Water Resources and Climate Adaptation

Water is one of the most important resources in the Southwest. What can we learn from a climate adaptation professional who has spent decades in this line of work? In this episode of Come Rain or Shine, we interviewed Kathy Jacobs, Professor Emeritus in Environmental Science at the University of Arizona. Jacobs was also the founder and director of the Center for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions at the University, under the Arizona Institute for Resilience. 

Jacobs recently retired from her multi-decade career focused on water resources and climate adaptation and assessment. She reflects on highlights and insights from her roles at the local, state, and national levels. Jacobs also teases some upcoming efforts and ongoing projects, proving that this work is never truly over for those passionate about finding practical solutions in a changing climate. 

Learn more about Jacobs’ work with the Center for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions (CCASS) and the Arizona Tri-University Recharge and Water Reliability Project.

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Transcript

Sarah: Welcome to Come Rain or Shine, podcast of the US Geological Survey, Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center or Southwest CASC. 

Emile: And supported by New Mexico State University and the University of Arizona. We’re your co-hosts Emile Elias

Sarah: And Sarah Leroy. Here, we highlight stories to share the most recent advances in science, weather and climate adaptation, and innovative practices to support resilient landscapes and communities.

Emile: We believe that sharing some of the most innovative, forward thinking and creative scientific research and adaptation solutions will strengthen our collective ability to respond to even the most challenging impacts of climate change in one of the hottest and driest regions of the world. 

Today, we are speaking with Kathy Jacobs, formerly a professor at the University of Arizona in the Environmental Science Department and in the Arizona Institute for Resilience.

Her research interests include water policy, stakeholder engagement, and connecting science and decision making. She was also the founder and director of the Center for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions at the University of Arizona. Kathy recently retired from the University of Arizona after a remarkable, decades-long career dedicated to advancing climate adaptation, science and solutions. Thank you so much for joining us today, and congratulations on your retirement.

So you're just a very well-known thought leader in water management and climate adaptation solutions, and I'm really curious about how you first became interested in water and climate?

Kathy: Well, that seems like a very long time ago, but I guess I would say I started being interested in this topic because of my real concern and interest in preserving the environment, and particularly biodiversity.

But, it was actually in graduate school that I became more focused on resource management per se. And at the time, I wasn't that concerned about which resource. But when I moved to Tucson, my first job opportunity was with the Arizona Department of Water Resources when they had first opened their doors, I mean literally. And that first job became a 23-year marathon.

And it was actually during the time that I was working for the Arizona Department of Water Resources, that I became more and more focused on climate, because clearly things were changing, and drought was a big deal, and the Colorado River was having an impact on water supplies in the state. So, that's really the story. 

Emile: Yeah so you mentioned you've had the role with the state and you've had various roles with water organizations in the southwest, including serving as the Executive Director of the Arizona Water Institute and Director of the Tucson Active Water Management Area for the state of Arizona Department of Water Resources. So I'm curious about what you learned in these roles and how your experience grew from over time, from one role to the next? 

Kathy: Well, of course, one never knows where one's career is going to go. And I guess looking back on it, I'm actually quite surprised at how things evolved. But it was actually learning about management and collaboration and working with the public that really probably changed my career, more than the subject matter knowledge that I developed related to water. You know, I think there are very few people who really understand how government works, and that turned out to be super important in my later job opportunities. But there are so few people who really see what works and what doesn't in working with groups of people and collaborative processes. And so I think those things were most valuable to me. 

Emile: Yeah. Thank you. And I think those collaborative processes are really important. And one, I think, recent collaborative process is the Arizona Tri-University Recharge and Water Reliability Project. That project recently released a report summarizing current water balances in the state, and how climate change may impact future Arizona water supplies. And so I know you were part of this. So what was your role in developing this report? 

Kathy: Well, this Arizona Tri University Recharge and Water Supply Reliability Project was the largest project that I worked on in the entire time that I was at the University of Arizona. It involved more than 40 people, including 15 faculty members across three different universities. And herding that many cats was really a major effort. 

I would say it was also sort of a capstone experience career wise, because it was on behalf of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, which, of course is where I started my career. And also, it allowed me to use a lot of the techniques that we intended to establish as sort of permanent opportunities through the Arizona Water Institute, which was intended to have the three universities working together to support water managers and tribes and local government and industry as they move forward in time on helping students become familiar with the real world, helping faculty know how to deal with the public, etc. 

And so this really, this project pulled all of those strings together for me, and it was a great sort of crowning event for my career.

Emile: I'm excited to learn more about it, and also about how managers can use the report in their decision making. 

