Water Resources

From 1996 Switzer Fellow Evan Hansen, whose West Virginia-based firm Downstream Strategies offers environmental consulting services with a core belief in the importance of protecting the environment and linking economic development with natural resource stewardship:

"Our project aims to clearly quantify environmental services such as water flow, carbon storage and biodiversity conservation that decision makers will consider as they evaluate projects from forest restoration to watershed management," said Jefferson Hall, Smithsonian staff scientist and project director. Read more

This reference resource, in atlas format, is an online-only compendium of maps and data sets accompanied by multimedia elements designed to illustrate key concepts in green issues and environmentalism graphically and interactively. Topics for the maps presented in this work were selected from articles in the 12-volume SAGE Reference Series on Green Society: Toward a Sustainable Future. Each map includes links to one or more of the series articles. Maps include interactive components, with clickable icons to deliver the data and statistics that make up each map.

From 2000 Switzer Fellow Jen Osha, who is coordinating an effort to bring bottled water to West Virginia residents whose water supply was contaminated by the chemical leak at Freedom Industries last week:

GLG 108 Water Planet, a class created by professors Kelin Whipple and Arjun Heimsath in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, answers these questions and dives more deeply into how climate change could affect the world’s already strained water supply. “Water is precious, limited and can be severely impacted by both climate change and humans,” Heimsath said. Read more

We believe that the process of unconventional fossil fuel development including shale tight oil and gas development in the Monterey Shale formation using hydraulic fracturing, acidization, and other forms of well stimulation will exacerbate many of these environmental threats, particularly climate disruption, local air and water pollution, and resource consumption. Thus, the decisions you make about the development of unconventional oil and gas production from shale in California will hold important consequences for California and the state’s future.

A 2011 law has provided new information about what natural gas companies are doing with the huge amounts of waste generated by West Virginia's drilling boom, but major data gaps remain, a legislative committee heard Tuesday. Evan Hansen, president of the consulting firm Downstream Strategies, said the state requires drilling operators to report what they do with only about 38 percent of the waste they produce.

Securing clean water is becoming increasingly difficult in the United States. Infrastructure like dams and treatment plants are aging, water demand is increasing, and more frequent extreme weather events like wildfires and flooding are driving up the cost of water management. It’s a complex problem, but one of the potential solutions is decidedly low-tech: Invest in nature. Read more

I am excited to announce that this week, International Rivers published a new report titled An Introduction to Integrated Resources Planning. The report, written by 1999 Fellow Chris Greacen, Chom Greacen, David von Hippel, and David Bill, demonstrates the benefits of a comprehensive approach to energy planning.