The Arizona Water Innovation Initiative at ASU — aimed at providing immediate, actionable and evidence-based solutions to strengthen Arizona’s water security — has already seen great success in patenting technologies, empowering communities and better understanding our state’s water challenges. Additionally, the newly launched Water Institute draws from existing academic capacity across ASU, led by the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory to develop educational, research and communication projects that benefit communities across the world.

In September 2023, the consortium, the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy and the Arizona State University’s Water Innovation Initiative, brought about 40 people from the Willcox and Douglas basins for an intensive two-day workshop of "exploratory scenario planning," a tool that assumes many possible futures and that plans for uncertainty.

The United States has no plan for the disruptions that will befall our food systems as critical water supplies dwindle, causing the price of some foods to skyrocket and bringing us closer to the time when we may have to consider pipelines to replenish or replace depleted groundwater, writes Jay Famiglietti.

The three TSMC factories are projected to create 6,000 permanent jobs and anchor a new economic corridor in northern Phoenix, generating significant property and sales tax as well as rate revenue for utilities. Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, said the economic boost will make it easier for the city to develop the water purification plant, which she called “a major project that will enable the city to, in the end, have much more flexibility with respect to the Colorado River.”

Several researchers are investigating ways to reduce and recycle water in chip manufacturing. For example, Paul Westerhoff, a sustainable engineering professor at Arizona State University, works with research teams to show chip manufacturers how to purify wastewater from processing chips and use it to wash the next chip.

Dave White, the director of the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at ASU, said the White House council’s activities are very narrow. “It’s not legislation,” he said, explaining that PCAST is “intentionally getting a more complicated part of the [groundwater] story” that will better inform their final recommendations to the president.

Water is also a universal basic need. While most people don’t think about how water is delivered to the Phoenix metropolitan area and Arizona’s rural regions, they would if it became scarce. ASU professors Claire Lauer and Stephen Carradini are working on a sustainability project to ensure one of our most precious resources remains plentiful in the desert.

An Arizona State University water law professor, Rhett Larson, said: "With ongoing shortages on the river, driven by climate change, Colorado River water is going to become very valuable. Anyone who understands this dynamic thinks, 'Well, if I could buy Colorado River water rights, that's more valuable than owning oil in this country at this stage.'"

It’s still a man’s world – even in Arizona, where so many women hold public office. Case in point: The Water Ladies. Attorneys Kathleen Ferris, Sarah Porter and Rita Maguire have decades of experience among them – leading the state’s Department of Water Resources, heading ASU’s Kyl Center for Water Policy and negotiating multi-state water deals. If anyone can make sense of our state’s water challenges, it’s these three.

“Our aquifers, while large and plentiful, are also fossil aquifers, so if we pump them out too quickly, then it’s just gone,” said Kathryn Sorensen, who now researches water policy at Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy. “So these types of things like advanced water purification, augmentation, additional conservation efforts – those all play into avoiding the use of those fossil groundwater supplies.”