Kathy: Well, the focus of the report is on how can you capture water that is currently evaporating from either rainfall or snowpack, and how can you get it recharged underground quickly so that you don't lose it to the atmosphere?

And obviously, the way the water cycle works is different in every basin, because some of them are high elevation and mountainous, and some of them are low elevation and flat. And we have very different climate conditions and different geomorphology in each basin in the state. So we did an assessment of the water balance in each of the 51 groundwater basins across the state.

And we also evaluated how climate change will affect that water balance going forward. We needed to know that to figure out how much water is being lost to evaporation and in what seasons, so that we can figure out which types of approaches might be most effective for capturing the water and getting it underground. So it was an enormous effort. It involved people from about ten different disciplines, including remote sensing and machine learning, you know, big data analysis, as well as surface water modeling, groundwater modeling, ecology, etc. So it was quite a bear to wrestle, but we had a good time doing it. 

I would say water managers are going to find three different things most useful. One is a decision support framework that we developed, which helps them navigate through decision processes to figure out what would be most useful in their own basin. We also developed a matrix of recharge opportunities, which is the first time I've seen anything like this. It's around 50 different ideas for how you can capture water and recharge it in different landscape types across the state.

And then the third I think extremely useful item is those basin profiles that include information that has never been generated before at this scale about how much water is lost to evaporation, how much goes to surface water, how much goes to groundwater. Really important to know if you're trying to make management decisions in basins. 

Emile: We'll be sure to include the links to the project in the episode notes. I'm curious about how the project was funded?

Kathy: The project was funded by the Arizona Board of Regents, which is a very unusual circumstance. So that's the governing body that manages the three state universities. And they essentially set up several projects to help the universities find projects working for state agencies. And the state Department of Water Resources selected our project out of three opportunities that we collectively developed, and they provided three over $3.5 million over a three-year period to do this work.

Sarah: Thanks, Kathy. And I had just one more question on this project. So you mentioned evaporation, and you looked at evaporation from snowpack and other sources. And I know I've seen in the news a lot arguments about evaporation loss from the CAP canals. Was that in this report at all, or have you looked at that maybe in other parts of your career? And I'm curious if that is a lot of evaporation or if not, and maybe some solutions for that if there are some. 

Kathy: Well, that's a great question. Clearly, evaporation from water bodies is a very serious consideration. In the lower basins of Arizona, it's 5 or 6 feet of water per year that evaporates off the surface of a water body.

And so if it's just sitting there, you're losing water. And that's true in Lake Mead and Lake Powell and, you know, the SRP reservoirs and so forth. The canal system itself, the water moves relatively quickly, and it's relatively deep and narrow. My understanding is that the system loses only about 2% of the total amount of water that's moving through the canals to evaporation. So that's not as significant a concern. 

That being said, it's very difficult to capture more water in many parts of the state - along the Mogollon Rim it's much easier. In many other places it's extremely difficult. So we definitely should be looking at, is there a way to actually minimize the surface area of some of these lakes, which turns out droughts do that. So.

Sarah: Okay, great. Yeah, thanks for that. And actually that kind of segues into my next question a little bit. But I'm just thinking back over your entire career and we've talked about various roles that you've played throughout the state. And we'll get into some other roles later. But I'm just wondering how you think that the landscape has changed for water managers in the southwest, you know, over the course that you've seen?

Kathy: Well, I can remember very distinctly when I think the water managers in Arizona started understanding that climate change was happening. And that was in 2006. And the reason I know that is because I actually held a big event for water managers to try to introduce them to the concept of climate change. And at the time, I think they all walked out just shaking their heads and generally disbelieving. I think you'd have to look far and wide now to find a water manager who doesn't think climate change is happening and that it is a problem. So that's probably the largest change. 

When you look at more subtle things, there was a time when we actually had excess CAP water because we had not yet fully developed all the uses for the water. And we were sort of desperately looking around for how can we store it, how can we exchange it? How can we get people to use it? At the same time, we were trying to get them to conserve water because that was the underlying objective and those two messages didn't jive well. So we had a little, some issues with our mandatory conservation programs in the early days. And I think now water managers are pretty bought in the conservation because clearly that's the cheapest source of water at this point.

Sarah: Yeah. Thanks. And just for our listeners, we've used the - we've said CAP a few times now. And so I'm wondering if you - for folks maybe outside of Arizona who are not familiar with the Central Arizona Project - would you be willing to just give a little short explanation of what that is? 

