This post originally appeared on The Nature Conservancy's Cool Green Science blog and is re-posted with permission.
The Watershed Conservation Screening Tool. Image © TNC
How can municipal water utilities know where conservation will have the best results in improving water quality? We can now answer with confidence: There’s an app for that!
In fact, I was recently testing that web app on the banks of the Dead Sea in Jordan. That might seem like an unusual location, but the complexity of water conservation in Jordan – with an influx of more than 1 million Syrian refugees – illustrates well the opportunities and limitations of this new app.
Honestly, I never thought developing a web app would lead me to the banks of the Dead Sea. I came to Jordan to launch The Nature Conservancy’s Watershed Conservation Screening Tool, developed over the past several months by staff from TNC, the Natural Capital Project, and Arizona State University.
The International Water Association, the membership organization of many of the world’s water utilities, was kind enough to invite us to launch the web app at their annual congress, and so I somewhat surprisingly found myself on a plane to Jordan. Hundreds of people from all over the world gathered for the congress on the shores of the Dead Sea. And these folks, representing bulk water users, are the target audience for the Watershed Conservation Screening Tool.
The tool provides large water users, like municipal water utilities and industrial facilities, a quick way to evaluate the opportunity for source watershed conservation to help improve water quality. It focuses on sediment and nutrient pollution to surface water sources from so-called non-point sources, such as from agriculture or other human land-uses.
The tool will instantly provide, for any medium to large-scale watershed (anything bigger than a roughly 6 mile by 6 mile area), located anywhere on the globe, estimates of water quality impairment. More importantly, it then provides estimates of opportunities to improve water quality through five different conservation activities.
The utilities I met with have been uniformly supportive of what the tool does. Many of them want to think more about source watershed conservation, and view the tool as a useful first datum that might help inspire their organization to act.
But as one utility employee said to me, to know is not enough. Many utilities talked about the barriers that could stop them from implementing a source watershed conservation plan. Many felt they didn’t have the funding or capacity to work on source watershed conservation, or that there were political or regulatory impediments in their way.
Continue reading the full post here.
