Previous chapters have presented two stark realities that together pose one of the central dilemmas of modern water management:
- Increased demand for water, combined with more frequent droughts driven by global change, is driving water scarcity in many regions.
- The standard hard-path approach for dealing with scarcity—building dams and aqueducts to modify the spatio-temporal availability of water—results in often-unacceptable social and environmental impacts.
The solutions to scarcity include both increases in supply and decreases in demand. Ways to decrease demand in each water-using sector will be discussed in upcoming chapters, while this chapter focuses on innovative and traditional non-dam alternatives for creating resilient water supplies. We address questions such as these:
Are there alternatives to dams and aqueducts for water supply?
Will desalination solve all our water problems?
Can we safely reuse our wastewater to get more mileage out of a limited supply?
Can we “harvest” water in sustainable ways using traditional and modern technologies?
Below you can download resources from the book and access new resources relevant to this chapter.