“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.”

Dave White, director of the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at Arizona State University — developed an agent-based model (ABM) to investigate the impact of water conservation attitudes on overall water availability in Phoenix. 

“I think it’s critically important,” said Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist and professor at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability. Without this type of legislative change, he said, “it allows the continued drilling of deep wells that pump a tremendous amount of water.”

Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at ASU, said the language of the ag-to-urban program needs to be airtight to avoid loopholes that could still allow a large volume of groundwater pumping that would negate any urban conversion benefit.

“There’s no agreement, so it’s hard to say,” Sarah Porter, director of Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy, said in a phone interview Wednesday. “But I think everyone is expecting — at least here in the Lower Basin — that there will be less Colorado River water available.”

“That three-dimensional nature of the project is something really unique. It has individual trees. It represents the snowpack, water and channels,” said Enrique Vivoni, director of the Center for Hydrologic Innovations. “We have the ability to do thinning in a smart way.” 

People come to depend on water rights to develop industry, grow agriculture and build towns, said Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. “And once you have that reliance, it becomes extremely painful to change,” she told CNN.

I sat down with Sarah Porter of Arizona State's Kyle Center for Water Policy, and the first thing she said to me was "probably most of what you think about water here is not true." And she was right because, for one thing, as you know, Phoenix itself, the city, is not short of water. So, one thing you have to get your head around is that here in the desert, with a once-a-millennium drought, there is not an immediate threat to water supply in the metro area.

Dr. Paul Westerhoff has been an innovative force in water since the early stages of his career, receiving the Paul L. Busch Award from WRF in 2006 for his research on the removal of engineered nanomaterials during wastewater treatment, which led to the development of new analytical methods. Dr. Westerhoff has led 14 WRF projects as Principal Investigator and has served on Project Advisory Committees for nine WRF projects.

With Arizona's long-term drought and climate change making fires more intense, Arizona State University and Salt River Project are teaming up for a new research project when it comes to forest thinning and the water supply says Enrique Vivoni.