Semi-Arid Water Resource Challenges - Can Water Harvesting Close the Gap?

Abstract:

Water resource availability restricts development in arid and semi-arid regions of world. Past observations show that urban areas can increase stream discharge at least on a local scale. These results suggest that urbanization may increase the availability of wet water capable of being used by urban society. Here we present a combination of observational work demonstrating the increase of available water in urban areas of southern Arizona; and a modelling study demonstrating that future land use change may significantly increase river discharge across the Santa Cruz watershed which is ~12% urban. The observational data comes from over 30 watersheds varying in cover from undeveloped to highly urban and in spatial scale from a few square meters to thousands of square kilometers. The modelling study includes a conservation (~35% urban), megalopolitan (~34% urban) and business as usual scenario (~38% urban) for land use change due to regional population growth. All land use change scenarios result in significant increases in watershed streamflow. Depending upon pattern of urbanization, streamflow increased as much 88% in some watershed locations; demonstrating the potential to partially meet water resources demands in the region with water produced by the urbanization process. This water could be used regionally or locally, and significant efforts at implementing water harvesting in the region have been pursued. However, the ability to scale such implementation and overcome the physical, and social barriers to implementation are currently unquantified.