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Research is essential in today’s connected world to meet societal needs, such as vaccines to fight the coronavirus, but the effectiveness of water resources research is still debated after more tha...

The highway construction industry constantly looks to increase productivity while public transportation agencies face challenges of shrinking budgets and staff numbers, even as the work continues to increase in size and demand. As a paradigm to maximize value and minimize waste with the resources available, Lean offers promise to enhance productivity, quality, and service. This study investigates the implementation of Lean by evaluating Lean conditions, practices, benefits, and challenges as expressed by U.S. and UK public transportation highway agencies as well as comparing the implementation of Lean between these agencies. Using a comprehensive literature review and formal interviews with six state departments of transportation along with Highways England from the UK, the findings show that Lean is intended to make process improvements to boost products and services to consumers. By creating a culture of continuous improvement, transportation agencies can improve their processes and increase their efficiencies and performance. Conversely, transportation agencies struggle to educate their employees and stakeholders in their understanding and practices of Lean, which causes confusion and ineffectiveness. Comparing the U.S. and UK transportation agencies, the approach to Lean implementation differs from a top-down approach for U.S. agencies to a bottom-up approach for Highways England. Furthermore, Highways England has an established tool for measuring Lean while development of quantifiable Lean measures is in its infancy in U.S. agencies. Overall, while the sample is limited, this exploratory study provides information for transportation agencies to use in consideration of implementing Lean.

Assessments of large-scale water resources projects in two regions of the United States provide lessons about long-term outcomes. In the humid East, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) serves mult...

President Joe Biden’s US$2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal in 2021 includes physical and social investments, but water systems would receive only about 5% of the total. Drinking water and wastew...

Although its investment needs lag the dominant transportation category, water infrastructure addresses human needs at a foundational level because it plays public health and economic roles. Much of it is old and not likely to be replaced soon, so federal policy must focus on intergovernmental leadership to sustain vital dams, urban water systems, and natural systems. Fixing the federal responsibility requires attention to intergovernmental relations and the conflicting goals of investment and regulation. Regulatory reform is ongoing, and normally not amenable to political initiatives. Federal water policies for both investment and regulatory controls seem to be on a flat trajectory, which is expected because they have evolved over decades. These can be summarized as: maintain federal dams and levees, invest in small grants and leveraging funds for state and local governments, address water justice issues, and operate essential programs like flood insurance. Public health and safety concerns will continue to dominate, more than in other infrastructure sectors. The future of water investments will be to hold the course with occasional shifts to respond to emergencies and new opportunities, such as greater private sector involvement.

By improving the operational capacity of utilities, smart water systems may enable utilities to improve access to water services and their affordability. Use of smart technologies is increasing in ...

Multiobjective water resources systems require long-term operational plans that consider vulnerability to failure under nonstationary conditions due to climate change. The paper presents a ...

In the United States, the national framework to address flood risk is the 50-year-old National Flood Insurance Program where the government bears the risk and private insurers handle customer policies. The program bundles insurance with flood mapping, floodplain management, and mitigation in the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Despite financial shortfalls and political controversy, evidence shows that public support is sufficient to continue and reform the program. Originally intended to transfer risk from taxpayers to insurance, the program recently required a taxpayer bailout after major hurricane-induced flood losses. Affordability of premiums is a major financial concern, even while premiums are forecast to rise. The flood mapping program is key to risk assessment, but it needs much improvement. The risk pool depends on compliance with floodplain resilience controls, which work better in riverine environments than in coastal zones. There is evidence of increased private sector interest in offering flood insurance. Politics raise questions about whether the needed reforms will succeed, but promising initiatives are to base premiums on risk, emphasize improvements in flood mapping, increase the involvement of private insurers in flood insurance, and increase responsibility of the state and local governments in flood risk resilience.

Drought is a complex natural hazard with its adverse multifaceted impacts cascading in every physical and human system. The vulnerability magnitude of various areas to drought mostly depends on their exposure to water deficiency, the existing water management policy framework and its implementation. The Standardized Drought Vulnerability Index (SDVI) is an integrated attempt towards characterizing drought vulnerability based on a comparative classification system, incorporating precipitation patterns, the supply and demand trends, and the socioeconomic background as the most crucial contributors to drought vulnerability. This work attempts to evolve the SDVI by presenting a more rigorous method of index parameters estimation and argues that the combination of in-situ and satellite data improve the index results in an effort to further minimize the paucity of drought related information. At the same time, it helps to surpass previous limitations in temporal and spatial propagation of the vulnerability concept. The new framework is applied in the South Platte Basin, within Colorado, on the 2012 summer drought (July-September). The proposed index modification may convey drought information in a more holistic manner to decision makers. SDVI could aid in advancing the understanding of each component contribution through in situ and remote sensing data integration and in avoiding existing practices of broken linkages and fragmentation of the reported impacts. Thus, it is believed that the SDVI could serve as an additional tool to guide decisions and target mitigation and adaptation actions, allowing for a more integrated management approach.

