Coastal Water Resources: Scientific Challenges and Opportunities - Video Excerpts

Paul Sandifer, Senior Scientist for Coastal Ecology, NOAA's National Ocean Service
What I want to try to do, very briefly, is encapsulate some of the major issues that you’re actually already talking about.  I probably won’t reflect on anything new, but I want you to think of things in the way that they’re interconnected, and let’s just start with water.  Let’s talk about the water as we see it.  Water, as somebody said in the session this morning, is a requirement for life - absolutely.  You don’t absolutely have to have oil, but you’ve got to have water.  And the real issues that we’re dealing with - or that you all are dealing with - the distribution, the quality, the quantity and availability of water.  And that means water for human needs – first of all – for agricultural and forestry – a very big sector here – for industry, and for an area that’s sometimes talked about but not nearly enough in my view as a biologist, and that’s the water for the non-human biological needs.  And this is more than just a downstream immediate fish habitat below a dam or something or a plant that we hear about.  This is the whole ecological consequences of freshwater availability and distribution.

So let me build this box for you around these water issues that we’re talking about, the water for humans, for agriculture and forestry, for industry, and for non-human biology.  The biggest one – the top – the overarching issue, whether you believe it or not, is going to be climate change.  It already is climate change.  We are seeing that with these back-to-back droughts.  That’s going to be a huge issue.  Many of you have heard a lot of discussion of this during the meeting, and that’s the regional side of things.  We cannot look at water anymore – even a water-rich state as South Carolina – we cannot look at water by individual supply, the well or the surface supply that supports this municipality that county, or whatever.  We can’t do that anymore, we can’t even look at it on a state basis.  We have to look at it on a regional basis.  And I’ll come back to this in a few minutes.  One of the ends of the box that we have to think about - we so many times don’t anymore, or haven’t really gotten there yet because we’re talking about those needs all the time - but that is the watershed system and the ecological side of water.  It’s far more than just what we drink and what we utilize in our ag and industrial processes because there are ecological services that we depend on for life on this planet as well that also require that water.  So eco-system based management looking at a broader way of doing business is a requirement for us.  And the final area I want to put to close up this box, the health effects - the health effects of water and waterborne diseases and the health effects of not having enough water.  I just had an opportunity a few weeks ago along with Geoff Scott from NOAA to participate in a CDC sponsored workshop in Atlanta on health effects of drought.  Drought is a big deal, as is too much water – floods – with regards to health effects.

And the last thing I’ll mention is, borrowing something from my late father, he told me early on in life, he said ‘you know son, I never seem to have any money, but I’m full of arrangements’.  Well, we’re about there now at the federal agency levels and the state agency levels.  None of us has got any money.  So it’s time for us to find ways to work smarter, to be full of arrangements.  And one of those arrangements is to take advantage of the brain power that each of our organizations has by bringing them together.  That’s multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, interdisciplinary kinds of programs.  The Hollings Lab that I happen to sit in for NOAA is an example of that.  There are five institutions that are full partners in that organization.  It doesn’t have to be this kind of model, but some model that allows us to bring our brain power together - because that’s really the most important part – bring our brain power together and work across institutional lines without so much institutional baggage in the way.  That’s the way, in this day and age, I think we can make some significant progress.



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