Protecting The World's Most Essential Resource: How Utilities Can Navigate Growing Risks To Drinking Water Supply
By Donnie Ginn
Across the United States and globally, protecting drinking water supply has become more complex, more urgent, and less predictable. Utilities are navigating a convergence of pressures — climate variability, emerging contaminants, and accelerating population growth — that are reshaping long-standing assumptions about water availability, quality, and resilience.
What were once isolated stressors are now compounding risks. Extreme weather is no longer a rare once-every-100-years occurrence and demand patterns that were steady for decades are shifting quickly. Together, these trends are redefining what it means to deliver safe, reliable drinking water.
Yet within this disruption lies a critical opportunity. Utilities that move beyond reactive strategies and embrace integrated, forward-looking approaches can strengthen resilience, protect public health, and build systems capable of sustaining communities for decades to come.
Climate Change: Redefining Water Supply Risk
Climate change isn’t a distant threat but an operational reality. Shifting precipitation patterns, prolonged droughts, extreme heat, and more intense storm events are straining both surface water and groundwater systems.
In parallel sectors, industry data shows climate-driven events occurring with greater frequency and intensity, forcing infrastructure providers to rethink planning assumptions.
Traditional supply planning no longer is sufficient. Utilities must instead plan for a wider range of scenarios, including more extreme and less predictable conditions.
The good news is that the ability to plan for that activity is moving in the right direction. According to the survey-driven 2026 Black & Veatch Water Report, many utilities already have plans in place or underway, including risk and resilience strategies, hazard mitigation, and other system-level efforts. These efforts point to a stronger planning foundation, but constraints continue to shape what happens next. Funding, training, and coordination remain key needs for emergency management and disaster response.
Leading utilities are responding by embedding climate risk modeling into long-term planning, allowing them to anticipate both operational and financial impacts and prioritize investments accordingly. This shift, from reactive response to proactive mitigation, is foundational to protecting drinking water systems in a changing climate.
Emerging Contaminants: Expanding The Definition Of Water Quality
At the same time, the definition of “safe” drinking water is evolving. Increased awareness and regulation of emerging contaminants — particularly PFAS, microplastics, and other trace compounds — are challenging utilities to adapt treatment processes and monitoring strategies.
These contaminants often occur at extremely low concentrations but carry significant public health and regulatory implications. Detecting and removing them requires advanced treatment technologies, specialized expertise, and substantial capital investment.
According to drinking water respondents to the Black & Veatch survey of more than 600 U.S. water sector stakeholders, 35% report they already are planning or implementing treatment for PFAS, reflecting the growing urgency of compliance.
There is no single “silver bullet” solution. Instead, utilities increasingly are adopting a portfolio approach combining targeted treatment upgrades with source water protection, risk-based monitoring, and adaptive planning. However, 31% of respondents from utilities addressing PFAS cite budget and ratepayer considerations as the greatest limiting factor, underscoring the financial complexity of compliance.
This approach reflects a broader shift in the industry: from compliance-driven decision-making to risk-informed, lifecycle-based strategies that can evolve as regulatory requirements change.
Population Growth And Demand: A New Scale Of Pressure
Population growth and urbanization are adding another layer of complexity. In many regions, utilities are not only managing aging infrastructure but also expanding systems to accommodate rapid growth.
At the same time, demand is becoming less predictable. Industrial development, electrification, and new economic drivers are reshaping water use patterns, often at scale and speed systems were not designed to accommodate.
The implications already are visible. According to the report findings, utility confidence in serving large new industrial customers has dropped from 73% in 2024 to 60% in 2026, highlighting the strain that new demand is placing on existing systems.
Utilities are adapting. Among those implementing strategies now or planning them within two years to manage rising industrial demand, 62% are pursuing expanded reclaimed or non-potable supplies, helping meet new needs without compromising existing supply reliability.
This is particularly critical in water-stressed regions, where new demand must be met without compromising existing supply reliability.
From Challenge To Opportunity: A New Utility Playbook
While the pressures facing utilities are significant, the path forward is increasingly well-defined. Across the industry, leading utilities are adopting a more integrated, opportunity-driven approach.
Diversifying water supply portfolios
Just as energy providers are diversifying generation sources to reduce risk, water utilities are expanding supply strategies to include water reuse and recycling, desalination in coastal or water-scarce regions, aquifer storage and recovery, and interconnected regional water systems.
These approaches reduce reliance on any single source and provide flexibility during periods of stress.
Investing in advanced treatment technologies
Utilities are accelerating adoption of advanced treatment solutions capable of simultaneously addressing multiple contaminants. These include granular activated carbon (GAC) and ion exchange for PFAS removal, membrane technologies such as reverse osmosis, and advanced oxidation processes (AOPs).
Critically, these investments increasingly are designed with modularity in mind, allowing systems to adapt as new contaminants emerge or regulations evolve.
Embedding digital intelligence and predictive analytics
The growing complexity of water systems is driving increased adoption of digital tools, but a gap remains. While 70% of utilities report collecting sufficient data, only 19% say they are effectively leveraging it, highlighting a significant possible opportunity to improve decision-making and operational performance.
Digitalization enables real-time monitoring of water quality and system performance, predictive maintenance to reduce failures and downtime, and improved demand forecasting and operational efficiency.
These capabilities are essential for managing both variability and scale in modern water systems.
Strengthening cross-sector collaboration
No utility operates in isolation. Protecting drinking water supply increasingly requires coordination across energy providers (for treatment and pumping reliability), industrial users (to manage large-scale demand), regulators and policymakers (to align standards and funding), and communities and stakeholders (to build trust and transparency).
That collaboration also is reshaping how infrastructure is delivered. Alternative delivery models are expanding rapidly, with projects tripling in recent years from 196 to 587 nationwide, reflecting the need for faster, more flexible project execution.
Building resilience into every decision
Perhaps the most important shift underway is how utilities define resilience itself.
Historically, resilience meant the ability to recover from disruption. Today, it’s about anticipating risk, adapting in real time and maintaining service under a wide range of conditions, requiring a holistic approach that integrates physical infrastructure hardening, advanced treatment capabilities, digital system intelligence, and workforce development and knowledge transfer.
It also requires balancing competing priorities — reliability, affordability, and sustainability — in an environment where each is becoming more difficult to achieve.
A Critical Moment For Water Utilities
Water utilities are at a pivotal moment. The pressures of climate change, emerging contaminants and population growth are not temporary — they are structural shifts that will define tomorrow’s water systems.
The utilities that succeed will be those that move proactively, embrace integrated, data-driven decision-making, invest in flexible, future-ready infrastructure, and collaborate across sectors and stakeholders.
Protecting drinking water supply always has been essential. Today, it is also strategic, underpinning economic growth, supporting public health and enabling community resilience.
The opportunity ahead is not just to respond to emerging challenges but to redefine what a resilient, sustainable water system looks like — and build it.
Donnie Ginn serves as Executive Vice President and Integrated Water and Environmental Business Leader at Black & Veatch with more than 30 years leading complex municipal and industrial water and wastewater infrastructure. A licensed professional engineer, he has directed delivery of more than 100 projects across both traditional and design-build delivery models.