The State of America’s Water Resource

Abstract

Water resources planning and management on the river basin level can be said to have begun in 1965, with passage of the Water Resources Planning Act thereby establishing the Water Resources Council (WRC). The Council released two national assessments of the state of the U.S. water resource, one in 1968 and the second in 1978. This chapter begins with the work of the WRC and takes the story of the state of the resource into the early twenty-first century in same major basins examined by the WRC, and begins a look at the effects of climate change on the sustainability of the resource in the Nation’s major river basins.

Keywords

As a whole the nation has abundant water resources with average annual precipitation of 30 inches for the conterminous United States, average natural runoff of 1,200 billion gallons per day, and large reserves of water underground. However, the Nation is less fortunate in the distribution and timing of the water resources.

USWRC 1968, First National Assessment of the Nation’s Water Resources

Additional Reading

• CIA (2016). The World Fact Book: Total Renewable Water Resources. Retrieved March 11, 2016 from www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2201.html.

• Griggs, Neil. (2008). Total Water Management: Practices for a Sustainable Future. Boulder, CO: American Water Works Association.

• Lohan, Tara, ed. (2010). Water Matters: Why We Need to Act Now to Save Our Most Critical Resource. San Francisco, CA: AlterNet Books.

• Schwalbaum, William Jesse (1999). Understanding Groundwater. Commack, NY: Nova Science Publishing.