have not been paying their water bills. Water utilities themselves have not been getting all of their revenue, but the water utility still has to pay off its debt. And so because of COVID, we've had these moratoria on shutoffs and so we're going to have this big financial crunch coming in the next three to six months. And so the programs like California I think are going to need to kind of have a two part aspect of them, one in addressing the COVID realities and one in addressing the systemic long term realities as well. Okay. So here's a really good question you focused on the role of federal versus state and local governments and water utility finance, but spent less time talking about the role of private sector investment. What do you see as the role, if any, of privatization of municipal water systems for addressing the trilemma. Great question. It's about 15% of people in the US get their water from a privately owned or investor owned utility. My guess is that that's going to increase investor, the problem. So the private sector is definitely an opportunity. The challenge is that my gut is that an investor and utility or private utility is not going to want to reduce a water utility that serves a declining population. I don't quite see where the profit return is for investors on that type of situation. So I think that there could be a great role for the private sector investor and utilities in water utilities in general, but I don't think that it is an answer to this question. And I'd be super curious to see if private water utilities have a response to that, but I don't see it on this one specifically. Great. Here's a question about different sectors bearing the costs. Do you have some idea of the variability of cost per volume for individuals compared to industrial users or agriculture. And what are the social implications to this and likelihoods for change. It varies on by state. And so in general, I'm going to set aside agricultural water users because they usually don't get their water directly from a community water system. But industrial and water and commercial water users usually play less on a per gallon basis than residential water users. So if you have reasons for that, and I can rationalize it and I can economically rationalize it if I had enough time with with a whiteboard and a spreadsheet to demonstrate it out. I don't think that it's a really big challenge, or I don't think that it's, it's not something that's going to solve this challenge. I will say one of the things that I've started to see is a growing number of industrial water users becoming increasingly innovative about using reusing reusing reusing reusing water. And so making it their goal to be as less water intensive as possible. That that certainly doesn't let all of them off the hook. I will say that one of the big challenges that we have here in North Carolina that certainly cascades to other geographic areas. A lot of the water utilities that we have in central care central North Carolina were built in order to enable water resources for the growing textile industry in the mid 20th century. As the textile industry has moved out of North Carolina that's left a lot of these cities with a water utility that's much bigger than what they actually need. So in some of these geographic areas, it's actually the loss of industrial customers. That's the big challenge, not the overuse or cheap water that's provided these industrial customers. Well, very good. Thank you for these rich answers, Martin. Just a question about something you mentioned in your slides early in your slides. You mentioned increased access to water related information, similar to a Google search for water data. And that's one of your priorities. How, how would the concept of an internet of water help improve water equity, what would that do for the equity situation. That is the grant. Yes. This is one that Lauren Patterson especially is working hopefully right now on as I speak but one of the ideas is that actually just visualizing as I did for in this case Greensboro or comparing different utilities. There's been a lot of talk about water equity and water affordability and there's a lot of lumped analysis at the county level at the state level. And what we think the increased data availability and this idea of an internet of water that we're trying to do can bring to it is to see what the problem actually looks like and to actually see the blocks the census blocks, where people are spending more than 15% of their income on water bills. And we think that that that granularity of awareness will increase the sensitivity to the problem and actually trigger some not just some policy responses, but some policy responses that are legitimate and specific to the communities that most need them. So that's that's that's our hope. Okay, great. You've you've really localized this problem for us very well. And we have a viewer that asked a question about the regional scale. Is there a role for regional water security strategies that could help address some of these problems. I think one of the ones that that the United States has too many water utilities we have too many community water systems the estimates are somewhere between 35,000 and 55,000 community water systems or water utilities. We need a fewer number which means we need to, we need to consolidate water utility functions in some ways and so a sharing of water provision between multiple communities is a way that we might start regionalizing some of that so combining cities, maybe one is growing one is shrinking but combining them into one water authority can start to to spread some of the burden as well as some of the benefits between that. I think one of the, one of the regional challenges then is that we don't just have in some areas of the United States, a single city shrinking we have entire geographic regions that are declining and it's not just the upper Midwest it's also in your neck of the woods the declining timber belt in some ways that the declining textile belt down in in North Carolina so when the entire region starts to decline. Then the challenge really does reach the state and federal level of do we want to subsidize and prop up entire regions is that a policy. Are we willing to have that as a policy of the United States to continue propping up some of these cities if not geographic regions, or are we willing to say that as a policy, we are willing to see some of these communities and regions. Decay. And that's, that is one of the most troubling aspects of this entire research agenda that I've run into that reality over the long term. Okay. We've had you on the hot seat for a while now. I'm going to finish up with two big picture questions. One is as follows, your excellent analysis suggests that this might be a good time for another presidential level report on the future of us water policy. What are the prospects for this kind of effort. There's always hope. So I actually, I'm more optimistic now than I have been for a weird reason. The Trump administration. There is no more presidential water commission as there was during Gilbert whites era. And so that was done away with 3040 years ago. But the Trump administration mobilized what's called the water sub cabinet and it's made up of the director of the office of water VPA. The assistant secretary for water and science of interior and a couple others like that. And I think that that level of cross agency coordination and awareness, maybe not coordination of action, but intellectual cross agency subsidization is a precursor to having a conversation similar to what Gilbert white triggered in 1950. And so that that was a necessary step that the Trump administration took. And then along with that the people that the Biden administration have put into those seats or will be putting in those, those seats are just keenly aware and super sensitive to this topic of water affordability and equity. And I think that the nation gives me hope that over the next four years, we can have a truly nationwide careful thoughtful deliberate conversation about what do we actually want out of our water systems in the United States. Great. So, one more. And it's probably not a short answer maybe it is. What's the single most important policy issue for the Biden administration to tackle in water in the coming year. This one, I, I, and it's not just because I'm working on it. I just think this question about what to do with water systems in in the stagnant or shrinking population areas is as much a question about our vision for American communities as it is about water. And I think that it just has to be, it has to be tackled at a very fundamental taproot kind of a level in order to even get start getting our arms around the size of the problem. Otherwise, we're otherwise flint that we, we are sitting on dozens if not hundreds of flints and Toledo's and Youngstown Ohio's. And unless we want to have crisis after crisis after crisis of our own making, while we're still having climate change related hurricanes and forest fires and the related. There's been crises to address that we need to get our arms around this particular problem, which is really about our vision for the future of these communities across America. Yeah. Great. Well, we're at our time. Martin, I want to thank you for a very stimulating and interesting talk. And thanks to our sponsors, the National Science Foundation, human environmental and geographical sciences program, then and the National Academy of Sciences, engineering and medicine. Thank you all for attending a recording of this talk will be available on the National Academy's geographical sciences committee web page in a few days. Thank you and so long.