Phoenix Is Dangerously Close to a Water Crisis. Are These Old Ideas Solutions?
Reading Time: 5 minutesA 2008 report—which included a sci-fi portrait of the future of Phoenix, Arizona—provides some dizzying lessons., Arizona water shortage: A 2008 report on urban growth in Phoenix contains some eerie lessons.
This month, we got some bombshell news: The Arizona Department of Water Resources has recently concluded that, by 2121, water demand in the greater Phoenix metro area will exceed groundwater supplies by nearly 5 million acre-feet, or about 1.6 trillion gallons. As a result, the state will stop issuing assured water-supply determinations in the Phoenix Active Management Area based solely on groundwater supplies. That means that new housing developments that rely solely on wells will no longer be allowed; developers will have to get their water from somewhere else, which will not only be more costly, but could be difficult, since other water supplies are also shrinking. That may not slow growth, but it does provide a bit of a wake-up call in a state that is notoriously sleepy when it comes to dealing with water.
Recently, however, while I was digging through my digital archives—files I’ve saved from past reporting projects—I ran into an old report from 2008 put out by Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy. [Disclosure: ASU is a partner with MediaDownloader and New America in Future Tense.] Given the recent news, the report, called Megapolitan: Arizona’s Sun Corridor, is prescient. Its authors take on the sprawling urban beast that stretches from Prescott to the Mexico border, with Phoenix and Tucson at its heart. The urban-planning policy report looked ahead 30 years to imagine the challenges and opportunities facing the 8-million-person megalopolis that authors expected to see there by now.
It’s fascinating to read the report 15 years after it was written, not only to see what the policy nerds of 2008 got right and wrong about their future (and our present), but also because it provides a window into what was happening at that moment in time—and how much the region has and hasn’t changed in the last decade and a half. It’s especially interesting given that the report was published just after the housing bubble burst spectacularly, hitting southwestern cities especially hard.
The report is daunting to read, clocking in at 50 pages of demographics, economics, governance, and land-use issues. But the authors distill many of their predictions down into a five-page speculative fiction scenario intended to ‘point out lessons, concepts, and innovations that should be considered now so that good public policy will be made for the future of the Sun Corridor.’
In this imagined vision of the future, a Phoenician named Sylvia returns to her home-megalopolis in 2035 and reminisces about the state’s changes over the previous three decades. It’s a dizzying, dystopian-slash-utopian view of our present via the authors’ futuristic look from the past, and reading it kind of feels like watching old episodes of The Jetsons.
The scene opens with Sylvia’s Phoenix-bound flight from China descending toward one of the Sun Corridor’s four major airports. The plane passes over a 10,000-acre concentrated solar project—the world’s largest—as Sylvia explains to her companion that the 2008 financial crisis shocked right-wing leaders into taking a more progressive path and redirecting the state’s economy from reliance on single-family home construction to a ‘knowledge economy,’ based on science, information, and technology. To prepare Arizonans like Sylvia for all of this, state lawmakers had made education a top priority. (It’s science fiction, after all.) She then boards a vehicle that merges onto the ‘smart lane’ on I-17; the future is still clogged with cars, though now they’re electric, moved by induction coils underneath the asphalt and guided by something akin to A.I.
Looking back from 2035, Sylvia informs us that a drought first gripped the state in 2018, and had not let go by 2035. That resulted in a lot of dust—in 2022, sci-fi Sylvia says, Newsweek declared the Sun Corridor the ‘new dustbowl.’ That actually slowed population growth for a time. But water scarcity was still not a problem. In the 2020s, our narrator explains, ‘the Sun Corridor’s water managers said the population of 8 million still had plenty of water supplies despite decreasing rainfall’ thanks to new technologies such as desalination and conservation measures. ‘Stretching water supplies insured that growth could continue,’ Sylvia says, while her colleague gapes out the EV’s window at a stucco sea of single-family homes and abandoned big-box stores.
Now let’s fast-forward—or rewind, or whatever—to the present day to see how the report’s prophecies held up.
Tucson and Phoenix may be sprawling toward each other, but they haven’t merged to form any kind of cohesive megapolitan area. And the Sun Corridor still has a way to go before it reaches 8 million people.
Solar installations are slowly blanketing public land in Arizona, but not nearly to the extent the report predicted. Renewable energy has yet to displace fossil fuel use: The state currently gets just 10 percent of its electricity from solar. Natural gas and nuclear provide the bulk of the state’s power, though a new wind facility recently came online at a working cattle ranch.
The Phoenix area is establishing itself as an electric vehicle manufacturing hub, and the feds just committed to loaning a battery company $850 million to establish a battery factory in Buckeye. Meanwhile, water-guzzling data centers have sprouted across the region. But knowledge itself isn’t necessarily growing along with the knowledge economy. Arizona is still the nation’s stingiest state when it comes to public school spending—so much for the prioritizing education prediction—and it consistently ranks near the bottom for educational attainment. Politically, the state has moved slightly to the left, but the Legislature is still dominated by the right wing.
Phoenix has been called the world’s least sustainable city, though the city’s leaders hope to make it the most sustainable desert city in the world. But Newsweek has not declared Phoenix the ‘new dustbowl.’ Dust storms do rip through from time to time, but so far, dust is not the most significant effect of climate change, nor has it dampened population growth the way the authors expected.
A more accurate scenario would have had Sylvia—the fictional narrator—at least mention the blistering heat, which may be the most consequential effect of climate change in Phoenix. A recent peer-reviewed study found that if a power outage were to occur in Phoenix during an extreme heat event and disable the air conditioning, nearly 800,000 people would require emergency health care, and some 13,000 residents would die. Even without that sort of calamitous event, heat kills in the region: Last year in Maricopa county, there were 425 heat-related deaths—compared to 49 in 2008, when the Sun Corridor report was written—and so far this year, five people have died from confirmed heat-related causes.
The 2008 soothsayers were basically right about water scarcity, though: So far, it hasn’t limited growth. In 2022 ,more than 2,000 building permits were issued per month in the Phoenix metro area, and Maricopa county remains one of the nation’s fastest-growing regions. In 2008, the authors write, the conventional wisdom was, essentially: ‘Why worry about water?’ Water managers assured the populace they could accommodate growth by transferring water from agriculture to housing or from wet regions to the desert. But this Pollyanna-ish attitude seems to be changing … at last.
Predicting the future is hard, and the report’s authors were relatively foresightful, even if their predictions about dust and political shifts were a bit off. They believed that a dustbowl would spark a new urge for sustainability—and get a new governor elected, who would declare: ‘Our past is haunting our future. We must face the challenge of restoring our land by changing our ways or suffer dire social, economic, and environmental consequences. It’s time for extraordinary deeds, not merely words, regarding the sustainability of the most populous part of our state.’
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/06/phoenix-water-policy-imagining-the-future.html
Ref: slate
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