Climate change is affecting the water sector by altering the water cycle and weather patterns. Extreme events such as droughts, heatwaves, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires are increasing in severity and frequency, posing critical risks to drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater utilities. The Water Utility Climate Alliance (WUCA) advances climate change adaptation, planning, and decision-making to ensure that water utilities, and the communities they serve, can thrive in the face of these emerging challenges.
WUCA leverages collective utility experiences to develop leading practices in climate change adaptation and mitigation that are actionable, equitable, and serve as a model for others.
We collaborate, with each other and our partners, to enable water utilities to respond to climate change impacts on utility functions and operations to protect our water systems today and into the future.
Defining level of service
One of the most important factors in infrastructure investment by utilities is Level of Service (LOS). Unfortunately, there is not a widely used consensus when it comes to implementation.
This report presents a framework for determining LOS using five core elements: system dynamics, future scenarios, performance indicators, risk tolerance, and equity.
New CMIP6 FAQ for water managers
The WUCA CMIP6 Working Group has created a concise FAQ guide to help water managers with limited experience in CMIP6 or climate-model datasets. Featuring 13 essential questions, it focuses on improving understanding and practical use of CMIP6 data for the contiguous U.S.
Developed collaboratively with experts, this guide offers clear answers to support confident navigation and interpretation of these complex datasets.
2024 Water Utility Climate Alliance GM meeting recap
In 2024, general managers convened in Miami, Florida, for the Water Utility Climate Alliance Annual GM Business Meeting to approve the 2025 workplan and budget, which passed unanimously. The meeting underscored WUCA's ongoing commitment to climate resilience in the face of increasingly severe climate events, as highlighted by recent hurricanes and unprecedented wildfires. This year's initiatives include the development of state-of-the-art climate modeling guidance (i.e., CMIP6), a new project leveraging high-resolution climate modeling from Department of Energy laboratories for intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) data, and expanded efforts to help utilities justify climate-resilient infrastructure investments. Additionally, peer-sharing remained central to WUCA's mission, with training sessions and collaborative discussions providing critical knowledge on decision-making under uncertainty, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction, and incorporating climate projections into water demand planning.
This year also marked the culmination of a multi-year collaboration with the U.S. Water Alliance to embed equity into WUCA's work, resulting in guiding principles, case studies, and an equity roadmap for climate resilience planning. Despite substantial federal funding opportunities for climate resilience—more than $500 billion allocated over the next decade—participants highlighted ongoing barriers to accessing funds and implementing projects at the needed scale. The meeting reaffirmed WUCA's focus on addressing these challenges and underscored the importance of continued collaboration, innovation, and advocacy to support climate-resilient water utilities and thriving communities.
Key messages from WUCA
Warming is here and now. Climate adaptation planning is not just about the future. Water utilities are experiencing the effects of a changing climate on their water resources today.
Know your system and explore its vulnerabilities. Assess your water system to identify vulnerabilities. Risks can only be reduced if they are identified.
Plan for multiple futures. Predicting the future is not feasible but anticipating plausible warmer future climates is. Prepare to face a variety of scenarios.
Capacity building and assessment are part of the adaptation equation. Developing the technical and managerial expertise to identify and assess climate risks to a system is as much a part of adaptation as the steps taken to implement risk reduction measures.