An Eye On Global Resilience From A Miami Perspective

By Hardeep Anand

Miami-Dade is seeing the impact of climate change firsthand, and responding with a resiliency plan that others can look to for guidance.

Five thousand years ago, nature created an extraordinary path in South Florida known to some as the “River of Grass” but to all as “The Everglades.” It’s not an overstatement to say that this precious natural treasure makes life in this area possible, because the Everglades is where Miami-Dade County drinking water gets its start.

The Miami-Dade County region enjoys a wealth of natural beauty in addition to the Everglades. Understandably, Miami is internationally recognized for its beaches. But its sensitive ecosystems, including coral reefs, Biscayne Bay, coastal wetlands, hardwood hammocks, and globally imperiled pine forests, are so unique that two national parks, a national marine sanctuary, aquatic preserves, and water conservation areas have been established inside the county — a circumstance that occurs nowhere else in the U.S. These natural resources support wildlife habitats, recreation, and tourism. They also help reduce erosion, reduce flooding, and contribute to clean air and water.

Amid all this natural beauty, the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department provides high-quality drinking water and wastewater services, promotes water conservation, and works to safeguard public health and the environment. The hardworking men and women of the utility maintain more 14,000 miles of combined water and wastewater pipes, and its drinking water is tested more than 324,000 times a year to ensure its quality.

Miami-Dade County drinking water surpasses federal, state, and local standards, and this past April, the taste of its water was recognized as “The Best Drinking Water” by the Florida Section of the American Water Works Association (AWWA).

Surrounded By Water

As you probably already know, Miami-Dade County is a coastal community. What you may not have realized is that it’s located just 6.5 feet above sea level. This makes the region extremely susceptible to severe weather, which can negatively impact its economic drivers, tourism, and agriculture.

The Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department serves 2.3 million county residents as well as millions of visitors every year. These numbers reflect the sheer size of the Miami-Dade County region — at more than 2,000 square miles, the county is larger than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware.

Simply put, Miami-Dade County is surrounded by water, and water is the primary way through which it feels the effects of climate change. Its main source of drinking water, the Biscayne Aquifer, is shallow and porous — and, together with over a thousand miles of canals that crisscross the county, is part of a highly managed and delicately balanced water supply and drainage management system.

Given the dual realities of climate change and sea-level rise, some of the population’s concerns include:

• Precipitation frequency and intensity
• Flooding
• Saltwater intrusion
• Natural disasters and severe weather events

Climate Change: Global Issue, Local Consequences

While climate change is a global issue, it’s felt on a local scale in Miami-Dade County. Since 1994, the region has experienced 4 inches of sea rise; 2 to 6 additional inches are expected by 2030, and up to 14 inches are expected by 2060. Therefore, the area finds itself at the frontline of adaptation while actions are being taken by local officials, universities, and organizations to create a sound foundation of planning, policy, and public awareness.

Water is often called our most precious resource, and with good reason. Clean drinking water and wastewater treatment services sustain core functions of critical infrastructure, communities, and human health. Water is necessary for individual health. But it’s also critical to scores of other processes and facilities. AWWA says that any measure of a successful society, from the health of its economy to its public safety, is in some way related to the ability to access safe water.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget the importance of water. It’s a fact that the world is covered in water ― about 75% of the planet is made up of it. There are 326 million trillion gallons of water on earth. That sounds like quite a bit, until you consider the following:

• 97.5% is saltwater and undrinkable.
• 2.5% is freshwater, but most of this is trapped in the poles, in glaciers, and deep underground.
• That leaves only .4% of the water on earth to share among 7 billion people, and that population will reach close to 10 billion by 2050.

In addition, agriculture means that we must share that water with 1 billion pigs and sheep, 1.4 billion cattle, and 19 billion chickens. Then there’s the water that goes into all the world’s crops — keep in mind that it takes 160 liters to produce one large banana.

In other words, .4% is not much water at all. So, we all need to be smart with this vital yet limited resource.

Getting Smart About Water

Smart water and smart water networks resonate with two broad themes: resilience and data-driven decision-making. Data-driven decision-making deals with water quality and quantity management as well as infrastructure resilience, while smart water networks are resilient networks that leverage data to respond effectively to shocks and stresses.

Smart water networks seek to alleviate challenges in water management through the integration of information and communication technology products, solutions, and services. Such technologies are adapted to monitor water resources, which enable water utilities to prioritize maintenance issues more effectively through asset management and data-driven decision-making.

It’s no secret that water utilities are asset-intensive, and historically, these assets have been managed in silos. However, the emergence of smart meters and smart water networks, the challenges of an aging workforce, and a demanding regulatory environment make it critical to deal with assets comprehensively through an asset management framework. Smart networks and comprehensive asset management programs facilitate a flow of information that can be used to transform and optimize utility performance and infrastructure integrity.

Smart water monitoring plays another vital role by providing the facts that water networks must package to communicate a compelling story to its stakeholders, customers, elected officials, and other policymakers. These stories help to ensure that water and water utilities receive the attention and support they deserve in the public sphere.

To put things in context, it’s also important to understand the term “resilience.” It has several definitions from various organizations, but a particularly relevant explanation was crafted by 100 Resilient Cities, an organization that was dedicated to helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social, and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century.

