Written by: D. Buckley on November 16, 2010 @ 5:46 pm
My last post was on xeric gardening, and this will be an important footnote. I recently learned of two interesting reports that discuss future water availability or lack of it. The first study (July 2010) comes from the Natural Resources Defense Council; it’s titled “Climate Change, Water, and Risk: Current Water Demands Are Not Sustainable“. The report claims that certain states in the U.S. are at extreme risk for water depletion by the year 2050 and lists Texas as one of them. Projected climate change scenarios impact precipitation levels and growing population increase water withdrawals to paint a dire picture.
The second report is a joint effort between Ceres and Water Asset Management (October 2010) and is titled “The Ripple Effect: Water Risk in the Municipal Bond Market“. It questions the ability of some of the nation’s utilities to meet the water demands of their citizens through the next 50 years. This study also applied a range of climate scenarios into the water risk computation. Officials from the Tarrant Regional Water District denied the accuracy of the second report which lists Tarrant County (Fort Worth) among its 6 study cases of water utilities in the U.S.; Dallas is the other Texas county in the study. You can read a news article on their response in the Dallas Business Journal, October 28, 2010.
Catogories: Sustainable Design, Xeric Planting