Water, climate change and infrastructure: A conversation with Upmanu Lall

Upmanu Lall is the founding director of the Water Institute in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University. Prior to joining ASU, Lall was the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Engineering at Columbia University and served as founding director of the Columbia Water Center. Lall studies how to solve water scarcity and how to predict and mitigate floods.

Here, Lall talks with the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative’s research communication director, Faith Kearns, about his work.

Faith Kearns (FK): Can you tell us a little about yourself and what led you to work on water issues?

Upmanu Lall (UL): My background is in civil engineering, and within that, I've been interested in a variety of things. I can't pay attention to the same thing for very long. I've worked on a range of problems over the years, starting out in hydrology, and then moving to statistical, quantitative risk analysis, and then to nonlinear dynamics and functional estimation.

In the late 1980s I got interested in climate change, and I started trying to teach myself climate dynamics. I then worked on the first two IPCC reports. And then, frankly, it got much more political than scientific. 

The aspect of climate change that I care about at this point is how heat and water are distributed in time and space. Our ability to resolve what happens in different places in the world and how it impacts floods, droughts, heat waves and more has seen only very modest improvements. That's what I've been more concerned with, because that's where climate intersects with society. 

I moved to Colombia in 1999 because they were interested in the work I'd been doing on climate and risk. The charge that was handed to me was to build a global water center. That got me into working from the bottom up and top down in many countries. 

I've ended up working on virtually every continent with partners, typically with prime ministers and presidents, but also with farmers. I started realizing that aging and inadequate infrastructure is actually the biggest risk society faces. It’s a more tangible piece where there's a public and private sector role to play. 

FK: Certainly many of the challenges that we face when it comes to water and climate change have to do with infrastructure. What does your research show us about the role of infrastructure in water and climate challenges?

UL: My focus in this began with the America's Water initiative. We started in 2010 with an idea to map the climate future. As I started getting into it, the question was, how do you buffer climate extremes, like the decades-long drought we've been going through in the western US. 

People were not thinking about it. Everybody was trying to project the future, which is not a particularly useful activity, because the climate model projections are not very good. There was zero conversation about how we are actually going to deal with this. 

Traditionally, we have dealt with floods and droughts by building infrastructure like dams and levies. Most of the conversation you can find in the literature for the last 20 years is the need to remove the dams. Let's say we do that, what's our strategy? If you end up with a significant drought, where's that water coming from? Because you didn't save it. If you have floods, where's the storage? 

I've been thinking about a portfolio approach. These dams came into existence through federal funding, then they were transferred to state governments, to private entities and locals who have not maintained them. Now we have a risk associated with this aging infrastructure and the federal government is not touching the financing, unless it’s a federal dam. Does the private sector come in? What's the risk factor? What's the insurance industry thinking? These were the kinds of questions I started looking at. 

FK: You recently hosted the Rethinking Water conference at Columbia University. I know that you plan to host next year’s conference here in Arizona. What will this convening look like in Arizona?

UL: We started this as America's Water conference in 2012. I was doing this as an annual, invitation only conference with policy makers, Wall Street people and tech companies, limiting it to 100 people each time. In 2017, Sciens Asset Management came and talked to me. They wanted to be a leading sponsor and take over organizing the conference and bringing in other private sector sponsors.

After Sciens joined us, we slowly started opening it up. This September, we had 700 people in person and 800 people online. The number of private sector participants increases every year. 

The design of this conference, from the beginning, has been to create a learning opportunity for people in universities. This has emerged as the go to place for people who are trying to see who's doing what and identify collaborators. 

In moving this to the western US, we want to look at regional issues to a certain extent. It brings us more to irrigation than to urban infrastructure, and it brings us to some discussions about larger scale water markets for risk mitigation. At the same time, many of the issues are still infrastructure related and that focus will be the same. 

FK: What are you looking forward to working on in Arizona? 

UL: I see opportunities in things like floating solar. Take Lake Mead, Lake Powell and the Colorado River. For Arizona’s allocation of twelve million acre feet per year, two million acre feet per year are lost to evaporation. This is a large-scale opportunity and there's strong interest from the private sector. 

Back of the envelope, if you cover ten percent of Lake Mead and Lake Powell with solar panels, you save 150,000 acre feet of water per year, which is a lot when you consider that Nevada has a 300,000 acre feet per year total allocation. 

At this point, I'm interested in doing a design. The idea is to have a series of barges that can chain to each other with a power cable running between them. We can grow organic, hydroponic crops under the solar panels. There is an opportunity to connect to the existing grid as well. You can generate about two and a half gigawatts of electricity, and that's what pays for this. 

Doing it is technically feasible. I have a student working on detailed designs and costing it out. I have talked to people who may be willing to finance it. I've talked to people who would be willing to execute the project as well. There are a bunch of sticky questions about who gets the saved water and such, but they can be worked out. 

Arizona and the western US are exciting places to work on water and climate. That's one of the reasons I moved here. I can see that the demand exists, but it's not clear to me the demand is being met. I think getting the private sector organized with us here would be useful, and I'm starting to work on that.