Season 4, Episode 5: Allison Lassiter - Sea Level Rise and the Hidden Threat of Saltwater Intrusion
Allison Lassiter, Assistant Professor in City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania
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Dr. Allison Lassiter, Assistant Professor in City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania, joins John to discuss one of the hidden dangers of sea level rise—saltwater intrusion. With expertise in climate adaptation and urban water management, Dr. Lassiter explains how rising salinity threatens drinking water systems, agriculture, and infrastructure. Together, they explore the costly solutions, like desalination, and why small communities face unique challenges. They also discuss the role of state-level strategies and innovative financing in building resilient water systems for the future.
“Salt is not just going to impact one system, or two systems, or three systems. It’s all of these coastal systems that are going to be impacted kind of simultaneously.”
Key Topics
The Threat of Saltwater Intrusion: Allison and John discuss how rising sea levels and saltwater intrusion are already threatening drinking water supplies, agriculture, and infrastructure along the coast.
Desalination Challenges: Exploring the costs, energy demands, and scalability issues of desalination as a solution to rising salinity in water systems.
Impacts on Smaller Communities: Allison highlights the financial and technical struggles smaller water systems face in adapting to salinity challenges and managing long-term water security.
State-Level Strategies for Resilience: The role of state and regional coordination in supporting water systems, from shared pipelines to better funding mechanisms.
The Importance of Conservation: Allison emphasizes the need to reduce water demand and fix leaks in older systems as part of a comprehensive strategy to address salinity and water shortages.
Links to Relevant Studies and Resources:
Allison references a study published in Nature Sustainability that estimates agricultural losses from saltwater intrusion in the Mid-Atlantic region could reach $100 million annually. Learn more about the study here.
Allison discusses her current project, SaltCast, a tool designed to help water suppliers “understand their exposure to salinity from the next week to the next decade.” Visit SaltCast.io to explore the tool.
Allison explains how drought conditions and sea level rise are pushing the salt front in the Delaware River further upstream, threatening Philadelphia’s drinking water intakes. Learn more about salinity management efforts from the Delaware River Basin Commission here.
Allison highlights challenges with desalination facilities, including energy dependency and scalability. Learn more about the Poseidon Desalination Plant outside of San Diego, the largest facility in the U.S.
Further Reading:
Saltwater intrusion and sea level rise are threatening U.S. rural coastal landscapes and water supplies. Learn more in this USGS publication here.
“We have this challenge that exists not just in the U.S., but globally, where water systems are just underinvested in. And there is not enough money in government in the world to get our water systems up to where they need to be.”
Transcript
START (AUDACIOUS WATER EPISODE 5, SEASON 4)
[MUSIC]
JOHN SABO: Welcome to Audacious Water, the podcast about how to create a world of water abundance for everyone. I'm John Sabo, director of the ByWater Institute at Tulane University. On today's show we're diving into the critical issue of sea-level rise and the hidden threat it brings, saltwater intrusion. My guest is Dr. Allison Lassiter, an assistant professor in city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Lassiter's research focuses on transformative methods for managing urban water in the context of climate change, with her recent work focusing on the threat of increasing salinity to drinking-water systems. Together we'll explore how saltwater intrusion is already impacting communities, the challenges of desalination, and the long-term solutions needed to secure our water future.
JOHN SABO: Welcome to the show, Allison.
ALLISON LASSITER: Thanks, I'm so excited to be here.
JOHN SABO: Great. Well, let's set the stage. Sea-level rise is happening right now, and, you know, having moved here from Arizona, where the ocean and sea-level rise is kind of out-of-sight-out-of-mind... I had a road trip with my daughter lily which started in Venice, Louisiana. And interestingly, she was in Venice, Italy a month later. And in Venice, Louisiana I took this picture of her, which is on a podcast from last season about this road trip, where she's standing where the highway literally goes into the ocean. And there are birds fishing in the water but on the highway that's now submerged. And it really brought home to both of us, oh, this is not 2100; it's now. So talk to me about, you know, from your perspective, maybe a little bit about what's happening on the ground and the urgency of the issue.
