CAREER: CAS-Climate: Addressing Climate Change Impacts on Urban Water Affordability

This project will address the impact of climate change on household water affordability. Climate change is increasing hydrological variability and water stress in many regions, leading water planners to invest in expensive new water supply infrastructure. However, many low-income households currently struggle to pay their water bills. Therefore, costly investments in water supply infrastructure may counterintuitively harm water security by making water unaffordable for a larger number of people. This NSF grant addresses this problem by, first, developing a new approach to assess the impact of climate change on water affordability that considers the environmental, social, and infrastructure factors that combine to determine water affordability. Second, it designs infrastructure and policy solutions to enable water supply systems to be both reliable in a changing climate and affordable for low-income populations. Through partnership with external stakeholders, this research will develop knowledge that local water planners and policymakers can use to improve the effectiveness of water affordability programs. This project will develop an approach to comprehensively assess the impact of climate change on household water affordability and design solutions. To achieve this, the project will advance theory for operationalizing distributional equity in systems models and methods for multi-scale urban water systems modeling. First, the project will advance understanding of the drivers of household water affordability through a novel systems-modeling framework that integrates environmental, human, and infrastructure dynamics across state, city, and household scales. Second, the research team will project climate change impacts on water supply and demand, using an approach that targets projections to the scales relevant for water system outcomes. Third, the project will leverage recent advances in reinforcement learning to design infrastructure and policy solutions to meet water affordability and reliability targets. To ensure the findings translate to practice, the research team will partner with two cities and develop an external advisory board. Additionally, the project will advance education on water equity and affordability for students, water managers, and local communities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.