Transforming Water, West - Welcome & Themes

Welcome to Transforming Water, West

For the past six years, this gathering has convened leaders from across the water sector under the banner of Rethinking Water. Together, we have challenged assumptions, shared new research, tested bold ideas, and built relationships across utilities, finance, government, industry, and academia. Those conversations have been invaluable.

This year, we are taking the next step.

We have changed the framing from Rethinking to Transforming because the moment calls not only for better ideas, but for coordinated action. The water challenges facing the United States are systemic: aging infrastructure, financial strain, intensifying hydroclimatic extremes, regulatory complexity, ecosystem degradation, and growing competition across sectors. None of these can be addressed within institutional silos. Transformation requires collaboration across the full ecosystem of actors who shape America’s water future.

Our shared aim is to develop actionable, implementable strategies that align infrastructure, operations, finance, governance, and science toward resilient and equitable water systems.

Four overlapping themes frame this year’s convening:

1. Safe, Reliable, and Affordable Water

At the community and industry scale, the foundation of water security is dependable delivery of drinking water, effective wastewater treatment, and resilient stormwater management. Aging assets, emerging contaminants, affordability challenges, and workforce constraints demand new operational models, financing structures, and technological integration. Transformation here means reimagining infrastructure portfolios, regulatory pathways, and utility governance so that safety and affordability reinforce—rather than undermine—each other.

2. Water Security for Sustainable Development

At regional and national scales, water underpins economic growth, food and energy systems, public health, and social stability. Increasing competition across sectors—agriculture, energy, urban growth, industry, and ecosystems—requires coordinated allocation strategies and sustained investment. Achieving water security will depend on aligning capital flows, policy frameworks, and basin-scale planning to ensure that supply, demand, and environmental stewardship evolve together.

3. Reducing Vulnerability and Exposure to Hydroclimatic Hazards

Floods, droughts, extreme precipitation, compound events, and hazardous releases are intensifying under climate variability and change. Advances in monitoring, prediction, and modeling provide unprecedented foresight—but foresight must translate into mitigation. Infrastructure redesign, nature-based solutions, adaptive operations and supply chain management, insurance mechanisms, and innovative financial instruments must be integrated into coherent risk management strategies. The goal is not only recovery, but anticipatory resilience.

4. Thriving Ecosystems

Water systems are embedded in ecological systems. Human modifications—through water withdrawals, wastewater discharges, stormwater runoff, land-use change, and bio-chemical emissions—reshape ecosystems at local and watershed scales. In turn, ecological degradation feeds back into water quality, hazard exposure, and economic stability. A transformed water future must recognize ecological function as foundational infrastructure. Protecting and restoring ecosystems is not peripheral—it is central to long-term system performance.

These four themes are deeply interconnected. Progress in one domain without attention to the others risks unintended consequences. Our challenge—and opportunity—is to develop integrated strategies that move beyond optimization within silos toward alignment across scales and sectors.

This convening is designed not as a conference, but as a working platform.

We invite you to:

Think about what the key federal programs: Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, the TMDL program and the National Flood Insurance Program, should be defined as in the 21st century.
Identify implementation barriers that prevent promising ideas from scaling.
Propose cross-sector collaborations that combine operational, financial, regulatory, and scientific expertise.
Define pilot projects, financing mechanisms, governance innovations, or research agendas that can move from concept to action.
Commit to continued engagement beyond this meeting.

Following the physical gathering, we will organize focused working groups aligned with the four themes. These groups will be charged with producing concrete implementation roadmaps—articulating priorities, timelines, partnerships, and measurable outcomes. Our goal is to leave not only inspired, but organized.

The transformation of America’s water future will not be achieved by any single institution or discipline. It will require leadership from all of us—utility operators willing to innovate, financiers prepared to structure new instruments, policymakers open to regulatory evolution, scientists committed to translational work, and communities engaged as partners.

Thank you for bringing your expertise, your candor, and your willingness to collaborate. We look forward to building the next phase of this work together.

Upmanu Lall

Director, ASU Water Institute