Showcasing Leading Practices in Climate Adaptation: Experiences from the Water Sector to Empower Other Sectors and Communities

The Water Utility Climate Alliance (WUCA) is a group of 12 utilities working to collaboratively advance climate adaptation. WUCA’s latest work, “Leading Practices in Climate Adaptation,” includes a report and website summarizing a range of actions that have been tested on the ground by WUCA agencies. The Leading Practices were developed by practitioners for practitioners and are accessible to utilities of all sizes, locations, and levels of climate adaptation experience, as well as other sectors seeking to adapt to changing conditions. Each practice is supported with concrete examples and many include supporting resources. In this webinar, participants will learn about the five essential climate action areas, review the Leading Practices, and hear a range of supporting examples. Participants will also engage in an exercise to begin thinking about which practices would be a good fit for their organization. 

Demonstrating climate adaptation in practice is critical to engineers and planners alike in designing more climate resilient infrastructure for the future. This is particularly critical as engineers are designing infrastructure that will most likely be used into the next century, based on today’s science. In this webinar, our first speaker will provide a nationwide overview, highlighting adaptation opportunities and actions for U.S. infrastructure planning and depicting how climate change information is being used in on-the-ground engineering practice. Our second speaker will showcase a series of eight engineering case studies developed by WUCA and the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group. The case studies include engineering projects that are being planned across a range of climate change impacts: drought, extreme heat, flooding and rising seas/storm surge, and extreme rainfall. The collection of case studies intended to be a conversation starter, ultimately offering the engineering community ideas to continue to build upon. 

“Mapping Climate-related Risks and Opportunities to Water Utility Business Functions,” is a collaborative project between the WUCA, WRF, the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, Denver Water (DW) and the San Francisco Public Utility Commission (SFPUC). Collectively they have developed a framework and guidebook (2020) to foster organization-wide climate mainstreaming. The framework is adaptive, flexible, and tailorable to help water utilities define their focus for a risk and opportunity assessment, ask key climate questions, map climate impacts relative to mission-critical business functions, and pinpoint risks and opportunities across those business functions. 

Access to safe, reliable, and affordable water and sanitation is a human right. It is essential to every part of our society from the economy to the health of the environment. Across the United States, we see growing numbers of individuals and communities confronting water threats, particularly those associated with climate change. Understanding water equity demonstrates that not all individuals/communities have the ability or opportunity to access adequate water resources or stormwater and wastewater services. Vulnerable communities face a barrage of issues including health and environmental disparities. Additionally, vulnerable communities do not have equal access to essential resources, hindering their resilience and ability to recover quickly as events such as flooding become more extreme due to climate change. However, when communities, utilities, government and nongovernmental institutions partner together equitable outcomes are possible. This webinar will highlight lessons learned in the water resource realm and solutions to achieve equity and promote climate change adaptations that also can be applied in other sectors to strengthen communities.

Many cities and municipalities have adopted green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) practices to reduce polluted stormwater runoff and meet water quality standards as well as yield many co-benefits, including flood risk reduction, improved air quality, reducing respiratory and heat-related illnesses, creating “green” collar jobs, and more. Our presenters will describe community experiences, beginning with their decision to use GSI, approaches to monetizing and quantifying GSI benefits, and the importance of partnerships with stakeholders. This webinar will highlight resources and tools from EPA and the water sector that communities may use to evaluate or plan for GSI options in their adaptation plans. 

Water utilities use energy to move and treat water to provide drinking water to communities and discharge clean water to the environment and that energy accounts for about 30% of a utilities’ total costs. Water utilities have been exploring opportunities to reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions as well as harness the energy embedded in wastewater for beneficial uses. This webinar will focus on 2 research projects. The Water Utility Climate Alliance (WUCA) has developed a collection of case studies highlighting progressive greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation projects at water supply utilities to share information on successfully implemented GHG mitigation projects, ultimately helping to drive forward GHG mitigation activities. Wastewater contains a lot of energy, which is often harnessed by biogas production. Yet, eighty percent of the energy can be recovered for heating and cooling at a building-scale to neighborhood-scale, called Sewage Thermal Energy Use (STEU). The Water Research Foundation study is examining how STEU is used by private property owners and municipalities, including financing options, ownership models, install and maintenance costs, GHG reductions, and other shared benefits. The information presented will provide valuable information and inspiration for getting a GHG mitigation or STEU project from concept to implementation. 

Heat health is a priority of the Biden administration, with proposed new actions aimed at protecting workers and communities to reduce heat-related illness and protect public health, including a proposed workplace heat standard. The White House maintains that heat stress disproportionately affects the poor, and minority groups with deadly consequences. Speakers in this session will provide a background on heat and water impacts and will highlight a study by the Water Utility Climate Alliance (WUCA) and the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA) that analyzed the impact of such extreme temperature events on critical water utility physical infrastructure assets and personnel. 

Federal and other funds for climate related initiatives have dramatically increased over the past fiscal year. However, there has proven to be a large gap in the understanding and access to technical and financial resources, especially where to find these funds and support for applying. This session will aim to improve understanding of these technical resources for financial support, connect the audience with community-based funding and sector-focused funding for recent and forthcoming actions.