Lynne Kiesling
David Zetland, call your office! Here are a couple of thought-provoking water articles I’ve recently read:
1. Peter Gleick on water policy in Wired: 8 proposals, and not a single one says a single thing about improving price signals to discipline water use! How can he claim to have any kind of serious, meaningful, effective recommendations for resource overuse when he fails to incorporate that simple, obvious point?
2. A new GreenBiz report recommending integrating more IT infrastructure into water provision:
The paper lays out the scope of the problems facing governments, water agencies, and utility companies as they address growing demand for water. Chief among them are providing water to meet this demand without harming the environment, maintaining the security of the water supply from contamination or tampering, updating an aging national water infrastructure, and managing the impacts of increasingly common extreme weather events.
“We believe that the role for more advanced information technology in improving water management decisions has never been more obvious,” Williams explains in a podcast interview with GreenBiz.com managing editor Matthew Wheeland. “WaterOrg is about doing is bringing awareness to the water industry of exactly what advanced information technology is capable of doing, and it wants to do that in a particular way. It wants to do it by encouraging interagency collaboration around particular water resources.”
Very interesting. They don’t discuss actual pricing of water, but better IT infrastructure would allow for more accurate and precise pricing and measurement of water consumption.