Published In

Water

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-1-2015

Subjects

Water conservation, Urban ecology -- United States

Abstract

Largely because water resource planning in the U.S. has been separated from land-use planning, opportunities for explicitly linking planning policies to water availability remain unexamined. The pressing need for better coordination between land-use planning and water management is amplified by changes in the global climate, which will place even greater importance on managing water supplies and demands than in the past. By surveying land and water managers in two urbanizing regions of the western United States—Portland, Oregon and Phoenix Arizona—we assessed the extent to which their perspectives regarding municipal water resource management align or differ. We specifically focus on characterizing how they perceive water scarcity problems (i.e., stressors) and solutions (i.e., strategies). Overall, the results show a general agreement across both regions and professions that long-term drought, population growth, and outdoor water use are the most important stressors to urban water systems. The results of the survey indicated more agreement across cities than across professions with regard to effective strategies, reinforcing the idea that land-use planners and water managers remain divided in their conception of the solutions to urban water management. To conclude, we recommend potential pathways for coordinating the fields of land and water management for urban sustainability.

Rights

© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Description

This article belongs to the Special Issue Water Resource Variability and Climate Change

Locate the Document

https://doi.org/10.3390/w7126659

DOI

10.3390/w7126659

Persistent Identifier

http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/16469

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