Delivering reliable, high-quality water requires a delicate balance between water supplies and customer demands.
While water managers continually strive to maintain this supply-and-demand balance through long-term water resource planning and demand management, new challenges exist due to the impacts of climate change, putting the world's water resources at risk.
The Water Utility Climate Alliance (WUCA) is dedicated to enhancing climate change research and improving water management decision-making to ensure that water utilities will be positioned to respond to climate change and protect our water supplies.
WUCA releases Leading Practices in Climate Adaptation
The collection of leading practices in climate adaptation covers a suite of climate adaptation actions and is intended to broadly promote collaborative learning.
Each practice in the collection is explained and supported by concrete examples, and is drawn from WUCA work products and WUCA members' experiences.
Sea level rise forum summary released
June 23-24, 2021, the WUCA Sea Level Rise (SLR) Committee and their consultant, EcoAdapt, held a virtual forum titled "Sea Level Rise Adaptation Exchange: Leading Practices for Moving from Assessment to Action."
The forum gathered over 60 resiliency leaders from around the country to discuss sea level rise adaptation opportunities and barriers, including the unique challenges faced by water utilities and other infrastructure managers.
WUCA releases new Strategic Plan for 2022-2026
WUCA has updated its Strategic Plan for 2022-2026 to guide its work and focus over the next five years. This new aspirational plan puts the Alliance in a strong position to build on a legacy of leadership in water sector climate adaptation and address and respond to emerging challenges and opportunities. It outlines strategic priorities, goals, and objectives that WUCA will pursue over the next five years, presents a refined vision, and articulates its approach to collaboration and intended target audience.
The plan incorporates new components of WUCA's focus, including equity, climate mitigation and more strategic communication of WUCA products and reports, while continuing to prioritize innovation, leadership and mainstreaming in climate adaptation.
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.