Kent Portney's "Our Green Cities" Blog

Tufts' 2012 Water Conference

The "Water Systems, Science, and Society" symposium is scheduled for April 27th in Medford, MA.  This year's conference is especially impressive because it will be co-sponsored by the Water Resources Research Center at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.  This is part of Tufts University's commitment to water-related education and research.  Check this year's conference program.

NRDC Report examines water quality and pollution in cities

Analysis reported by the Environmental Working Group entitled "Over 300 Pollutants in US Tap Water," assessed the quality of drinking water in 100 U.S. cities.  They tested for many different types of pollutants, far more than is required under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.  What they found was that some cities have pretty decent drinking water, including the three best -- Fort Worth, TX, Providence, RI, and Arlington, TX, while other cities have very serious problems.  They found that Las Vegas was the 98th worst, Riverside, CA was the 99th, and Penscacola, FL was the worst.

Wall Street Journal Article examines water shortage issues

An article in the Wall Street Journal online takes a look at two studies of city water shortages.  This article, entitled "The Ten Biggest American Cities That Are Running Out of Water," discusses how and why major cities are facing serious water problems.  Based on analysis by CERES and by the NRDC, the articles suggests that the ten cities with the biggest problems, from the tenth worst to the worst, are (10) Orlando, FL; (9) Atlanta; (8) Tucson; (7) Las Vegas; (6) Fort Worth; (5) San Francisco; (4) Phoenix; (3) Houston; and (1) Los Angeles.  One thing that pops out from the analysis is the obvious conclusion that it's probably not a good idea to build a big city in a desert. 

CERES Report on Water Shortages in Large U.S. Cities

CERES has issued a 2010 report that examines serious challenges with municipal water supplies. This report, The Ripple Effect: Water Risk in the Municipal Bond Market, suggests that when municipal utilities take on bonded debt, investors might not have a full range of knowledge about the risks they incur as a result of serious water shortages. Presumably, the goal of this analysis is to get municipalities to take issues of water quality and quantity seriously lest they face increasingly high interest rates on the bonds they issue. 

Interdisciplinary Doctoral program on Water and Diplomacy

I'm happy to report that Tufts University recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation's IGERT program to support the creation of a new Ph.D. program in "Water and Diplomacy."  The idea behind this program is to train new graduate students on issues well beyond what they would get strictly within their own disciplines or departments.  The purpose of this is to promote the idea that addressing the world's water resource problems will require an understanding that far exceeds what engineers, natural scientists, economists, or other social scientists bring.  Starting next fall, the program will admit students who will study water challenges from this broad perspective.  I will post more information about this Ph.D. program in the next couple of weeks.

As you may know, the UN has issued its Millennium Development Goals project. Among the various targets in this initiative is to "Halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water."  If this is going to happen, a whole new generation of scholars and researchers will have to be involved in finding ways of dealing with the scientific, engineering, and international and diplomatic challenges this will entail. That is what this program is designed to try to address.

Recent book on local water policies and sustainability

Issues of potable water increasingly present major challenges to cities all around the country and the world.  A recent book, entitled Governing the Tap, by Megan Mullin, a political scientist at Temple University, is worth looking at. Directly comparing specific conservation, land use, and contracting policies enacted by different forms of local government, Mullin investigates the capacity of special districts to engage in responsive and collaborative decision making that promotes sustainable use of water resources. She concludes that the effect of specialization is conditional on the structure of institutions and the severity of the policy problem, with specialization offering the most benefit on policy problems that are least severe.  Taking a closer and more critical look at local, especially city, water policies is long overdue.  Hopefully, this book will usher in a period where we stop taking water policies for granted, and re-examine the use of special water districts to see how effectively they contribute to the overall sustainability of our cities and metropolitan areas.  I'm not making any judgments about this issue, but Mullin's book certainly raises a lot of important questions.  Since I expect that water issues will become the next wave of serious environmental problems to be confronted world-wide, such analysis is badly needed.