The Kyl Center examined the growth in the Valley regarding groundwater use and the consequences that come with it. The report is said to provide communities with solutions to become “water resilient.”

Farms and ranches will have to make painful cuts to their water use, according to Sarah Porter with the Kyl Center for Water Policy. “You’re talking about farmers not being able to grow as much, potentially really impacting rural economies,” she said.

Wutich said water scarcity disproportionately impacts poorer communities and asked the audience if they knew the saying, “Water runs uphill toward money.” She said water-insecure communities have less capacity to solve problems with sophisticated engineering and are more likely to rely on social infrastructure, such as borrowing water from a neighbor or buying unregulated water from vendors selling from a truck or pushcart.

“In the Phoenix area, and Tucson, there is a great capacity for the older cities to grow, mostly upward, because they have fairly robust water supplies,” Sarah Porter said. But even those jurisdictions are seeking new — or new-used — water sources.

"The drought situation across the western U.S. has improved considerably as a result of a very wet winter," Jay Famiglietti said. In fact, both California and Nevada are "essentially drought-free" at the moment, which is "really unusual."

Southwestern cities have an exceptionally simple solution for curbing residential water use: Charge more for it in the summers. After Phoenix started using this powerful incentive, the number of homes with front or back lawns went down from nearly 80% in the 1970s to about 10% today, according to Kathryn Sorensen.

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The focus on water, particularly vital for Arizona, is aligned with the broader objective of integrating sustainability into the fabric of regional development, an effort led by Paul Westerhoff, a regents professor at ASU's School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment.

“Essentially, cities need to carefully consider the trade-offs between a program like this (grass removal rebates), or investing in other ways to get people to reduce the amount of water they’re using on their yard,” said Sarah Porter, the director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University.

Conservation is necessary but it's not enough to achieve "safe yield," the balance between water pumped and water replenished, according to a report by the Kyl Center for Water Policy, authored by Ferris and center Director Sarah Porter.