Water Wars: Taking Water Conservation Action

It's time to discuss what communities can do to prevent future urban water crises. In Dry Run: Preventing the Next Urban Water Crisis, I profile seven large US metro areas that have made great strides to promote water conservation and improve water efficiency by successfully managing pricing, regulation, incentives and education.

By looking at places as diverse as Atlanta, San Antonio, Austin, Las Vegas, San Diego, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, we can build a “water toolkit” for addressing future shortages before they happen. Good public policy is a necessary adjunct to technological innovation and design ingenuity, in preventing future urban water crises. We can apply their “lessons learned” to prevent water crises from inflicting pain on our ecosystems, pocketbooks and collective psyche. Beyond these practical things, we need to develop a new sense of “water stewardship” that helps us to move away from the crises facing us as water shortages start to become more frequent, longer lasting and more severe.

Jerry Yudelson is principal of Yudelson Associates, a strategic green marketing and project consultancy. One of the original class of LEED Fellows, Jerry is the author of 12 books in the green building space. His next book, The World’s Greenest Buildings: Promise vs. Performance in Sustainable Design, is due out in the Winter of 2013 from Routledge Taylor & Francis (London).

image: Stefano Corso via Flickr cc (some rights reserved)