ALLISON LASSITER: Yeah. Well, sea-level rise, that idea of flooding a road is very imageable. And I see pictures of flooded roads or flooded houses a lot when people are talking about sea-level rise. But one of the issues I've been most interested in or concerned by is not just the actual, like, inundation of the coast, but the fact that that water is salty water, and thinking about what it means for salt to come further inland on the coasts. So there's the aspect of inundation to prepare for, but then there's the aspect of salt being introduced into a lot of our coastal landscapes, our coastal water supplies, interacting with our coastal infrastructure, and thinking about all of these secondary effects of salt, too. So this has been top-of-mind for me recently, but you're certainly right that it's not just some issue that's in the distant future; it's happening now. Most of my work focuses on the southeastern U.S. where there's rates of sea-level rise that exceed global averages. And I think one thing that's pretty challenging is believing that we should begin action on it today, even though it does still seem like a distant issue.
JOHN SABO: I totally agree with that. And that's a great stage-setting statement, because this, you know, set of episodes is about salt at the end of the day. Talk to me about salt, I mean, maybe broadly, like gulf challenges with salt and water supply.
ALLISON LASSITER: Yeah. So my focus is on drinking-water systems and thinking about how they interact with salt from sea-level rise. But certainly I just should mention that that's not the only system that's impacted by increasing salinity along the coast. So agricultural systems are very impacted, and there was a study in nature sustainability looking at the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It sort of estimated that agricultural losses alone from salt could be up to $100 million a year. So this is just in one little region, and that's annually. So we could consider how more places will be experiencing this. And that's certainly salient in Louisiana, where there's a lot of people that are working along the coast. So then coastal infrastructures, too. So salt interacts - it increases rates of corrosion. So there's lots of different kinds of salts within oceans, not just sodium and chloride but we can also think about magnesium or maybe bromide. And these different types of salts have different effects. So they can interact with metals and cause corrosion. They can also help leach out in our drinking-water systems heavy metals like lead. So when we experience salt we don't just experience salts; we experience all these additional problems that pile onto salt. For drinking-water systems they're at this difficult position where there's - so for coastal drinking-water systems they might encounter salts from sea-level rise. But at the same time, especially for surface-water systems, like all the ones that pull from the Mississippi, there's increasing salt just in our freshwater inland because of things like agricultural runoff, and human waste, and even natural materials like rock. So salt is increasing in freshwater, and then also coming in from the ocean. And so those systems that are kind of at the border between where there was fresh water before and where the ocean was, are getting pinched from both sides.
JOHN SABO: How does a small community deal with that, if they have a drinking-water system that's on the frontier? Like, what are the remediations and what do you think the best path forward is for that?
ALLISON LASSITER: Yeah, this is something we're really working on right now, and it's really challenging. So salt is difficult to remove from water; it requires desalination technologies. So you can't use the standard technologies that we have been using for forever to remove, you know, most, like, bacterial contaminants. So it will mean adapting the way that we treat our water systems. And there's a lot of places in the U.S. that have built desalination facilities. And so we might think of that as, like, a great option to move to. There's some challenges though. Desalination facilities are expensive. They require a large capital expenditure up front, and then also they're expensive to operate in an ongoing way. They require intensive energy inputs, and they also require a lot of space. And they tend to not produce the volumes of water that we're accustomed to consuming. Even the largest desalination facilities in the world, like Poseidon outside of San Diego, they have a facility there that supplies about 10% of San Diego's water needs. So it's hard to build one that's at the scale of demand that we might have. So desal technologies are improving, and certainly costs will go down over time, and energy requirements will hopefully go down. It's tough to rely on large energy inputs for your water system, because that can introduce some risk if there's something that takes out the power at any point. And then also for communities that are using brackish water as opposed to sea water, the costs are less, too. So it's not like it's impossible to do desalination, but it's difficult.
JOHN SABO: Allison, there's a lot to unpack there of really important information I think. Let's start with the energy piece. Unpack for the listeners why that introduces risk.
