Sponsor
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NOAA Award No. NA09OAR4310140. Additional financial support was provided by the Institute for Sustainable Solution at Portland State University (James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation sustainability grant).
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.
Locate the Document
DOI
10.3390/w7126659
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/16469
Citation Details
Shandas, V., Lehman, R., Larson, K., Bunn, J., & Chang, H. (2015). Stressors and Strategies for Managing Urban Water Scarcity: Perspectives from the Field. Water, 7(12), 6775–6787.
Description
This article belongs to the Special Issue Water Resource Variability and Climate Change