Something in the water

ASU efforts unite water experts, drive real-world solutions for water security

Securing a thriving water supply remains at the forefront of climate discussions, and Arizona State University has demonstrated its commitment to a sustainable water future for all. The Arizona Water Innovation Initiative and the newly launched Water Institute combine the skills, efforts and insights of ASU’s water experts to tackle one of the most complex challenges of our time. Several members of the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative and the director of the Water Institute participated in a roundtable discussion on their progress, the role of technology in solutionsmaking and the importance of collaboration.

Sarah Porter is the inaugural director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. She is also an attorney and has a broad understanding of both Arizona and regional water issues. She directed Audubon’s Western Rivers project, a multi-state initiative to raise awareness of the challenges to Colorado River sustainability, as well as protecting and restoring flows for critical habitats and communities. Porter is on the executive committee of the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative at ASU.

Upmanu Lall is a professor in the School of Complex Adaptive Systems within ASU’s College of Global Futures. Prior to joining ASU in January 2024, Lall was the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Engineering at Columbia University and served as director of the Columbia Water Center. Lall is the director of the Water Institute at ASU’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory.

Paul Westerhoff is a Regents Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at ASU and the Fulton Chair of Environmental Engineering. He was elected into the National Academy of Engineering in 2023. He is the deputy director of a National Science Foundation Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment and deputy director of the NSF STC for Science and Technologies for Phosphorus Sustainability. Westerhoff is on the executive committee of the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative.

Amber Wutich is an ASU President’s Professor, director of the Center for Global Health, and 2023 MacArthur Fellow. An expert on water insecurity, Wutich directs the Global Ethnohydrology Study, a cross-cultural study of water knowledge and management in more than 20 countries. Her two decades of community-based fieldwork explore how people respond, individually and collectively, to extremely water scarce conditions. Wutich is on the executive committee of the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative.

Susan Craig is a director in ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation. Previously, Craig worked for ASU’s Kyl Center for Water Policy at the Morrison Institute for Public Policy, driving projects on water resilience. One such project is the award-winning Arizona Water Blueprint, an interactive tool providing information to empower inclusive and informed decisionmaking. Before ASU, Craig worked for Arizona’s three primary state water agencies, where she led state water programs for 20 years. Craig is on the executive committee of the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative.

Jay Famiglietti is a Global Futures Professor in ASU’s School of Sustainability and the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment. He is professor emeritus from the University of Saskatchewan, where he was executive director of the Global Institute for Water Security, and where he held the Canada 150 Research Chair in Hydrology and Remote Sensing. Famiglietti is the director of science for the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative.

Editor’s note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

What is the driving purpose behind the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative?

Porter: Our southwestern region is at an inflection point with water. We see diminishing flows in the Colorado River. We have parts of the state that are reliant on groundwater, a nonredundant resource, and we’re seeing rapid or big increases in demand or depletion of groundwater resources. And yet, we still are importing a lot of new industries. Some of those new industries are high-water-use industries. Water managers are still trying to manage our water needs on a smaller supply, while enjoying our prosperity and quality of life. Water is one of the fundamental concerns for the state of Arizona.

We have people who never had access to clean, safe drinking water — and these are big populations. For example, the tribes in northeastern Arizona. We have only two flowing rivers left in the state. So we have environmental issues; we have social and equity issues. More people are paying attention to these issues.

Arizona State University is a leading institution for water research. The Arizona Water Innovation Initiative pulls together a deep well of transdisciplinary experts to find and implement solutions to these challenges.

How do these solutions expand to a national and international level with the Water Institute?

Lall: A lot of the issues Arizona is facing can be easily applied to national and international scales. Many of the solutions developed here at ASU easily transcend the Southwest’s bubble. But that certainly isn’t the case everywhere. The communities that rely on the Mississippi River, for example, have a vastly different set of concerns than the ones we have here in Arizona. We must be thoughtful — “prescribing” a solution in one place because it worked somewhere else is a losing strategy.

What we need to do is align policy, technology and financing so the overall design of our infrastructure systems allow us to be nimble to solve these problems anywhere. We talk about the need to update our infrastructure when it comes to energy, but water is no different. Water is stuck in the 20th century. Society has high aspirations for strong wastewater services, flood protection and stormwater control. The technology needs to catch up to those aspirations, and there is a lot of opportunity there.

How does technology play a role in taking advantage of this opportunity?

