"The time for corporates to ignore water scarcity is passed," says Jay Famiglietti, the global futures professor at Arizona State University and the director of science for the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative. "There is growing consumer and non-profit pressure for corporates to step up and champion global water stewardship in order to help sustain economic growth, food production, and to play a leading role in protecting the environment."

Last week, the Biden administration previewed a set of options for fixing the Colorado River’s supply-and-demand problem. Sarah Porter, Director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy, joined “Arizona Horizon,” to discuss more. These options provided a rough outline for proposals that it will hand off to the incoming Trump administration to finish.

Three Arizona State University professors are being honored with the highest faculty award possible — Regents Professor. Amber Wutich, a world-renowned expert on water insecurity, directs the Global Ethnohydrology Study, a cross-cultural study of water knowledge and management in more than 20 countries. The Carnegie Foundation named Wutich the Arizona Professor of the Year for 2013–14, and she received the ASU Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award from the Faculty Women’s Association in 2020. And last fall, her work earned her a MacArthur “genius grant.”

The proposals presented Wednesday could stir further negotiation between the states as well as the 30 tribal nations with rights to the river's water, said Rhett Larson, a water law professor at Arizona State University. "It seems likely to me that instead of making everyone happy, they'll make everyone mad," Larson said of the proposals. But that might be a good thing, he said. "If it's something that's distasteful to both basins, it might unite both basins," he added. 

“They’re not going to take the any of the proposals,” said Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. “The federal government put the components together in a different way ... and modeled them to provide near-maximum flexibility for negotiations to continue.”

Jay Famiglietti is a hydrologist and Global Futures Professor at Arizona State University, as well as the former executive director emeritus of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan. “I would describe the faucet as non-existent.” said Famiglietti. “There’s no such infrastructure in place, that’s just imaginary.”

“We see tremendous potential in this approach,” says Paul Westerhoff, co-corresponding author and Regents’ Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at ASU. “By continuously improving its accuracy and expanding its reach, we’re laying the groundwork for proactive water safety measures across the globe.”

Legal experts, however, warn that proving groundwater abuse under Arizona’s existing laws will be challenging. Rhett Larson, a professor of water law at ASU's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, said Arizona’s current laws give agriculture a wide exemption to nuisance laws. 

Rhett Larson, a professor of water law and an environmental law expert at Arizona State University, argued that Canada should treat water as it treats gold or oil. Larson acknowledges that water is unique among natural resources “because of its esthetic, cultural and ecological significance, as well as being essential to all life on earth.”

“They're world leaders in chips, and they want to be world leaders in all these other things,” said Paul Westerhoff, an ASU professor and Fulton Chair of Environmental Engineering who has worked for more than a decade with the semiconductor industry. He leads a dozen scientists in research for semiconductor water treatment. “What we're trying to do is to figure out how they can take that wastewater, clean it up and make new chips again with it.”