Resilience: The capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience.

Biological systems have been useful in the study of complex systems, and high resilience in the face of uncertainty is at the heart of evolutionary biology and natural selection. Similarly, resilience is fundamental to water utilities for withstanding shocks and stressors and surviving an unpredictable future.

Resilience and efficiency are both design choices that need to be considered when planning structures as well as processes. They are both important concerns for water utilities, though sometimes there is a direct compromise to be made between the two. Smart data can help decision-makers choose the right tradeoff on a case-by-case basis.

Over the course of evolution, the ability to balance resilience and efficiency has proven essential for systems to thrive over the long term. Smart water networks will help water utilities do the same.

Data’s Role

The water sector has long had data in the form of hydraulic models, lab analytical data, and SCADA data. But currently, the world’s data landscape is chaotic and cluttered:

• 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day
• 90% of the data in the world was generated over the past two years
• The number of smart devices is projected to reach 200 billion by 2020

With the onslaught of all this new data, new terms have been created that deal with receiving more information than one can possibly parse: infoxication, information anxiety, and infobesity.

The challenge for the water sector is to manage our data well so that we can better manage our water utilities, making them more efficient and resilient. Smart water networks cannot afford to be infobese, but the data warehouse can become infobese as the Internet of Things (IoT) and digital sensor technology are scaled up within water utilities. We need to cut through the clutter, prioritize, and become lean and efficient data-analyzing machines.

Smart water networks need data discipline. We need to be purposeful in the collection, dissemination, and use of data — this will help ensure that data is reliable. Then we need to use that data to inform our decisions and overall strategy.

A smart water utility is part of a larger network of stakeholders that are connected by data. This interconnected structure ensures that data is being leveraged and accessed across various functions. And as we all know, there is power in numbers. So, when we grow our smart networks, they become stronger and more resilient.

One thing to keep in mind is that the “Smart Water Journey,” like any other resilience journey, is incremental. It involves looking back and learning from past lessons as we bounce forward to face the shocks and stressors to come — this is the resilient mindset.

A Resilient Future For Miami And Beyond

Resilience will ensure that Miami-Dade County, its water, and all the other treasures the region has to offer will be enjoyed for generations to come. But the fact is, to be fully effective, water resilience needs to be addressed on a global scale because we are all in this together. All water has value — drinking water, wastewater, stormwater, and everything in between — and should be managed in a sustainable, inclusive, integrated way. One model that can help reach this goal is a circular economy, which is a closed-loop system that minimizes waste and makes the most of resources.

The US Water Alliance has applied the circular economy perspective to the water sector to create the “One Water” approach. While this approach focuses on water, its goals and outcomes are thriving local economies, vibrant communities, and healthy ecosystems. The circularity of the One Water approach is rooted in the fact that no matter who we are, where we live, or what we do, water connects all of us.

The big challenges in the field of water call for transdisciplinary engagement, which integrates the input from several disciplines as well as practical knowledge. We cannot solve the big water challenges by taking a monodisciplinary perspective. Think, for instance, of water scarcity, flooding, and the replacement of aged infrastructure. We can’t tackle these kinds of questions with technical expertise alone. They require the input of engineers and scientists, but also of administration specialists, geographers, and economists. Moreover, we won’t manage with exclusively scientific knowledge. For innovations to succeed, we also must draw on the experiential knowledge of policymakers, entrepreneurs, maintenance engineers, and others.

Building A Resilient Water Workforce

Resilient organizations are composed of resilient people, and human resilience is engendered by education. For those in the water sector, sharing knowledge is a big part of successfully addressing climate change as well as other shocks and stressors — and that means keeping yourself informed as well as sharing your knowledge with others.

People cannot solve problems they do not understand, so water industry professionals must be conversant with issues at the granular “1-foot” level in order to be an effective part of the solution. This cannot happen unless the water industry has a sustainable method for sharing knowledge. The nonprofit One Water Academy was founded as a platform for curating intellectual capital from around the globe in order to develop water professionals for a resilient, One Water world.

One Water Academy has built a digitally connected community to allow easy access to water professionals from across the globe. It is a convenient learning solution featuring online and instructor-led training, live webinars, social sharing, gamification of learning, discussion boards, certification tracking, coaching and mentoring, use cases, mobile learning, and more.

By leveraging the knowledge gained through One Water Academy, water professionals gain further ability to influence and lead the move toward resilience within the water sector.

Hardeep Anand has dedicated his engineering career to the advancement of public policy to benefit the environment and the community. Mr. Anand has more than 25 years of professional engineering, program management, and leadership experience in the public and private sectors, which he leverages to create and implement programs that realize efficiencies and provide tangible results. As Director of One Water Strategy at Miami-Dade County, he focuses on breaking down silos in water management within county government and across jurisdictions, laying the foundation for a collaborative, integrated approach to water. Previously, as Deputy Director for the Miami-Dade Water & Sewer Department, he oversaw a multibillion-dollar Capital Improvement Program that delivered innovative projects with the objective of shifting from a transactional approach to water infrastructure planning to one that will transform the water system across the region.