Assessing One Water, nationally and locally

To succeed, movements must take stock of their progress at regular intervals, learn from successes and failures, and make necessary adjustments. The same holds true for the One Water movement. 

At a session held as part of the U.S. Water Alliance’s recent 2022 One Water Summit in Milwaukee, participants highlighted two efforts to assess the current state of One Water: One is examining the movement across the United States as a whole, while the other aims to enable local entities engaged in One Water efforts to evaluate their progress on an individual level.

The State of One Water

As part of the September 14 session titled “Understanding and Measuring One Water,” panel members described the U.S. Water Alliance’s inaugural State of the One Water Field National Survey. Launched in September, the survey is open to individuals who work for a U.S. city, utility, or organization or who own, manage, operate, advocate for, or benefit from water systems, according to the survey description on the U.S. Water Alliance website.

“The vision of this project” is to “track the growth of the One Water movement so that we can collectively work toward making One Water the new normal in our country,” said Jennifer Walker, the director of the Texas Coast and Water Program at the National Wildlife Federation and a member of the group that developed the survey. “We want to see where we are and how we can continue to help lift that vision up and help operationalize it,” Walker said.

The State of the One Water Field National Survey has three primary goals, said Joseph Danyluk, the OneWater director for Jacobs and another participant in the development of the survey. “The first is establishing a baseline and identifying metrics for people, for place, and for practice,” Danyluk said. “The second is identifying barriers to the advancement of One Water, more so at a national or regional scale.” Identifying such barriers can help facilitate approaches to overcome them, he noted.

The third goal for the survey entails “envisioning where the industry is headed,” Danyluk said. “Are we getting better over time? Are we static? Are there scales that are more conducive to One Water approaches? Are there regions that are really getting things right, and what can we learn from those places to share those examples with others?”

Returning to the concepts of people, place, and practice, Walker likened them to the “three indicators” that reflect a “healthy One Water field.” People are key, she noted. “People make a movement, and we wanted to see if we have a movement,” Walker said. “A healthy field of practice requires networks of people with a shared identity.” 

“This indicator is critical, because only with a network of One Water changemakers will the movement grow,” Walker said. “We wanted to describe that and hopefully quantify it.”

As part of assessing place as an indicator of the health of the movement, the survey will be used to test the hypothesis that “cities, regions, and watersheds across the United States are really institutionalizing One Water,” Danyluk said. To this end, the survey is intended to “identify explicit One Water plans,” he said. At the same time, the survey will be used to determine the extent to which collaboration is occurring among various players, including utilities, other entities within the water sector, communities, and other watershed partners.

Finally, the survey is expected to shed light on “how One Water is maturing as a practice,” Walker said. “Are we moving toward integration? Is what we’re doing sustainable and increasing sustainability? Is equity embedded in the work that we’re doing? Is One Water clearly understood in communities?” To this end, survey respondents will be asked to provide details regarding guidance documents, frameworks, standards, and reports, Walker said. “We know there’s a lot out there.”

The survey closes on November 2, and the findings are to be released in January. “One of the goals is to lean into data visualization” as part of conveying the results, Walker said. The idea is “to take all this data and to cut through the complexity to clearly communicate the state of One Water to the One Water field,” she said.

The State of One Water Field Survey will identify “where we are as a movement,” said Inge Wiersema, a vice president and One Water Leader for Carollo Engineers, which contributed to the survey’s development. “The goal is to make this replicable, so in the future this can be repeated and we can actually measure progress and identify areas of improvement.”

A framework for cities

Funded by the Water Research Foundation (WRF), the work to develop the Ratings Framework for One Water Cities began in January 2020 and was completed in September 2022. The project was conducted by the One Water Solutions Institute at Colorado State University, Carollo Engineers, Florida International University, and the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure.

On its website, WRF describes the project as an effort “to help utilities and municipalities identify effective strategies and viable technological, policy, institutional, and financial pathways toward One Water. Specifically, the project will create a rating system and guidebooks with key metrics and benchmarks to assess the progression toward One Water cities, benefits and co-benefits, and competing trade offs. The rating system will explicitly include information on policy, institutional, legal, financial, and technical factors that provide bridges or inhibit progress toward One Water.”

The project began with a literature review, expert interviews, and a survey of WRF subscribers, said Mazdak Arabi, the director of the One Water Solutions Institute and the project’s principal investigator, during the September 14 session. 

Based on the literature review, the project team identified nine key factors for One Water programs, Arabi said. The factors are institutional collaboration, governance, and organizational culture; stakeholder/community support; water supply resiliency; flood and stormwater resilience; watershed and ecosystem health; water recycling and resource recovery; climate change resilience; livability, quality of life, and affordability; and social, environmental, and economic equity.

Interviews were conducted with the leadership of 17 utilities, cities, or counties that have established or are in the process of establishing One Water programs, Wiersema said. The various organizations represented “quite a big spread” in terms of One Water experience, Wiersema said. “It was a really wide range in how these utilities are approaching One Water.” Participating entities also varied in terms of size, location, water availability, and responsibilities.

As a means of enabling cities or utilities to ascertain their progress in developing One Water programs, the framework will allow users to gauge where they stand in terms of five categories: planning, culture, stakeholder engagement, informed action, and monitoring. For each category, users of the assessment will determine if they have reached one of three levels—onboarding, progressing, or advancing. 

“The framework is designed to help cities and utilities understand, ‘How can I get from this place to the next place?’” Wiersema said. To help users of the framework progress in their One Water journey, the project team will soon release a “guidebook” to walk entities through the process, she said. 

As a follow-up to the framework, the “logical next step” is to develop a web-based tool that “walks communities, cities, and utilities through the [assessment] process,” Arabi said. “We’ve started that process, but that will take another six months to a year to complete.”

Complementary efforts

Because the State of One Water Field Survey is national in scope and the WRF effort is locally focused, the two projects “complement each other,” Wiersema said. 

With their respective focal points, the two efforts will help shine a light on the current state of the One Water movement, Danyluk said. “The results of these surveys are going to identify where the gaps and deficiencies are and where we need to improve within the movement,” he said.