ALLISON LASSITER: Yeah, okay. So, well, you can imagine, for example, in the Florida Keys they're building a desalination facility right now. Now, this is an area that is also very susceptible to hurricanes. And so if you're relaying on local energy sources for powering that, or the grid for powering that, if there's anything that happens to the energy supply in the area then it puts the water supply at risk, because you're dependent on that energy to produce water. So should there be a hurricane that takes out power for a few days it's going to be difficult to produce water during that time. There's ways to, you know, build some backups into systems, but it can be hard to sustain them. So this is - it's nicer to have lower energy requirements to your water system.
JOHN SABO: That makes sense. And here we're talking about largely fossil-generated energy as well, right?
ALLISON LASSITER: Yeah, so water systems often - or desalination facilities, a lot of the newer ones do include renewables when they're building those sources, maybe solar or potentially off-shore wind. The thing is, is those renewables tend to feed into the local power grid, so they're not directly supplying the desalination facility; they're augmenting the local capacity. So they do that because renewables are, you know, often not reliable sources of energy all times of the day, and all days of the week. So they're able to pull a more reliable mix(er) of energy if they draw from the grid. This is to say though that, like, you're still kind of fundamentally using the grid even if you bring online some renewables. And so things like fossil fuels, or water is providing the baseload in that area--could be hydro, it could be nuclear--are still pretty essential in delivering desalination.
JOHN SABO: What about small communities, when we think about desal? Like energy requirements are lower, but my guess is the financial wherewithal is harder. Talk to me about those tradeoffs.
ALLISON LASSITER: Yeah, so one of the big challenges with all of these climate-adaptation problems is... So you might be exposed to this threat of sea-water intrusion or salination, but the issue is really how well can you handle that threat? So some communities will be able to build desalination facilities. Like Hilton Head has, like, really excellent water management, and they have a lot of resources because they have a lot of tourism. But there's other places that just don't have the same capacity. So these smaller communities are often struggling to deal with their water systems today. So about 80% of systems serve 10,000 people or fewer. And it's really important to remember that for water systems almost all of their money comes from the rate payers in their service area. Like something about 95% of financing comes from rate payers, so it's not being distributed from the federal government. So that means if you have 10,000 rate payers, and everybody's paying their water bills, and the water bills are still affordable bills that people can pay, there's only so much money you can bring through the door. This can make it really difficult to raise the capital for funding a major project like a desalination facility. In fact, a lot of these water systems, these smaller ones, are more worried about meeting problems for today that they need to deal with immediately. That could be a broken pipe, it could be needing things like new water regulatory requirements. Like we have new requirements on PFAS or PFA. So something like preparing for a problem that might exist 30 years from now can feel a little bit back-of-mind compared to the other issues that are just pressing.
JOHN SABO: So we have an example of I think exactly what you're talking about right in our backyard in Plaquemines Parish. And I think you've worked in the region--you know, what does a small community like Plaquemines do in the face of what's coming and what they have to deal with today?
ALLISON LASSITER: Yeah, they're in a difficult situation. I don't know the details of what's happening there, but I can say that, you know, relying on - well, some people are using bottled water to drink when the water gets too salty. And this just isn't a great (inaudible). I mean, we consume - I think the U.N. suggests that we have a bare minimum of 15 liters--so what is that, 5 gallons or so--of water per person per day just to, like, survive. But you want about a 50 liters to, like, meet sort of baseline needs. And these are, like, very - I mean, you can just imagine bringing in 50 liters of water to drink, or to use in your household. That's a lot of bottles of water. And even that is very low compared to your average American's water consumption. So anyway, relying on water that comes in through things like bottles is just not very realistic or helpful for a lot of communities. Maybe it's, like, okay for, you know, supplementing drinking water at meals, but it's just not going to meet your household's needs. So then there's this idea of, you know, maybe using smaller-scale desalination facilities. So some places along coastal Louisiana have rented these small desal facilities, and they're just quite expensive to use in and maintain over time. So what will these places do? Probably their best choice is linking up with other water systems in the area and trying to share water resources. Now, this presents a lot of challenges. Building a pipe - so you could conceivably tie into another water system with a pipe. But a pipe, it costs about a million dollars a mile to build a pipe, so you're kind of confined in linking to a nearby water system. But conceivably you could link together and share water resources with somebody that's a little bit further away from the salt that might have better access to fresh water. So for example, Plaquemines maybe could share water with Jefferson, who is still kind of on the edge of the salt line, but they can sort of reach upstream perhaps a little bit more and draw from some fresher water sources. So these things are possible but they're difficult. And that means that the larger water system with that freshwater source is taking on additional risk, which can be pretty tough, because all water systems are pretty risk-averse and don't like to bring on new risks.