Westerhoff: We have a really interesting — and exciting — role in bringing together existing technology solutions and identifying what solutions need to exist but don’t yet. I think there has finally been a recognition that Arizona is an innovator in the water area. Previously, we’ve really focused on importing solutions from elsewhere and demonstrating them here. Things are shifting in Arizona. There are solutions from Arizona that we should start exporting to solve water problems. We are at a point where we are strong players. Arizona can and should help.

The other big recognition is that Arizona has a water problem, but it also has an evaporation problem. Evaporation is a really big challenge, and we need to innovate to control and reverse that evaporation. So in our Global Center for Water Technology, we’re funding about 25 different faculty teams looking at new technologies. We’re also addressing some of the state agencies’ priorities; How do we use technology — satellite imaging, artificial intelligence and more — to solve some of the problems that they don’t have the tools to solve?

Porter: I want to emphasize Paul’s point about importing versus exporting knowledge and technology. Arizona is, in many ways, a really good testbed for these water solutions. When these solutions are emerging and being tested, we have that opportunity, as Paul said, to export them. While we’re solving our own problems, we’re able to help others who are in a similar situation. That is huge, and that’s part of our calling as a research institution and university.

There is more to addressing the water problems in our world than technological development. How does humanity play into the equation?

Wutich: Here at ASU, our commitment to the human side of water solutions is unique. Human water needs are often overlooked, especially in the most water-insecure households or communities. That’s a problem around the world. In the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative’s Arizona Water for All program, we build social infrastructure to help Arizona’s most water-insecure households and communities achieve short and long term water security.

There are two innovations that we’ve been working hard on. The first is with ASU’s Global Center for Water Technology: We’re building social infrastructure around the Modular, Adaptive, Decentralized (MAD) engineered technologies to optimally advance household water security. Our other initiative is building a cross-state Arizona Water for All Network, based in ASU with nodes at Northern Arizona University and the University of Arizona, that coordinates community-based water research. This network is designed to serve the water needs of households and communities. We also have a third thrust, which is around measurement and monitoring to ensure our work has a positive impact on water security in the state of Arizona.

What’s especially exciting is that we’ve incorporated that human element across the board of the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative. I’ll point to Susan Craig, who is really doing extraordinarily important work in that space.

Craig: Thanks, Amber. Impact Water Arizona is all about community engagement and translation of data. We provide funding for faculty and staff to come up with creative ideas for community engagement and have funded 18 projects since the initiative kicked off in 2022. The other piece of what we’re doing right now is a strategic initiative to address protection of rural groundwater. That includes putting together rural groundwater resilience workshops.

I think what’s really crucial is that when you’re engaging with communities like we do, you have to activate change. Simply talking to people isn’t enough; you have to hear their experiences, learn from their perspectives and do something about it. We want to make sure that there’s a real purpose to the work we do. If we are producing a product, it needs to be thoughtful. It needs to be useful.

What has the response been to your efforts so far? What does the future of the initiative look like?

Craig: I’ll give a recent example of the response, because it’s fresh in my mind. We just held a film screening in Willcox, Arizona, of a film we produced based on an agriculture exploratory scenario planning workshop we held there. The theater we held this event in was pretty small — around 60 people — but the theater was full and the energy was through the roof. We held a panel afterwards and the audience was just so engaged.

Through this workshop we held and then again through the film screening, the community just came together. The people understood that there needs to be some guardrail around protecting groundwater. And we just recently heard that one of the largest water users in the Willcox Basin has reduced their water use by 14%. That’s a realized, tangible result of some of the work that we’ve been doing. To see people starting to get on the same page and aligned in action, I think it’s huge.

Westerhoff: A kind of unexpected response we got is surprise. The state put a lot of faith in us to lead this project, and we’ve come forward with ideas that I don’t think they expected. We’ve really challenged the perspectives of a lot of state entities on how strong a university can be and how we can help them. Our faculty and students have taken even the most mundane ideas and challenged them by bringing in a new kind of scientific twist — the intellectual curiosity, creativity and strength of our knowledge base has been on full display throughout this initiative. It’s opened all kinds of doors and really emphasized the value of a university in the solutions space.

Famiglietti: One thing I have found incredibly rewarding is how willing agencies are to work with us. My work in modeling and remote sensing allows for a very high resolution picture of our water balance across the state. Through these images, I can see what’s going to happen to rainfall, snow. Then we can see how that will impact groundwater recharge, groundwater supply, stream flow and our whole changing water supply.