Water resources decision-making processes involving impacts of climate change require coherent climate datasets, which may exhibit high spatial and temporal variability. These datasets are ...

The legal concept of foreseeability is an important element of proof in flood loss litigation against the US Army Corps of Engineers. Although hydrologic forecasting and engineering uncerta...

To construct a valid model, hydrologists face challenges in determining sensitivity to the forcing data and uncertainty in model parameters. These require basin data and forcing data from d...

Climate change and land development are causing more flood damage in the United States, which leads to more litigation. This is a rising concern to USACE, which owns many dams, levees, and ...

Population growth, socioeonomic development, and climate change will add pressures on limited water resources, especially in the arid Arabian Peninsula countries, where overutilization of r...

Under pressure from climate change and other drivers, the risks of water-related infectious and chronic diseases seem poised to increase. Addressing these risks requires shared work in the fields of public health and water resources management. To help in risk assessment, the paper presents a comprehensive conceptual model of water-related health effects and the potential barriers that can be established by water management actions. The model does not indicate unique solution strategies because multiple water management factors cause multiple types of water-related diseases. It uses the water-health nexus to conceptualize the pathways to diseases and help clarify health-related responsibilities for water management and public health officials. Experiences of the U.S. are presented as an exemplar of the links between water management and disease incidence. However, parts of the water management system are not regulated effectively and many countries lack organized utilities and effective water governance.

The provision of a safe and sustainable drinking water supply is one of the hallmarks of a successful society. Treated drinking water entering distribution systems in virtually all U.S. public drinking water systems meets regulations and is microbiologically safe. However, the opportunity for microbial contamination from decades to century old water distribution systems is increasing with time. Thus, increased health risk to consumers should be a driving factor in accelerating reinvestment in America’s aging water distribution water systems.

While more than half of the people in the world have access to piped water on premises, no global assessment has been made of the availability, safety, reliability and affordability of service leve...

Water infrastructure is multifaceted and essential to achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Major categories include dams and hydropower, water supply and sanitation, and irrigation, wh...

Cities seeking to reform water management practices that degrade sustainability are challenged by limited resources, financial needs of legacy infrastructures, institutional barriers, and rigid regulatory environments. Stakeholders in urban water programs report that financial aspects of One Water top their list of concerns. As shown by local initiatives, integrated water management strategies based on the One Water concept can help to mitigate these problems and provide additional benefits and co-benefits. Experiences reported by cities identify practices that facilitate financial solutions to ongoing concerns. Drawing from three sets of One Water cases, 36 examples were shown to include significant financial innovation. Analysis of them pointed to strategies that involve organizational approaches, regional shared governance, partnerships, resource conservation, and corporate social responsibility. Financial innovation in each category requires further study to identify new opportunities and to validate feasibility, along with benefits and co-benefits.

Given the water-food-energy interconnections, integrated planning, policy and management using the nexus approach are required for the food production system. In this study the nexus and non-nexus approaches are compared to propose an optimal cropping patternthat considers water, energy and economic parameters. Linear optimization was applied to compare i) the nexus approach utilizing an objective function to maximize a water-food-energy nexus index and 2) the non-nexus approach utilizing three objective functions for water use, energy use, and agricultural net return. The study showed that the nexus approach is the best. Applying it through a water-food-energy nexus index provides a holistic method for identifying an optimal cropping pattern that reduces water and energy consumption and increases the agricultural net return.

This article illustrates a method for applying the water-food-energy nexus approach to propose an optimal cropping pattern. The proposed cropping pattern maximizes economic water and energy productivity and minimizes water and energy use. Through this method a water-food-energy nexus index is applied. A case study from Egypt is applied to illustrate the method.

Deficit irrigation, or the deliberate underirrigation of a crop, is a way to save farm water and allocate it to uses such as municipal, industrial, or agricultural expansion. Research on th...

Activists who oppose local government spending can defeat creative stormwater programs, often by using the slogan “rain tax” to convince the public that the financing plan is a tax increase...

Transfers of the right to use water can provide flexibility in regions where cities and farms compete for supplies. For example, the state of Colorado’s prior appropriation water law allows...