JOHN SABO: Yep, I know that very well. You know, one of the things that I - when we had saltwater wedge in the headlines every day in New Orleans, one of the things I was thinking about--as you talk about Plaquemines possibly tapping into an upstream water source that's further from the salt border--is that, that boundary between salt and fresh water is going to ratchet every year.
ALLISON LASSITER: Yeah.
JOHN SABO: And so, like, to me building a pipeline--which was proposed for New Orleans, too, right--is a temporary solution. And so it brought me back to desal. But having been in the western U.S. for so long, and knowing that everyone was pointing to the ocean and salt water as the solution, and knowing that it costs a lot of money to move water from where you would get it, I knew that that wasn't a silver bullet. It feels odd to me to actually suggest it after that long background that I just gave you. Question here is, urgency and kind of long-run planning, like, those are two very different types of sociopolitical conversations. How do you balance that?
ALLISON LASSITER: Yeah. I guess one of the ways we can start to think about this is preparing for emergencies vs. preparing for long-term adaptation. So one of the challenges we're experiencing in Philadelphia right now is very much similar to the one that you're experiencing down in - or you've experienced down near New Orleans, is that there's an inland drought currently, or it's maybe lessening a little bit, which is making less freshwater flow down the Delaware River, which is allowing that salt water to creep up the Delaware from the estuary. And this puts Philadelphia's drinking water intakes at risk very much in the same scenario they've had in Louisiana. So this has been a problem that people along here have been managing for a long time, like since the maybe, I don't know, like, early 1900s, have been really considering and grappling with increasing salinity that might interact with Philadelphia's water intakes. Okay, so there's kind of two challenges to think about. Like, one of them is this drought situation where maybe for a few months there's going to be pressure on the water system. Or another thing is the long-term salinization of these intakes. So eventually Philadelphia's intakes will be contaminated by salt from sea-level rise. It's not a question of if; it's just when. Like, will it be 100 years from now? We don't really know. But in the interim there will be moments where Philadelphia has very high-salinity water. So we can think about how would you adapt for these emergencies? What sort of emergency systems or supplies should we have online? How long of an emergency should we prepare for? Should we prepare for just a few days of high-salinity water? Or should we prepare for a few months of high-salinity water? And these strategies are different than, like, the permanent-salinity strategies. So this would probably be the case and be helpful for New Orleans, too. Like, what could you do to think about augmenting supplies for a few months, like, during a late autumn before all of the sort of winter rains come? Certainly one piece of this whole puzzle is not just bringing more supplies online though; it's reducing demand. So we use a lot of water. We are pretty wasteful with water, particularly in these places that have historically been wet--we don't have the value of conserving water. A lot of older systems like New Orleans lose a ton of water in distribution, so it could be 20%, 30% of the water that's piped through the city. And if we just reduce how much water we need, that makes it a lot easier to supply the volumes of water that we are looking for, and less costly. So as we're thinking about solutions we need to be thinking about both supply-side solutions that might tide us through some of these emergency times, but also these demand-side solutions. Like maybe let's get our consumption under control.
JOHN SABO: It's a great concept to introduce here, and it's something I wouldn't have thought about even having lived in Arizona, where, you know, it's constantly the conversation.
JOHN SABO: Up next Allison explains how smaller communities are navigating the challenge of salinity and the role of state-level strategies and building long-term resilience.
JOHN SABO: One of the questions that always comes up in a conservation context is--and you mentioned this before--you know, the revenue that comes in is rate-based and use-based. How do those small systems survive a situation where all year long they're making less revenue on the water because there's less being sold?
