According to a statement from the research director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy Kathryn Sorensen, “Groundwater across the state is a hugely valuable supply, there isn’t enough water for everything, right? Human wants are always unlimited. Our ability to meet those wants is always somewhat limited. I hope you think of these trade-offs in terms of which developments are worth the water.”

“Everybody’s running for reelection,” said Kathleen Ferris, who crafted some of the state’s landmark water legislation and now teaches water policy at Arizona State University. “Nobody wants to sit around the table and try to deal with these issues.”

"This is long overdue, but better now than never," said Kathleen Ferris, a senior research fellow at Arizona State University's Kyl Center for Water Policy, who previously directed the Arizona Department of Water Resources when the state's groundwater laws were passed in 1980. "It is really important that the Department of Water Resources takes these actions because we need to protect these groundwater supplies."

Margaret Garcia, an assistant professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University, said the billion-dollar disaster dataset does not capture all the ways global warming impacts the economy because it includes only the most expensive disasters caused by a subset of extreme events.

Some of the data centers use a lot of water that is increasingly scarce in Arizona. As Sarah Porter, Director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy, pointed out to me, citing another person's research: In Arizona, each demand for an answer from a generative AI tool like ChatGPT consumes 2 1/4 tablespoons of water for cooling the centers.

“Sometimes I feel like people don’t want to do the heavy lifting,” said Kathleen Ferris, who is now a water policy researcher at Arizona State University. “Instead, they want to just find the next water supply and be done with it and have somebody else pay for it.”

"Atmospheric water harvesting systems can be an 'important tool' for disaster response when water supplies might be offline for an extended period of time," says Paul Westerhoff at Arizona State University, and are well-suited for places with relatively high humidity like Florida. However, he says their reliance on electricity, often from a generator, has been an issue during past disasters.

“Why don't we do the things that we know are possible and that are within our jurisdiction first,” Kathleen Ferris said, “Before we go looking for some kind of a grand proposal that we don't have any reason to believe at the moment could succeed.”

“I think the investment in the infrastructure will ultimately make the system more resilient for the community,” said Cora Tso, a senior research fellow at Arizona State University's Kyl Center for Water Policy. “The ag industry uses a significant amount of water, and thinking about making that system more sustainable would ultimately benefit the state.”