Giving Compass' Take:

• Katherine Long discusses the challenges that communities will have managing water in the unpredictable climate we are facing. 

• What plans and resources are already in place in your community to address flooding and drought? How can funders improve these preparations? 

• Read a toolkit for planning water security. 

Internationally, the World Resources Institute says 17 countries—home to one-quarter of the Earth’s population—are using their water resources too fast. Extreme water shortages have happened in Chennai, India and Cape Town, South Africa. Water is an inherently local issue, and the poorest communities are often the most vulnerable.

Even the U.S., which is not on the list of the World Resources Institute’s most-stressed countries, has places where water is being used faster than it can be replenished, the institute report says. California, Colorado, Nebraska, and Arizona are among those “high-stress” states: About 40 to 80 percent of available water is withdrawn every year to supply irrigated agriculture, municipalities and industries. The most-stressed state is New Mexico, where more than 80 percent of its available water supply is withdrawn annually.

And you can’t let the taps run dry. “Failure is not an option,” Kaatz said.

The future is especially unclear in Colorado. It’s far from the oceans and divided by topography—craggy alpine mountains in the west, high plains and desert plateaus in the east. Its historic weather patterns have been complex and highly variable.

The same could be said of its politics: blue in some areas, red in others. When the Denver utility created its climate adaptation program in 2008, it aimed to set aside politics and make one thing clear: That Colorado is warming, the natural system is changing, and that the region must prepare for a hotter world.

The Rocky Mountain snowpack is one ongoing sign of climate change. Denver relies on snowpack to fill its reservoirs. But during the spring, the snowpack doesn’t refreeze at night the way it used to, Kaatz said. That causes the snow to start melting sooner and over a longer time period. Some of the water is lost to plants, soil, and evaporation, and less river runoff  is left to fill the reservoirs.

Paradoxically, Colorado also has to plan for flash floods that could overwhelm its drainage systems. “What does it mean if we have more intense and frequent extreme precipitation events?” Kaatz asked. “What if our heat waves last two weeks, instead of 10 days? Our first step is to plan for multiple, diverse and flexible solutions, and the second is to plan for increasing extremes.”

Philadelphia’s Rockwell says there’s an ongoing need for “actionable science.” Here’s an example: Philadelphia knows it can expect more rainfall in the future, and the storms will be more extreme. Global climate models do a good job of reporting multiyear and seasonal averages, she said. But engineers need much higher-resolution data to help them figure out what a really intense, short rainfall event would do to the city’s drainage system.

That’s a problem faced by engineers around the country, and the alliance can’t solve that uncertainty. But it helps when they can talk to one another about how they’re solving the problems.

Just up the coast, New York City must deal with bigger storms as well as sea level rise. The city has been using climate resilience design guidelines for more than a decade now, said Alan Cohn, managing director for integrated water management for New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection.

Still, “as much as we’ve made leaps and bounds since 2004, in terms of more detailed climate projections, there’s still a lot of gaps and uncertainties,” he said.

Read the full article about managing water in an unpredictable climate by Katherine Long at YES! Magazine.