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Enhancing Water Awareness, Stewardship and Responsibility
The Water Assembly is conducting a "Futures
Project" whose long term goal is to raise significantly the awareness
and sense of responsibility for our water resources among the general
public and hence the official decision makers.
Seven years have passed since the Middle
Rio Grande Regional Water Plan for Sandoval, Bernalillo and
Valencia Counties was accepted.
It reported the region's substantial annual
deficit consumption of water relative to its renewable supply. We
currently lack an adequate means of assessing how well the Plan has
been implemented or of measuring its success against its mission to
balance use with renewable supply.
To create a sense of stewardship and responsibility for
these issues, the Water Assembly is embarking on a campaign to increase
public awareness, dialogue and engagement with local officials. The campaign is intended to
encourage water management entities in the region to adopt water
accounting mechanisms to measure how well they are meeting specific
targets, in accordance with strategies outlined in the Plan, and to
report on their accomplishments and shortfalls to each other and to the
public.
As an overview, we see the Futures Project partially
emulating the South
Africa "Mont Fleur" process that stimulated extensive
public involvement leading to the development of their
constitution. We envision
our project taking place in four phases:
Phase One - A Baseline Description: Develop in 2009-2010 a credible,
graphic description of the region in 2025, assuming that current
implementation efforts and rates of progress continue, but that no new
or enhanced interventions (technical, managerial, or institutional) are
undertaken.
Phase One Results - The
Water Assembly gathered a multi-disciplinary expert team to implement
Phase One. The expert
team developed a 2025 retrospective
story. That story describes one plausible scenario of
how the experts think the Region's future might look, assuming no new
policy changes. While this baseline future story is, of
course, fictional, it was based upon the team members' analysis
papers in their respective fields. The story and
experts' analyses were presented at the 14th Annual
Water Assembly.
Phase Two - Alternative Scenarios: Develop a several alternative
visions of the region in 2025, describing futures that might occur
based upon plausible variations in the externally imposed environments
or our human caused behaviors.
We gathered local leaders representing a broad spectrum of
stakeholder perspectives as well as those folks whose primary interests
are in water to start to identify attributes of different future
scenarios. They tackled
this task at the 15th Annual Water Assembly
on November 5, 2011. The
next step is to flesh out their notes into plausible prose scenario
descriptions.
Phase Three - How We Got
There: Identify
and explore the plausible kinds of events, actions or interventions
that could lead to each of the futures that came out of the Phase II
activities. The draft
scenarios will form the basis for that exploration and evaluation. The present plan is to address
this Phase III through a Town Hall ike event
in the 2012 time frame.
Phase Four - Publicity Campaign: Bring the baseline description
and the alternative vision stories out to the general public to
stimulate vigorous debate leading decision makers to establish well
informed policies relating to water stewardship and associated
responsibilities.
We picture this fourth publicity phase to involve a
vigorous media campaign, likely including a pointed video to bring home
the nature and implications of the visions.
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