Cynthia Campbell can walk four blocks north and be in the middle of a long water canal that carries Colorado River water to Phoenix. When she turns on her faucet, the water that comes out is almost exclusively from the river.

And as a long-time water expert, she can’t stop thinking about the possibility outlined in a new federal report that, someday, that water might not come.

“It’s a very real thing from my perspective,” said Campbell, director of policy innovation for the Arizona Water Innovation Institute at Arizona State University.

Thursday marks the kickoff of the third annual International Atmospheric Water Harvesting Summit, hosted at Arizona State University.

Atmospheric water harvesting is an intriguing new frontier in water science. The idea is relatively simple: in addition to harvesting from rivers and recycling groundwater, what if we could tap into the water reserves floating in the air around us?

"We are losing time. And time is very important in this conversation because probably the most critical or unsettling, dire aspect of all of what we're talking about is the one thing that no one can negotiate, and that's Mother Nature," said Cynthia Campbell, ASU director of water policy innovation.

Black Canyon Heritage Park (BCHP) is thrilled to announce the return of the ASU WaterSIMersive Exhibit, bringing virtual and mixed-reality experiences that explore Arizona’s water future. Hosted at Cañon Elementary School from Jan. 24–31 the exhibit’s finale coincides with BCHP’s popular WinterFest/BookFest.

“We haven’t really got much of a break hydrologically, but this is something that has been foreseeable for a very long time,” Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, told The Tribune.

The agreement was praised by Kathleen Ferris, an Arizona State University water researcher and a former Arizona Department of Water Resources director, as an important first step toward putting the brakes on chronic overpumping of the basin's aquifer. Overpumping has persisted since the 1950s and dried up more than 100 residential wells over the past decade or so.

Ferris said she hopes the agreement will spur future actions, particularly as Arizona's water agency prepares to impose longer-term conservation measures in the basin through its recently created Active Management Area there.

"We always think that the water issue is a local issue," lead author Fan Zhang, global lead for Water, Economy and Climate Change at the World Bank, told Live Science in a joint interview with co-author Jay Famiglietti, a satellite hydrologist and professor of sustainability at Arizona State University. "But what we show in the report is that ... local water problems could quickly ripple through national borders and become an international challenge."

“The hard thing right now is the great uncertainty,” said Sarah Porter, the ASU Kyl Center for Water Policy director.

With time running short, many worry that public participation in the EIS process – vital to informed decision-making – will be greatly reduced.

Still, as Rhett Larson of Arizona State University said on the first day of the conference, “Desert rivers bring people together.”

Away from the panel discussions, Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River District, a rural Colorado water district that mainly serves farmers, put it a little more bluntly still: “They say we have to engage in mandatory water cuts so that Arizona’s God-given right to growth can occur.

But Sarah Porter, director of Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy, said Mueller’s point was 10 years out of date. Since 2015, the Colorado River has no longer supported much of Arizona’s growth.