ALLISON LASSITER: Yeah, it's a great question. And it's certainly a problem. There's plenty of examples of conservation. And, like, I think some water suppliers or water systems in Los Angeles were experiencing this, where people conserve and then the system brings them less revenue. You know, we saw this problem also in the energy sector in the past, and because of that move to new ways of thinking about water rates - or rather energy rates. So that was when this kind of concept of rate decoupling was introduced. One of the things that we don't really do very well in water is think about smart ways of considering billing, and considering capital planning, and considering bringing capital costs back into water bills. And so we have a lot to learn from the energy sector and thinking about how to incentivize conservation and pricing in a way that helps the supplier utilities stay afloat, while also encouraging conservation.
JOHN SABO: That's really interesting. You know, the two are very different resources. I have a colleague at Arizona State, Michael Hanemann, who always says, you know, "Energy is more valuable and easy to move, and water is not valuable and really hard and expensive to move." But we still - I think he would agree with you completely that there's still a lot to be learned with pricing structures in energy and how we might introduce some creativity to that in the water sector.
ALLISON LASSITER: Michael Hanemann was on my dissertation committee.
JOHN SABO: Oh, okay.
ALLISON LASSITER: I have spoken to him about this subject. But he writes this great article on the value of water, and he talks about the challenge that sort of Adam Smith put forward, this original environmental economist, which is the value of use vs. the value of exchange. So of course there's this issue with water, which is that it's incredibly valuable in use. Like, we need it more than energy actually. We can live without energy; we can't live without water. But somehow we're not - we don't value it that way. So certainly a component of all of this water work is helping people understand the value of water a little bit more than they currently do. We just really take it for granted.
JOHN SABO: Michael Hanemann, not on my PhD committee, but one of my favorite mentors. So that's a good connection to have been made. Talk to me about something that you're doing right now in research on this topic that you're really excited about.
ALLISON LASSITER: Yeah. Well, one of the things I'm doing is working on adaptation strategies with suppliers. So we're kind of transitioning from a phase of work where we've been evaluating who's going to be threatened by increasing salinity, to figuring out what to do about it. So we're just launching that. There's not too much to report on that yet. But another project that I feel really excited about is something called "SaltCast," we have a website saltcast.io. And what we've done is I'm working with a group of oceanographers, hydrologists, bio-geochemists, on creating a tool to help water suppliers--or I guess any sort of coastal water user--understand their exposure to salinity from the next week to the next decade. So it's all for tidal rivers and estuaries. One of the big challenges with a lot of the ideas we've been talking about is there's actually not really great data. So it's hard to prepare for an issue that you don't know is coming for you. So we're seeking to help with the at least surface-water systems through SaltCast.
JOHN SABO: That's great. Talk to me about how you connect sort of that information and data stream to communities most in need, and maybe communities who are marginalized and may not have access to that kind of information to make adequate household decisions.
ALLISON LASSITER: Yeah, absolutely. So a difficulty is that a lot of these smaller water systems just maybe don't have the (staff) that are thinking about long-term supply-planning problems. So they're dealing with issues that are arising today. But they certainly don't have the team of modelers to create the tools for this. So one of our, you know, first steps is to just create a model that's accessible to people that don't have an in-house team of modelers. Now, there is certainly a gap between just sort of providing a tool and making sure it gets incorporated into decisions and operations. And that's something we're going to have to work on, and that's not a quick fix. One of the things we've certainly noticed is that a lot of smaller water systems--but also really all water systems-might understand the salts is an issue, but they don't have the institutional structures to adapt to salinity information. So should they get salt information - and it doesn't really change their processes yet. So there's going to have to be a sort of shift in the way we think about salt as a contaminant, and how we integrate it into decision-making, or information on salt into decision-making across the board in large water supplies and small water supplies. Those small water suppliers will probably need extra help figuring this out.
