Recent years have seen the publication of a number of reports about how water and wastewater utilities in the United States can become more resilient, particularly when it comes to addressing rapidly aging infrastructure, optimizing operational efficiencies, and contending with increasing water demand.
There has been significantly less discussion about how state and local leaders (including mayors and county offices) can help water utilities invest in resilience. We believe that this is the missing link in preparing the water sector for the years to come—and that state and local leaders can take critical actions today to strengthen water resilience.
Across the United States, private and public water and wastewater utilities are highly fragmented (Exhibit E1). In fact, approximately 50,000 community drinking water systems and 16,000 public wastewater treatment systems supply the majority of the US population. To put this into perspective, the country’s energy sector has only around 3,000 systems, including co-ops and publicly owned utilities. This means that while addressing the resilience of only 10 percent of water systems would have an outsize effect on the country’s population, reaching all communities—especially rural ones—could require significant effort
Click here to read the full report.