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Professor Jerry Schnoor discusses water sustainability and strategies for conservation Q.What are most important water and sustainability issues facing the midwest and the nation? A. The most important issues facing water sustainability have to do with climate and land-use change. Most Americans don't realize it, but climate is already changing and it is affecting people greatly. Generally, wet areas are getting wetter and aril areas are getting drier, and projections indicate it is going to become much worse through the next few decades. Most problematic in the Upper Midwest has been the trend towards more intense rainfall events and flooding. Land-use change, such as urban sprawl and intensive agriculture for biofuels, has ex- acerbated our water quality problems. The nation faces similar problems to the Upper Midwest except that water shortages are a much greater threat for the southwestern and mountainous-west portion of the U.S. Resources, and the Iowa Farm Bureau have teamed together on voluntary projects for best management practices, real improve- ments have been achieved. Targeting of best practices to the most sensitive landscapes really works at the watershed scale. We need integrated management of water resources at the river basin scale which requires cooperation of many entities, but it is the best way to improve water quality. ]n the future, we should develop markets for perennial crops like prairie grasses and woody trees which require less fertilizer and pesticide and which hold the soil in place via deep root structures. Let's hope these perennials can become the next gen- eration of crops for biorefineries, biomass for power, and biofuels. Q. What are some strategies that could be used to encourage water conservation practices in awater-abundant state like Minnesota? Q. What are some productive strategies to encourage the agricultural community to address non-point source pollution? A. The most successful strategies are when multiple partners share a vision and work together to achieve results. For example, Minnesota has been a pioneer in pollutant trading schemes, and you have even experi- mented with municipal wastewater plants purchasing credits from farmers for buffer strips and best management practices. In Iowa, when the Soybean Growers Asso- ciation, the state universities, individual farmers, the Iowa Department of Natural A. We are inadver- tently practicing water reuse as populations grow and demands on water resources in- crease. Drinking water becomes wastewater, and wastewater be- v comes drinking water. ~'0 a That's the Water Cycle a ~ writ large. So we must rY~ think more holisti- cally and systematically about our v`~ater re- 0 s sources. Does it make a sense to draw down ow- confined aquifers hundreds of feet, like we are doing now with the Cambrian Ordovi- cian aquifer in southern Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois? It's not sustain- able, and, ultimately, it points to the need for water reuse. In addition to smart eater metering and pricing, water efficiency in buildings (a component of LEED), and water conservation, we need to consider recharging our aquifers with treated waste- water, by which I mean, aquifer storage and recovery, a form of indirect potable reuse. This will require high treatment efficien- cies as we recycle wastewater and recharge the aquifers with the drinking water of tomorrow. ,;~ Federal 2010 budget reflects cometment to water issues Although the Minnesota Legislature has been quiet this fall, the 111'" Congress has been considering a number of water resources- related legislation. Of primary importance to the WRC, the Department of Interior FY2010 budget has been signed into law, and the i Water Resources Research Institutes program was provided $6,500,000. This is flat funding from previous years, but important in that WRRI funding was in the President's budget for the first time in eight years. The SECURE Water Act provisions of the Om- nibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-11), Section 9507, authorizes the Secretary of Interior to provide grants for various water-related research. This passed into law in March, but was not funded in the FY2010 budget. Three other bills have passed the House and have been referred to various Senate commit- tees. HR 1145, the National Water Research and Development Initiative Act of 2009, directs the President to implement a National Water Research and Development Initiative to im- prove the federal government's role in design- ingand implementing federal water research, development, demonstration, data collection and dissemination, education, and technol- ogytransfer activities to address changes in U.S. water use, quality, supply, and demand, and to designate an interagency committee to ', implement the Initiative. HR 469 encourages ~ research, development, and demonstration of technologies to utilize water produced incon- nection with the development of domestic en- III ergy resources. Finally, HR 3598, the Energy and Water Research Integration Act, aims to ensure consideration of water intensity in the Department of Energy's energy research, development, and demonstration programs to guarantee efficient, reliable, and sustainable delivery of energy and water resources. It directs the Secretary of Energy, in coordina- j tion with other relevant federal agencies, to establish the Energy-Water Architecture Coun- cil (EWAC) to provide improved energy and t water resource data collection, reporting, and technological innovation. e~ eCelilber ~.~.~_ Jerry Schnoor speaking on the Midwest's changing water environment at the Minnesota Water Resources Conference.