By Grady McCallie
For those of us living in communities with water restrictions, the current drought is a wakeup call. As with all droughts, there’s no telling for certain when it will end. But even after rains and full reservoirs return, a central lesson should stay with us: Rapid growth in total demand for water has brought us to the point that, in a dry year, there’s not enough water to go around. If total demand continues to increase, as it has for years, we will reach a time when water is scarce in a normal or even wet year.
There are two basic responses to the drought: Try to increase water supply or manage demand by using existing resources more efficiently. The problem with working to increase supply is that most of the options — Âbuilding new reservoirs, pipelines and wells — are cumbersome and expensive. In communities most affected by the current drought, we’ve tapped the easily available surface waters. Going further afield to capture new supplies will be expensive, environmentally destructive and will steal future economic development away from communities around the new water sources. (Another response — interconnecting water systems — provides flexibility for moving water around but doesn’t address the underlying question of total supply and demand).
So as a state, we need to focus on using existing resources better, through such measures as rainwater capture, water-efficiency standards for new construction and water reuse or reclamation. We also need more systematic policies that link land-use decisions to consideration of the available water supply and rate structures that promote wise water use.
Here’s where recent discussion of water policies in North Carolina has shut down. We need to go one step further. There are a couple of different ways to think about managing demand, and the path we take will make all the difference to North Carolina’s quality of life and economic future.
The first path is to adopt an assortment of public policies (including public education) to promote efficiency and conservation, and hope that the total benefits add up to enough to keep demand less than supply, and avoid disruptions to our lives and businesses. This approach amounts to focusing on current trends, trying to bend them bit by bit. If we conserve too little, we run out of water.
The second path is to calculate how much supply we really have available in each river basin, and — after we set aside what our aquifers and rivers need to continue functioning as healthy water sources — allocate water to different uses. Starting with the limit rather than the trend has several benefits.
One benefit is that, knowing what the limit is, we can ensure that conservation and reuse policies are strong enough to reach it, so our communities don’t adopt a lot of policies and then still run out of water. Second, as a resident I don’t want to suffer inconvenience — and some conservation measures are indeed inconvenient — for the water I save to be given away to a new subdivision down the road. Without attention to the overall limit, that’s what greater conservation means: My quality of life declines so that my water system can sell that water to someone else. When policy acknowledges the overall limit, the trade-offs are more explicit, and those of us who are being asked to conserve can insist that our sacrifices ensure a healthier future for us all, rather than simply feeding another crisis in a few months or years.
Traditionally, North Carolina’s elected leaders have shied away from discussing limits. Yet, pretending limits don’t exist — that new technology or investment or state policies will always find new water supplies or efficiencies to meet growing demand — defies reality, and undermines economic stability. As the current drought has shown, North Carolinians look to our local and state elected officials to ensure that we have a stable water supply. Calculating the limits of our water resources, and basing conservation and growth decisions on them, is the kind of leadership we’ve voted officials into office to show.
Grady McCallie is the policy director of the N.C. Conservation Network.