JOHN SABO: That makes a lot of sense. Let's come back to sea-level rise. We talked a lot about salt and drinking-water systems. One of the things that I've been struggling with even after seeing my daughter stand in front of that road going into the ocean, is urgency. And I got asked this in a meeting with a bunch of water people, like, how do we increase the urgency of action? And for me when we're talking about millimeters of sea-level rise, you know nobody is going to respond to that, especially if you live in Arizona where I lived. You know, it's, like, "Well, what does that mean?" And saltwater wedges tend to drive up the urgency, but it goes away when the drought - or when the problem is no longer there. What's your perspective on urgency and how we get, you know, diverse constituencies to recognize the urgency of this and act in a way that's appropriate with long-term adaptation?
ALLISON LASSITER: Yeah. It's a really difficult question. I mean, one of the things is that water systems are just - they have so many urgent concerns, so how do you prioritize among all the urgent things? And salt just kind of falls off the backburner. The thing is, salts is not just going to impact one system, or two systems, or three systems. It's all of these coastal systems that are going to be impacted kind of simultaneously. Okay, so what does that mean? Well, like, should each one of these systems individually build their own desalination facility? Should they each individually, from their rate payers, come up with the money so that they can access new loans or, you know, issue a municipal bond and then commit to all of these capital expenses? Should they all be engaging with all of these different private desalination facility builders that, you know, build, operate, own, transfer? What does this look like? Does everybody kind of act on their own? Or does there need to be a more coordinated strategy? And my sense is there needs to be a more coordinated strategy. I don't think that each of these systems has the capability of raising the funding and financing to meaningfully pull this off and put them in a good position in the long term. Okay, so then the question is who needs to feel as though this is an urgent issue? Is it all of the individual systems, or are there states that need to start thinking about owning this problem in a different way? And I think states do. So how do they incentivize water suppliers working together more closely, regionalizing or consolidating as has been a big program in the past, getting small water suppliers to work together, but to specifically manage salinity? How do we think about funding and financing sources to help with adaptation? So at the, you know, state level, at the federal level, we've been really ignoring water systems. The amount of money that comes from the federal government into water systems has steadily declined since the 1970s. And even with the latest infrastructure funding it provides maybe five percent of the identified need for drinking-water systems. So the numbers sound big, like $30 billion, but there's something, like, $1 trillion worth of needed investment just to get systems up to status quo, to maintain good water services today. That's not even about adapting to climate change or building in salinity management. So we have this, like, huge shortcoming in funding going into systems - funding, but also just, like, planning support, and technical support on how to engage with all of this. And I really think it's upstream governance, not just the individual water systems that need to feel urgency on this.
JOHN SABO: That's a great vision for solutions, the strategy piece. And just to, like, play back what you said, I think you advocated for state-level strategy and not a federal one, yeah?
ALLISON LASSITER: Yeah. Well, so the way that water-system finance works right now is typically it is - the federal government does distribute some funding directly to water systems, but it most typically gets distributed to the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund and the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, so these sort of funds that are set up at the state level. And then water systems apply to access money from that fund. It's usually low-cost financing that they're paying back over time. So every state has these revolving funds, and so there's already, regardless of the state, some variety of state infrastructure set up to think about kind of coordinating water projects across the state. Now, there's places where it would really make sense for states to work together better - I don't know, maybe Florida and Georgia at the border could think about working together. We have this issue along the Delaware River--thankfully there's, like, a regional organization that helps manage water sources. So the state is definitely not the perfect unit for managing water; it would ideally be by water (inaudible), or by groundwater, like, the area - like, across all of the Ogallala. But it's probably our most realistic way of thinking about coordinating across systems is working at the state level.
JOHN SABO: Makes sense. I mean, the revolving funds have been successful in spite of, you know, the numbers that you cited, the declining investment from fed and the small percentage of federal investment. One of the things that's nice about the revolving funds is that they do give back and they are self-perpetuating in some way. Very familiar with (inaudible) in Arizona and the State Revolving Funds in general.
ALLISON LASSITER: Though there is the challenge about small water systems often not having the capacity to apply for money from these revolving funds.
JOHN SABO: That was my next question, yeah. No, I totally get that. And that's mainly, like, a human capital issue, right? Like, there's not enough - tell me about that. Expand on that, because I think that's a really important point.