Kathy: Sure. And the Central Arizona Project is a very large federal canal that brings water from Lake Havasu all the way to Tucson. I think it's around 330 miles in length. And it involves a large number of pumping stations. At the time it was built, which was in the 1980s, it was one of the larger federal projects within the Bureau of Reclamation. And it was built primarily to help Arizona get off of its reliance on groundwater and switch to what was viewed as a renewable supply, which was Colorado River water.

So it became a significant portion of the water supply portfolio for both the Phoenix area and the Tucson area. And so now that CAP availability has become more limited, the implications for future water supplies in the central part of the state are rather substantial. 

Sarah: Okay, great. Yeah. Thanks. So I'm going to switch gears just a little bit away from water in a way, but to a big part of your career, which is that you served in the Executive Office of the President under President Obama from 2010 to 2013, and where you were also the lead advisor on water science and policy and climate adaptation within the Office of Science and Technology Policy. So could you share a bit about that experience and what it was like? 

Kathy: Yes. It was very remarkable to find myself in that place. It was not something that I anticipated or specifically tried to achieve. But I found myself in a place that I think I was sort of uniquely qualified for because I had all this management experience and knew quite a bit about many resources.

One of the reasons I did was because, as a regulator with the Arizona Department of Water Resources, I actually had had to interface with electric power and mining and agriculture and municipal utilities. And so that had given me maybe an inch deep, but a mile wide understanding of many topics. I found myself in a place of having to essentially rebuild the capacity of the federal government to actually do the National Climate Assessment, which was required by law, but the capacity to do it had essentially disintegrated during the prior administration.

So I really had a huge amount of responsibility. I had to sort of build the system and find the people, and find the money, and build the vision across many, many people. So we had a 60-person advisory committee. We had 13 federal agencies involved. We had hundreds of authors and I think almost a thousand contributors to the National Climate Assessment report that was released in 2014.

It was by far the most impactful position that I've had. And of course, as you mentioned, I also was able to participate in developing water policy and adaptation policy at a time when that was kind of a big deal. There was Superstorm Sandy. There were all kinds of issues between agencies about water policy and so forth. So it was a remarkable time that was also frustrating, but a great opportunity. 

Sarah: So you touched on the fact that you, in this role, served as the director of the National Climate Assessment, and in this you had to lead hundreds of authors, you had over 1,000 contributors in writing this, this massive report that came out. So I don't know if you want to share any more on that or what it's like to have to lead an effort like that?

Kathy: Yeah. I mean, many people have made jokes about my ability to corral very large numbers of people. I've done it many times over my life. I used to run ice shows, for example. And a friend of mine just told me at one point that he thought the National Climate Assessment was just, you know, an ice show in bureaucracy.

But anyway, you know, I think it is both a privilege and a serious problem to try to get that many people herded in the same direction and to actually perform basically volunteer jobs. So the National Climate Assessment authors are not paid. The only people who were paid were staff members who were generally loaned from agencies or were hired just as independent contractors. So there was no existing framework to do all that with. And that was probably the biggest issue. 

But it also meant we could really focus on how can we make this useful? How can we engage people who are making decisions? How can we try to build this into an adaptation process as opposed to just a collection of information?

And the reason I say that is you can't have successful adaptation unless you're evaluating whether what it is that you're doing is working. And that's what an assessment is. It’s a value and evaluation of what's working, what's not working, what's changing, etc. And so my perspective is that assessments need to be part of adaptation processes. And so it was a unique opportunity to try to get federal agencies to understand that and to make the assessment be more than just a report and rather a commitment to ongoing adaptation.

Emile: How do you think it worked in terms of getting federal agencies to understand the need for integrating assessment? 

Kathy: I would say that was probably the hardest part of what I was trying to achieve. In many cases, I think they heard the words “sustained assessment,” which is what we called it at the time, and they believed that meant they would constantly have to write reports. Whereas what I meant by a sustained assessment was a strategic, long term process where you're collecting data in order to support adaptation and in order to support reports. 

So I would give myself a D minus in terms of the influence I had on that particular topic, and I wasn't alone. More than 150 people have worked with me on that piece of this over time, and I would say none of us have actually succeeded. So it was a valiant effort. And I still believe in this cause. But we didn't succeed. 

Emile: Well, certainly something for people to continue to push forward on. Certainly there's more work to do, and that's definitely an arena for people to continue to work. It's kind of strange, but I think about it as like going to the doctor's office, right? Like, you need to get people to want to go get their checkups, right? Except the checkup for climate and climate adaptation. So we’re going to have to convince people to pay attention to their health, the health of the adaptation. 

And you mentioned something. This is a bit of a sharp left turn, but you mentioned something about ice shows? Can you talk about that a little bit more? 

