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.”

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.