ALLISON LASSITER: Yeah, I mean, so there are organizations out there that are helping these small systems apply for grants, so I don't want to take away from the work that's being done. And plenty of people understand that this is an issue. But the application for these grants is just arduous. And then also the reporting over time afterwards is difficult, too, or it can be. I think people are trying to lessen some of these difficulties and make it smoother, but maybe we're just not quite there yet. So it can be - these smaller systems can require some assistance to apply. The alternative to getting money from one of these revolving funds is typically private financing, so that's access through municipal bonds. Some larger systems in particular--some small systems, too, though--find it easier to go to the municipal bond market than going through the revolving funds. That's possible. But that's also not a no-brainer.
JOHN SABO: That's a good detail. So you pitched a solution - I like it - you know, a solution that's scalable, too. Because, you know, at the state level you could imagine it, you know, transferring with some rules of thumb to other states if one were to do it first. Let's move to kind of a final question, which is what are you optimistic about? What gives you hope about our position and where we're going in terms of adaptation in this realm?
ALLISON LASSITER: [LAUGHTER] Well, there's a lot of creative minds out there, and one of the things that maybe will be interesting that I'm feeling, like, let's just hope, with our recent change in administration who's to say exactly what will happen--or, like, our coming change in administration--who's to say exactly what will happen with financing that's available for critical infrastructure like water. So oftentimes water is more bipartisan of an issue than some other issues, so it's possible that we'll continue to get funding through the door for water systems, which is so badly needed, at least to bring systems up to status quo, if not to adapt to climate change. But we have this challenge that exists not just in the U.S. but globally, where water systems are just under-invested in. And there is not enough money in government and the world to get our water systems up to where they need to be. And so globally there's this call to think about public-private partnerships and bringing more private finance into water systems. This is a mine field; there is a lot of challenges to navigate in bringing more private money into water. But I also think it's something that needs to happen. I mean, my preference would be for everything to stay public, but there's - I don't see a path forward for us to just rely on public money and to keep water systems safe and secure in the U.S. or globally. So it could be that in this moment where we possibly don't have as much money from federal administrations to adapt to climate change, that people start to get more creative in thinking about ways that we can bring more private finance into water systems. There's a lot of people with access to private capital that want to see climate adaptation go forward, and also want to fund basic rights like water. So I'm hopeful that we'll come up with some new ways of funding and financing over, you know, the coming years that end up being really productive and helpful, and creating better water systems.
JOHN SABO: Well, I think that's a great place to stop. Thank you so much for being on the show, Allison.
ALLISON LASSITER: Thank you for having me. It was so great to talk to you, John.
JOHN SABO: Likewise.
[MUSIC]
JOHN SABO: Okay, so that's a wrap for this sobering episode. Sea-level rise is not something we might expect in 100 years; it is here now. The saltwater intrusion we saw with the encroaching saltwater wedge in New Orleans in 2023 is one of the consequences of sea-level rise, and this phenomenon will only be more and more common in the coming decade. Hence we need to learn from near-disaster, like the events in 2023, and plan now for what will become a common challenge in the near future. One clear theme that emerges from my conversation with Allison is that the impacts of saltwater intrusion are not just relevant to New Orleans--it is happening all over the Gulf south states that border the Gulf of Mexico, and also on the Eastern Seaboard right in her back yard. If we turn to solutions there is the well-traveled silver-bullet idea of desalination. Will this work, especially in smaller communities? Allison points out that the prospect for public financing for this in small to medium communities is bleak, because these communities often lack the expertise to apply and manage grant funding that is critical for building adaptive capacity. On a positive note, Allison thinks that there is hope. We have adequate human capital and creative minds to innovate new financial instruments that fuse public and private capital to break through to new solutions.
JOHN SABO: That's it for this episode of Audacious Water. If you like the show please rate and review us, and tell your colleagues and friends. For more information about Audacious Water and to find in-depth show notes from this episode, visit our website at AudaciousWater.org. Until next time I'm John Sabo.
[0:36:28]
END (AUDACIOUS WATER EPISODE 5, SEASON 4)