Kathy: Sure. When I was in junior high school through college, I was very focused on figure skating, and I became an ice dancer and actually a professional ice dancer in the sense that I taught people how to do ice dancing. I did qualify at a relatively high level for competition, but I never competed, and I just loved the creative process of putting together a theme and then designing all the components and the costumes and the music and the whole creative process.

And there was a point in time when I actually almost went to graduate school specifically to do that kind of thing going forward. So I applied to an Arts Administration MBA program, thinking I was going to do that sort of thing in my long-term future. And fortunately for me, I chose something else because I think that would have been a disaster. But it was a momentary fixation. 

Emile: Well, somehow it gave you the skills to move forward on the National Climate Assessment as well. So it's really interesting how those pieces come together to help build something really complicated with many moving parts. So yeah, that's great. 

So for your most recent chapter in your career, you were the Director of the Center for Climate Adaptation, Science and Solutions, and I'm wondering if you can talk about how the Center began and some of the highlights of the Center.

Kathy: Yes. The Center for Climate Adaptation, Science and Solutions was essentially created when I came back from Washington. The idea was that we would try to build a more impactful program at the University of Arizona focused on climate adaptation, because we had so much capacity. We had at that point identified around 60 people who were faculty members at the university who actually engaged in climate adaptation, and yet everybody was working independently.

So the idea was, how can we be more impactful, build a cross campus interdisciplinary adaptation capacity that also is connected to the outside world and helps decision makers with those issues, with translating science and so forth. So in some ways, it's very similar to ideas like the RISAs and the Climate Hubs, but in other ways, I think it's very different because it was about building a platform at the University of Arizona from that capacity and trying to build strength for the University in that way.

Emile: So you just recently transitioned, stepped down, from your role at the University of Arizona. But knowing you, there's a lot of other things still happening. And so I'm curious if there's anything that you want to talk about around what you might currently be thinking about or working on? 

Kathy: Well, there's a couple of things that I'm still engaged in. One is because the Arizona Tri-University Recharge project has had such a warm reception, we've had an ongoing series of requests for media and from various, I mean, radio and TV and podcasts and various other things. And so I'm engaged in designing webinars, and there’ll probably be some follow-up papers as well. The project is continuing in a slightly different way under the leadership of Neha Gupta. There's a no cost extension, and we have some students who are still will be completing their PhDs through the next year. So I'll play a peripheral role with all of that. 

I've also just completed a National Academy study looking at a regional pilot demonstrations for water energy nexus projects. And this is funded by the Department of Energy. And that report has also been extremely well received. And so there are many presentations associated with that. And there may even be some follow up activities.

Possibly more important is the fact that I'm continuing my set of quixotic efforts to combine assessment and adaptation through something that we are now calling Climate Loop, and that's an effort to try to take all this knowledge we have generated and help build a citizen-based version of the National Climate Assessment that is essentially parallel to what the federal government is required to do. So we have been working on how can we fund such a thing? How can we design such a thing? How can we really bring home this idea of adaptation being a learning process? Which in my view, it absolutely is. So I will continue to focus on that.

And then the rest of it's a big experiment. I don't know what all else will happen, but I know I'll be playing with my grandkids more and going birding more frequently and hopefully being slightly more sane. 

Emile: It'll be exciting to see what comes up in terms of next steps, but the Climate Loop, is that what you called it?

Kathy: Yes. 

Emile: That sounds really interesting. So I'll be paying attention to what you're doing in that regard. And sort of taking a big picture look back over your career. What would you say at this moment are some of your top highlights that you're most proud of? 

Kathy: Well, I have had a number of amazing opportunities and I'm very proud of many of them. So I guess for the 23 years I was at the Arizona Department of Water Resources - among my top highlights are the fact that I really built an office of people who really loved to work together and were very impactful and motivated. 

And the other thing was helping to design the assured water supply rules for the state of Arizona. I led that process, and it still stands today as the major incentive for municipal water providers to move from groundwater to renewable water supplies. There are many other things that I'm happy about from my Department of Water Resources days, but those are kind of the highlights.

In terms of what I have accomplished since. Clearly, the National Climate Assessment stands out as probably my most impactful moment and sort of a lucky intersection of need and opportunity that allowed me to sort of bloom in a place I had no anticipation I would be.

And then finally, I guess I would say this, this final project that we've just been describing, the Try University Recharge project, because it really did bring together a lot of the threads in my life. And we again built a very cohesive team. I love seeing faculty members learn right next to students and having retreats and engaging with the real world so that people in academia have some understanding of how things actually work, because unfortunately, they rarely get that opportunity to actually be part of a project that is directly connected to real world decision making processes. So I do feel great about that. 

