Every year, when we research the latest available data for our annual State Rankings Report, we search for the most reliable sources with the most up-to-date information.
For example, the DOE’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) is the place to look for accurate tallies of installed wind turbines or solar power capacity by state. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is where you go for employment data per industry sector or per capita spending on education. You can be confident data you get from these government sources reflects a snapshot of the activity in the past 12 months.
When we put together our 2015 Rankings Report, we were hoping to include a new category ranking the states that are doing the best job of preserving and expanding their water resources, a critical priority which is growing in importance in direct proportion to the inexorable shrinking of the overall water supply in the U.S. We assumed the logical place to start was the federal government’s statistics for state-by-state water usage, but we were disappointed to discover that the government’s most recent water use numbers are from 2010. That’s right, tracking water use has been such a low national priority that the Feds only survey it every five years. So we put our new Water Resources ranking on hold.
We’re please to report that the nation’s approach to water resources may be about to take a giant leap forward. Next week (on March 22, which the United Nations has designated World Water Day), the Obama Administration is hosting the first White House Water Summit, which aims to move water resources to the top of the national agenda.
The Summit will highlight the urgent need to get a precise annual fix of the nation’s water usage, enabling all of us to see where water resources are being conserved with maximum efficiency—or where an appalling amount of water is being wasted. Discussions in the lead-up to the Summit (the White House hosted leading experts at a water roundtable in December) have focused on the need to have the U.S. Geological Survey, which currently has a small team take five years to produce its comprehensive water-use analysis, upgrade its program using the EIA as a model. The goal is to create an annual survey of water use by each state, breaking these statistics down by quality and quantity, and by source, telling us exactly how the nation’s farms, factories and homes are consuming this precious resource.
If you doubt the need for an annual U.S. water snapshot, consider this: in the five years since the last federal water-use survey was released, Texas suffered a four-year drought and California suffered a five-year drought, while municipal water supplies in numerous locations—including Flint, MI, Toledo, OH and Charleston, WV—were severely disrupted by pollution that made the local water supply undrinkable. The current water-use numbers for all of the above are dramatically different that the old statistics still being posted by the federal government.
In an Op-Ed piece published in The New York Times this week, one of the nation’s leading water experts, Charles Fishman, urged the Summit to make upgrading water-use statistics a top priority. According to Fishman, author of the book The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulence Future of Water, revamping the way we’re collecting and reporting water use is the most effective step we can take (at a relatively low cost) to quickly and dramatically improve our understanding of what needs to be done to conserve and expand our water resources.
Modernizing water data “would unleash an era of water innovation unlike anything
