Darrel M. Tremaine

Cities and urban areas present important opportunities for advancing toward sustainability and resilience goals. From a systems perspective, various targets and indicators of key outcomes reflect sustainability of urban areas, motivating consideration of local and regional context. We explore four key themes for creating sustainable urban areas: 1) urban areas are complex systems linked with diverse rural areas across the urban-rural gradient, 2) data and modeling of physical and non-physical systems can aid decision making for sustainability, 3) creating sustainable urban-rural systems requires collaboration with partner communities, and 4) change requires adaptive and transformative governance frameworks. These themes guide sustainability innovations through co-production of knowledge among communities, authorities, managers, and researchers. The sustainability of urban areas strongly depends on urban-rural connectivity regarding both physical systems and governance frameworks.

Environmental justice and sustainability have both become major concerns for water resource management, particularly with recent federal emphasis on environmental justice under the Biden administration in the United States. Texas, like many U.S. states, lags behind the federal government in this emphasis. While many localities have made progress in some respects—for example, some major Texas municipalities have included equity and sustainability metrics in their recent climate action plans—others have not. This has left a patchwork of persistent water management and availability issues that are exacerbated by extreme weather and worsening impacts of climate change. We provide a review of many of Texas’s water equity and sustainability challenges, both now and in a more extreme climate future. These include water access, affordability, contamination, flooding, drought, and aging infrastructure. For example, many Texas counties rank highest in the nation for flood risk, including coastal counties with high populations of disadvantaged communities and counties containing populations that live in persistent poverty in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Additionally, approximately 44,000 Texans, or about 0.4% of the state population, lack access to complete plumbing facilities in their homes. The costs of water infrastructure leaks (estimated at about 51 gallons of water per day statewide) are shared across customers of all income levels, though they place a disproportionate burden on low-income customers. We then assess existing statewide and local policy and planning efforts and gaps in addressing these concerns in Texas. We focus particularly on the role of efforts to incorporate community voice—the ideas, concerns, needs, and expertise of impacted community members, dismantle causes of injustice, and improve equity in spending. If communities are not intentional with future development, new water infrastructure could continue to perpetuate existing harms. Thus, we provide a research agenda and recommendations for addressing some of the policy and planning gaps and persistent environmental justice issues. We aim to help water managers and policy makers identify and dismantle sources of inequity, particularly through including community voice.

Background: The 100th Meridian in Texas aligns with a corridor of large and rapidly growing urban areas with a growing water demand and limited supply. Understanding the variations in residential water consumption may assist with identifying the characteristics associated with disproportionate water consumption that may be responsive to policy changes and enforcement. Methods: Data from the San Antonio Water System, the Bexar County Appraisal District, and the American Community Survey were utilized. The average daily water consumption was estimated for the seasons and a total year for more than 300,000 single-family residences between 2009 and 2015. The presence of a swimming pool, residential parcel hectares, size of the living space, and per capita income were examined as predictors of the variations in residential water consumption using hierarchal modeling. Results: The presence of swimming pools and a residential property’s value were the strongest predictors of water consumption. Parcel hectares and household income were positively associated with water consumption. A quartile analysis of select independent variables identified the disproportionate variations of water consumption of units with large yards, swimming pools, and high values. Conclusions: The findings indicate a strong association between variations in residential water consumption and both irrigation and swimming pool water used, which emphasize a need to focus conservation efforts on higher-valued housing and residences with swimming pools and the consideration of tiered pricing.