Collaboration with agencies is absolutely essential to tackle these outcomes, and the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative came at a really good time. Something I’ll point out is that our resources and ability to really dive full-force into this work have grown through this initiative. We’ve been able to quickly build up capacity to really have a huge impact.

Coupling our strength in the solutions space and the willingness from other entities to work with us, the engagement opportunities are like none I’ve ever experienced before. I now have the support to really strengthen our modeling and forecasting and remote sensing tools — and the potential for these advancements to help guide policy and agency productivity is really, really high. I expect that collaboration to grow as the initiative continues.

On the topic of collaboration: How important is outreach to bring both the awareness to water challenges and solutions?

Famiglietti: I think talking about these things is critical. I just started teaching a class here at the School of Sustainability and as we were going around the room one of the first-year students said that the last thing we need is for more of our research to just sit in the refrigerator. And they’re right. Writing a paper isn’t enough.

We need that outreach from the community level to the highest level of government. As my student said in class, our work can’t live in the fridge. It needs to live with the people. We have to bring a lot of firepower to our outreach.

Westerhoff: Outreach is essential if we are going to see the kind of major evolution we need. We’ve built up this expertise in the solutions space here in Arizona, but we need to do the outreach to make that known so other people can take advantage of it. It’s very possible that future water experts who are looking for a robust industry to contribute to could find it here in Arizona.

Lall: To chime in on that theme of major evolution, Paul, I’ll say that the way that we talk about our work plays a huge role in how we accomplish that evolution. If we talk about the technology we currently have as the end all of progress, people will see it that way. If we effectively communicate the potential we have for growth, that will resonate.

I’ve worked on both a community level and with top leaders across the globe, and how you talk about your work matters. Outreach is key, but at the same time you need to be aware of what you’re putting out. I’ve had situations where I said something to a leading politician very conversationally, and then later learned that my kind of offhanded statement has made it into a speech of theirs. You have to make sure you’re being responsible with your words, especially when working with people who have that level of influence.

While that kind of collaboration and outreach has its own set of challenges, it is work that needs to be done. When I think about scaling water solutions to an international level, outreach and collaboration is necessary to expose us to a different set of problems than the ones we are used to.

When we hear about water, especially here in the Southwest, we often hear of “doomsday scenarios.” There are a lot of people out there who are feeling anxiety about their water futures. As the people leading regional and international water solutions at ASU, how do you feel?

Famiglietti: I think I definitely came into this space a pessimist. Working with my colleagues — especially here at ASU — has really helped me realize that we can do more than just kick the can down the road, so to speak. We can propose things that are going to help out the state for a long time.

Wutich: As an anthropologist, my expertise is in disasters and societal collapse. People ask me all the time how badly we’re doing, and there are a handful of things that societies have to do to get back on track when they are in danger. One thing that makes me so optimistic about Arizona is that we are doing all of the right things. The long-term planning and policymaking, the development of technologies that can help us use water more efficiently, and also building social infrastructure that helps societies become resilient and integrated. Those are really at the heart of any kind of disaster management. We’re doing those things, and that tells me that we’re still invested in working our way through water challenges.

Craig: I’ll offer that there is a mix of emotions. In one of the recent webinars we conducted, we did a word bubble for how the participants were feeling about their community and water situation. The main feeling people submitted — the biggest one — was “hopeful.” But the second one was “uncertain.” I think it says a lot that people felt both strongly, but ultimately “hopeful” took that No. 1 spot.

Westerhoff: We have a lot of work to do, and it’ll be a challenge. But it is a challenge that will undoubtedly come with so much innovation and advancement, simply because that is the nature of the challenge. That is what we need, so that’s what we will produce.

Porter: To those who are really struggling with that anxiety, I want to offer the context that Arizona has done well in its water management and is capable of solving big water challenges. Agencies and water managers haven’t been waiting for ASU to get involved to tackle these issues. They’ve been fighting this fight for a long time.

What’s wonderful is how people recognize that ASU can add value. ASU is nonpartisan and neutral and credible. We produce research and new technologies. And my sense is that we are welcomed into the bigger discussion. We’re in a place where we need everyone’s great ideas. We need everyone’s important research. We need to put all kinds of ideas on the table. ASU is a generator of research and ideas, and is also really good at testing research and ideas. I’ll just say it: We are not in a doomsday scenario.