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Engineering a Long Term Water Management policy for Georgia
The current drought exemplifies the need for a new direction in engineering education.
By Alan Flurry
Extreme drought conditions being experienced
in the southeast and Georgia in particular have thrown a
complex problem into sharp relief. Once the state’s citizens find themselves in the midst of endless months without regular rainfall, doing anything to counteract the effects of an issue that cuts across political boundaries and economic systems unites disparate constituencies with a sense of helplessness.
The questions are many and patience grows short. Arriving at a short term solution is proving difficult enough; much more complex is the development of a sustainable solution which will mean grappling with highly technical issues, building consensus on acceptable standards across the state and effectively communicating the options to design a flexible plan.
At the University of Georgia, this sounds a lot like engineering. And to develop a sustainable state water policy, embracing a more expansive view of engineering as a crucial societal-wide activity is key to the long term strategy for providing water that supports growth in the state.
To understand the symbiosis or mutualism of the water issue with engineering, it is helpful to see how both are actually in a perpetual state of change based on the needs of society. Illustrating this makes the self-evident case for transcending traditional engineering education and reveals new paths toward water management policy.
Engineering can be described as the activity whereby society as a collective body of people alters its environment and reorganizes its natural resources for developing systems for three essential pursuits: obtaining food, securing energy and maintaining health. Thus, engineering is and always has been a natural extension of society’s need to provide for itself.
By the same measure that our model for educating engineers must, by definition, be outdated from fifty years ago, so to our strategies for maintaining a steady and dependable supply of water.
The present drought notwithstanding, Georgia has a serious water problem. The lack of rain over a ten to fifteen-month period has revealed a highly complex issue, one which punishes short-term thinking and makes for difficult choices in providing for the needs of its citizens. But the problem is also a reminder of the collective societal activity that is providing for our food, energy and health.
We have been growing beyond the means of the natural resources which support our economic development. How we reconcile these seemingly antagonistic constraints defines our society. This process is not one of discovery, as no secret tap will be found to replenish the state’s reservoirs. We must integrate solutions into the habits of our citizens and industries, as successful societies always have. Structural remedies will reflect a dynamic set of consensus-driven guidelines, a water philosophy based on quantity, quality and economics.
Other states have been through this crisis, and Georgia can learn from the steps others have taken on how to adapt our thinking towards the long term. Todd Rasmussen of UGA’s Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources and the Faculty of Engineering was completing his PhD in 1979-80 in Arizona when that state went through a similar drought. He saw first hand how a state must balance its priorities over a multi-objective issue that yields solutions through compromise. Now a water resources professor at UGA, Rasmussen suggests a progression of engaging the issue as the state moves beyond the crisis toward a long term management plan. The necessary steps underline the convergence of this issue with the greater arc of engineering as a societal activity.
One issue highlighted by the drought, according to Rasmussen, centers on the question, should water in the state of Georgia be bought and sold on the open market? Should it, in other words, be considered a severable property right? Water used by farmers today, does it belong to them, and should they be allowed to sell it to Atlanta at a cost of their choosing? Before this question is answered, however, the parameters which inform regulatory and management schemes must be clarified.
Another issue is the need to set some minimum performance standards. It is not practical to write one set of rules to apply to every industry and all municipalities, so working groups representing each would work together to establish just what can be achieved. The constraints on this activity – continued growth with finite resources – underlie the good faith that stakeholders would bring to these standards. The decision to balance these is the only underlying principle.
Then, according to Rasmussen, the need for some geographically-based organizational structure becomes evident, essentially for two reasons: to lay out the roles of locals versus the state, and to distinguish between the state’s regions. These regional water management districts would delineate watershed-based North Georgia from the groundwater-driven coast. The advantages of having the politics done on the local level would eliminate distant interference with the internal affairs of a coastal community. But accountability and oversight would be important constraints on designing management plans, which would then be evaluated at the state level. The most-effected groups would be involved in the most difficult decisions. Targets for water use by industry and municipality would be set with their input. As these targets are identified, marginal abatement cost analysis can show where to begin to build efficiency into the management policy. It is at this stage that the state can assess the goals of the policy and hence, how we might begin to answer the difficult questions.
“In Arizona, they came up with BADCATs – best available design currently available technology – so it’s a design and technology goal,” says Rasmussen. The cue at this juncture would be to enable the most up-to-date, currently available technology throughout the state as a staging goal preliminary to any management policy.
“What is an operating principle for complex problems? How do engineers fit into that?” asks UGA engineering professor David Gattie. “We have to be multi-lateral in our thinking so that engineering fundamentally synthesizes the disparate political, economic, technological and natural resource aspects of this complex water management issue.” Imparting these concepts to today’s engineering students is not simply a question of one course or lecture, but a four- or five-year experience breaking down assumptions about questions and answers in an intellectually rigorous and diverse learning environment. The interconnectedness of our decision making processes and their implications must be a product of more than mathematical or political calculations; while both are necessary, individually they are not sufficient for equitable, sustainable solutions. It is sufficiency through complex decision making that must be reflected in the education of engineers for the 21st century.
The close ties of money and water, despite the politics, makes it an economic issue practically above all others. Within this, any water policy must be equitable and efficient, though these two are very different metrics. Yet instead of having just what constitutes these standards come down from on high, stakeholders are brought into the conversation early, including the university. Extension agents already reach across the state and back and would be positioned to gain local trust and help it aid a unique management policy for Georgia. Once this trust exists and there is equal buy-in from residents, chambers of commerce, agriculture and industry, higher order concepts like water quality trading can be introduced. As society becomes more savvy about the collective activity of altering its environment and reorganizing natural resources toward satisfying basic needs, we will be better able to address complex questions. Is price a market opportunity to build efficiency into the water system? It takes many people to answer this question, not just engineers, not just politicians or business owners or farmers. But we can enable engineers to better play their role among these parties by realizing it as the larger, long term activity of society that it is. We can transcend our individual interests toward a common good, one we are already engineering.
In 1984, Rasmussen, still in Arizona, hosted a visitor from Cyprus, a water manager across the green line separating Greece from Turkey in the Mediterranean. His visitor reported that, even with myriad other troubles, water management passed back and forth effectively without running afoul of either entity for one reason they have come to understand and live with: Water is too important. “People in Arizona were proud of building up this trust and it had only been a few years,” Rasmussen recalls. “This Cypriot said they had been doing it since about 2800 BC, nearly 5,000 years they had been managing water. So when we think about whether we’re going to have something by next year, well, this is not a short term issue.”
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