PHOENIX—In the middle of summer in the nation’s hottest city, water experts from local governments, tribal nations, universities and industry groups gathered Monday to discuss how the federal government could help local communities sustainably manage their declining aquifers. 

The White House is taking the initial steps to create potential policies to better understand and protect the scarce underground water resources vital to families, farms and industrial operations throughout the country. Nationwide, overconsumption is depleting aquifers that supply communities with fresh water. In some areas, fertilizers used in farming or chemicals used in industry or mining are contaminating the underground reservoirs. 

In the Southwest, including Arizona, it’s particularly concerning as new research shows how rapidly declining groundwater and surface water supplies—which are governed differently—are interconnected. 

The workshop, which provided a preview of what federal help might look like, was held by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), a group of experts from outside the federal government tasked with making policy recommendations to the president. 

The council’s final recommendations will be published and presented to President Biden in November, and a future White House will decide what to do with them. For now, the council has four major tentative recommendations: inventory the nation’s aquifers; increase the nation’s capacity to track groundwater movement and its quality; add groundwater stewardship to the mission of federal agencies, especially those that oversee public lands; and enact legislation that would encourage local communities to restore groundwater levels and better plan how they will use the resource. The last one would likely involve financial incentives.

“You can’t run a ranch, you can’t run a farm, you can’t cool a power plant, you can’t have a town unless you have access to water,” said Steve Pacala, an emeritus professor at Princeton University serving on PCAST’s groundwater working group, during the workshop. Roughly 50 percent of the U.S. population’s drinking water comes from underground aquifers.

The workshop was designed to gather feedback from local experts on what the federal government could do to address the issue. The consensus was clear: communities need more data to properly understand the state of their aquifers. Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, said federal support for better understanding groundwater is vital. But there is little appetite for federal oversight of the resource beyond providing funding and stakeholders remain divided on how to address the issue locally.

“There will be a lot of skepticism and caution over federal involvement,” she said. 

Since 1980, when Arizona passed its groundwater law, management of aquifers in the state has been contentious, with developers, farmers, miners and others increasingly at odds over who gets how much of the diminishing resource.

“You can’t run a ranch, you can’t run a farm, you can’t cool a power plant, you can’t have a town unless you have access to water.”

Dave White, the director of the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at ASU, said the White House council’s activities are very narrow. “It’s not legislation,” he said, explaining that PCAST is “intentionally getting a more complicated part of the [groundwater] story” that will better inform their final recommendations to the president. 

The conversation mirrored similar ones happening in the Colorado River Basin, as the federal government, seven states and 30 tribes that rely on the river look to use less and save the system that provides water to over 40 million people in a region where drought has pushed the nation’s two largest reservoirs to the brink of collapse in recent years. 

As the river has declined, the threat of federal intervention has led to cutbacks from the states that rely on its water. The solution there, so far, has largely involved paying water rights holders to cut their use to keep water in the system, while the basin’s major players continue to negotiate a long-term agreement to replace the system’s current guidelines that expire in 2026.

Agriculture is the major user of both the Colorado River and groundwater, with upwards of 80 percent of their water heading to the farms that feed the nation. That’s resulted in the debate over how to use less water often pitting rural farmers against cities and developers. In that context, the water savings have often come from fallowing fields and adopting innovations that allow for less water-intensive farming.

Reducing the depletion of groundwater could rely on a similar solution, with the federal government potentially offering incentives to use less.

But as opposed to the obvious declines of surface water, such as in pictures of the rapidly draining reservoirs of Lake Mead and Lake Powell that have drawn national attention, groundwater remains largely invisible, its falling levels hidden below ground and the average American that depends on it often unaware that their water comes from deep aquifers.

Almost everyone in Arizona, where groundwater issues have been front and center for years, agrees now that the state is in a drought that makes addressing the decline of aquifers even more urgent, but how to do so remains divisive. Last year, the governor announced Phoenix could no longer rely on groundwater for any future growth; the aquifer it has relied on is tapped out. Scottsdale cut off the water it was supplying to a neighboring community. And across the state, rural residents and water advocates pushed for new legislation to protect local communities from overpumping of the aquifers they depend on. 

In many cases across the country, little is known about the condition of local aquifers and how they function. The New York Times last year analyzed tens of thousands of aquifer sites and found that nearly half had declined significantly over the past 40 years as pumping outpaced nature’s capacity to replenish them.  

In Arizona, that’s left some communities unsure of how much water can be stored in their local acquirer, how much is recharged each year from rain, snow and surface water flows and how much can safely be withdrawn each year before the aquifer begins to decline. A clear takeaway for the council was that comprehensive data collection on the condition of aquifers and how they function would be an important starting point for a dialogue on how to equitably share groundwater and avoid overtapping the supply. The lack of understanding of the hidden water supplies prevents effectively managing them, everyone in attendance at the Monday meeting who spoke to Inside Climate News agreed.  

“We can’t even answer basic questions,” said Haley Paul, Arizona policy director for the National Audubon Society, who also serves on the governor’s water council. By getting more data, she said, “it’s another way to make the invisible visible.”

Arizona continues to debate new groundwater laws. Currently, 80 percent of the state has no regulations over groundwater, resulting in agriculture operations pumping unlimited amounts of water, which has drained some communities’ wells. 

But despite the lack of legislation to implement groundwater management outside of the portions of the state where it is currently regulated, Paul said there has been progress in getting people on all sides of the issue to join the discussion about it.

“Doing nothing doesn’t seem to be an answer anymore,” she said.