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The world runs on water. Yet the world’s water systems face formidable threats. More than a billion people currently live in water-scarce regions, and as many as 3.5 billion could experience water scarcity by 2025. The Water Risk Atlas is a scale of “water stress” — how close a country comes to draining its annual water stores in a typical year. In areas of high or extremely high water stress, said Betsy Otto, “if you then hit a drought … you’re really in trouble, because you’re already using most of what you have.”

Published in 2006, “Buried Treasure: Groundwater Permitting and Pricing in Canada” was written to help fill the need for greater public awareness of the value of groundwater and an understanding of how it is regulated.

During the next quarter century, water utilities in North America will face a number of developments that will put pressure on their resources, spur them to develop alternative supplies, and necessitate new approaches to how they conduct business. This article in the August edition of the AWWA “Journal”, the second in a series, highlights two of these trends—population growth and climate change.

As reported in the October 2005 edition of the AWWA “Journal”, results are in from the second annual State of the Industry survey—a comprehensive evaluation of the water industry's overall health. “The State of the Industry Report 2005: A guide for good health” presents key findings from the survey, which included the responses from more than 1,700 utility personnel, service providers, and other individuals.

Standard water industry tools—such as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and modeling programs—collect and store data that are currently unrelated to time and space. As reported in Authentic intelligence: Automated decision-making through GTSM (AWWA Journal, November 2005), a new tool called geospatial time-series management can help water managers consider anything that moves or changes through time, such as rainfall, reservoir levels, treatment flows, and natural stream flow.