Welcome to 2007...a New Climate... and a New Frontier for Innovation

If space exploration led to breakthrough innovations in the 1960s, addressing climate change might be a similar rallying point for innovation for decades to come. Rather than pristine science that helps us understand and explore worlds beyond our imagination, climate change will drive a different kind of innovation that is more holistic and practical, more interdisciplinary and operations oriented.

In 2006, a consensus emerged that climate change was a fact, primarily due to human activities. This year may mark the moment when government and industry start planning and acting on the effects of climate change as integral aspects of the future because doing so is no longer avoidable.

The urgency to address the results of climate change is particularly significant for water utilities. People need water to live. In addition, all industries and economies rely on water as their foundation. Yet, the most conservative scenarios for climate change show that much of our existing water and power infrastructure will be rendered obsolete.

Last week, The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) hosted a Water Utility Climate Change Summit that brought together US water and wastewater utility managers, government leaders and climate change experts to discuss the effects that climate change could have on its existing infrastructure and determine action items.

The best research available on climate change—much of it done by scientists in that room—cannot specify how much higher sea levels will rise or how many more floods, droughts and significant storms we can expect.

Scientists know the direction of those changes, however, and that is enough to influence planning, design and action, noted environmental expert Peter Gleick, President of the Pacific Institute.


New Infrastructure and Maps
Planning for climate change will require drawing new maps for “dry ground.” Those maps must be superimposed onto topographical maps that predict earthquake severity in California neighborhood by neighborhood. Climate change also requires that government addresses the future of low-lying infrastructure and buildings that are likely to be submerged by water levels or that are in the paths of new flood plains.

Dan Cayan, the Director of the Climate Research Division at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, stated that sea levels will rise anywhere between 3 and 25 feet. Mary Nichols of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power noted that these new sea levels will submerge many engines of commerce including airports such as San Francisco International and Oakland International and the world’s busiest ports such as LA-Long Beach. Emergency service providers such as fire departments and major hospitals will find themselves underwater or in the flood plain. Buildings and infrastructure, including water, waste water and electricity power grid, will be underwater in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York.

Extreme winds and high tides will also impact the same infrastructure, including roads and highways that societies rely on daily.


A Different Kind of Infrastructure?
To address these and other economic and environmental impacts, utilities can begin developing more robust, dynamic infrastructure and put a greater emphasis on creating more varied infrastructure tests. David Balmforth, a senior engineer at water consulting firm MWH noted that this is a key focus for many of the utilities in the UK that are addressing the impact of climate change. For example,

•	Current waste water treatment processes rely upon biological treatment systems that would be corrupted and out of operation for days or weeks following flooding from seawater. Planners are beginning to consider ways to make existing systems less sensitive to the effects of seawater flooding and debris from major storms.
•	With more sudden and severe flooding, planners are also evaluating how much water existing infrastructure can accommodate and how they can prevent sewage waters from overflowing the capacity of that infrastructure.

Researchers have not been able to compute the complex changes in snow pack melt, storm systems, waves, ocean levels, temperature and cloud formation that climate change will bring, let alone their combined effects. Yet, simulations that have been used to test the severe and unpredictable impacts of space travel upon on a rocket ship may become relevant for testing neighborhood water systems.


More Than Just Moving the Pipes..
The water industry that operates the world’s water infrastructure has long been the bellwether of a consolidated, stable industry. It provides the pipes and pumps, valves and purification systems that ensure healthy, safe drinking water. Water infrastructure is also essential for industry and development, as well as agriculture. We cannot risk any climate change-impacts to our drinking water quality or supply.

SFPUC Commission Susan Leal closed the conference by proposing an initiative to raise public awareness and generate support for funding necessary changes.

The harder question that the conference did not address is how to refine existing infrastructure to address the future volatile weather in which it must operate. We built the first space rockets with resilience and flexibility to address phenomena we could not anticipate before the first rocket was launched. Water infrastructure will need to have similarly adaptive design.

Designing and planning that infrastructure presents an ideal opportunity for innovative technology that can help the water industry address society’s needs regardless of what the future brings.


Laura Shenkar is an entrepreneur who has been working with leading-edge technologies for over 20 years in the US, Europe and Israel. She holds a BA from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.