I guess there's one other project I'm very proud of and that is the Lower Santa Cruz River Basin Study. That was a Bureau of Reclamation study that was evaluating supply and demand imbalances across the Tucson basin. And the thing that was great about that was we had more than 100 stakeholders, I think, engaged over a multiple year process, in the end it was six years. But to have a successful and engaged stakeholder process around a report of that complexity was actually pretty tricky, and I think we played a major role in helping the Bureau of Reclamation do that. 

Sarah: Thanks, Kathy. Those are some pretty amazing highlights. And I wanted to circle back. You mentioned birding as one of your hobbies. And I know you've been a birder for a very long time and have gone on some amazing birding trips. And so I guess I just wonder if you want to talk about that at all, and maybe what you would call as your most amazing place that you've been birding? 

Kathy: Wow, that is a tricky question. I always think that the most recent bird I've seen is the most beautiful, and I have had many really amazing birding experiences. 

I think for me, I'm super motivated to know that these birds still exist because biodiversity is declining, especially among birds, and certainly the number of birds is declining over time. And it's not just climate change, its land use change, pesticides and a number of other issues, but about a third of the species, actually a third of the total birds, that existed something like 25 or 35 years ago are gone. So we're actually seeing a huge decline in the numbers of birds. 

And so when I see them, I'm even more excited because I know they're still there. And they can still, you know, they can still be part of the habitat. I don't know, it's hard to beat going birding in Central and South America because the numbers of species are so huge. I've seen between 250 and 300 species on a couple of the trips that I've been on, and of course, that's so overwhelming. It's hard to learn them all. In fact, it's hard to learn any of them when there's that many. But many of them are so spectacular that it's hard to forget. 

Sarah: Great. Thanks for sharing that. Okay, so we're going to get into kind of wrap up questions here. So were there any questions that we didn't ask you today that you'd like to share with our listeners? 

Kathy: Well, I guess just in terms of a motivating point, I just talked about the fact that I'm concerned about biodiversity decline. And as we work forward in the climate change context as resource managers, I just wish there'd be more conversation about really preserving the biodiversity hotspots in Arizona. Riparian areas are those hotspots, and nobody's standing up and saying, we need to ensure a robust water supply for those places in the future. We did, of course, talk about that in our report, but I don't think there's enough interest in environmental impact or in environmental health for natural habitat. So I would love to reinforce that idea again and hope somebody listening decides to take us up on that.

Sarah: So leading into my next question, I want to ask you about hope. You know, we're talking about birds and biodiversity. And but, you know, we like to ask everyone on here what gives them hope for the future. So where do you find your hope? 

Kathy: Well, I guess I would say two things. One is I think natural systems actually do have a lot of resilience, and if we would stop torturing them so much, they would be doing pretty well. They have the ability to change quite a bit and in some cases relatively quickly, but we need to be much more aware of how to protect natural systems than we are right now. And I'm just impressed by what Mother Nature can do when given a chance.

I think the other thing that gives me hope is, you know, everybody has relatives, not everybody has children or grandchildren, but they certainly know children. And I am really focused on providing opportunities for people in the future and allowing, you know, my own grandchildren to grow up in a world where they still have choices and where biodiversity still exists. I think that that is a unifying theme that can help people reach out to each other, even if they're across great political divides, is just thinking about future generations. 

Sarah: Thanks, Kathy. That's very inspiring. Last question. What is the one thing that you'd like listeners to remember from our conversation today? 

Kathy: That is actually the hardest question you've asked me. You know, I guess my perspective is if you do what you do with passion, that you're likely to rise in your field. And that if you are collaborative and focused on building community around solutions, that is a thing you will feel great about for the rest of your life, whether you succeed or not. So that kind of an effort pays off by itself, even if the specific outcome you had in mind doesn't occur.

Sarah: Excellent. Thank you so much for joining us. It was amazing talking with you. I haven't seen you in a little bit since you've retired, so it's nice to catch up and hear about your long and successful career. So I hope you're enjoying retirement so far and still getting to do the things you love. 

Kathy: Thanks, Sarah.

Emile: Thanks for listening to Come Rain or Shine. Podcast of the USGS Southwest CASC, New Mexico State University and the University of Arizona. If you liked this podcast, don't forget to rate or review it and subscribe for more great episodes! 

Sarah: A special thanks to our production crew Reanna Burnett, and Lauren White. If you want more information, have any questions for the speakers, or would like to offer feedback, please reach out to us via our websites.