Road to 2050: Visions for a More Sustainable Future

There are two ways to embrace the future: we can passively let the future happen and react to it, or alternatively we can actively shape the future by taking specific steps that will beneficially effect the state of the world and the resources available to those living in the future. To take a more active approach toward shaping our future, we need to have a vision of what kind of a future we want. Approximately two years ago, we encouraged some 50 experienced professionals in environmental and water resources engineering, ecology, and economics, employed by consulting firms, academia, governmental, and nongovernmental agencies, to create such visions on the basis of optimistic expectations. These visions are now in a book (Grayman et al. 2012) that attempts to identify just what we can and should do over the next few decades to shape the future that we would like to see and inhabit in the year 2050. The book’s goal is to motivate some thinking about how we as a society want to achieve a more perfect world. It considers sustainability and how we develop and manage our natural and cultural resources to benefit both our and future generations. We guess what future generations would tell us about how we should develop today and manage our water resources and environment, so that they, our children or grandchildren, some 40 years later, will be better able to meet their needs, achieve their goals, and improve the quality of their lives. Our visions fit into three broad categories: Planning and Policy; Education; and Science and Technology. Pervasive themes in the collection of visions for 2050 include (1) managing water resources variability (floods and droughts) considering nonstationarity; (2) providing adequate and reliable supplies of clean water, food, energy, and sanitation to expanding populations, especially in urban areas; (3) developing new options for addressing water and environmental management issues provided by rapidly advancing technology; (4) changing our educational system considering technological and economic factors; and (5) planning and managing water and environmental resources with adaptable, robust, and integrated approaches. It is relatively easy to create alternative visions of an ideal 2050 but much harder to get society to reach a consensus vision and to meet the challenges of achieving that vision. We often focus on satisfying short-run goals to the exclusion of longer-term ones. An example of this type of challenge from the book concerns the aging and deteriorating water resources infrastructure in the United States (Grayman et al. 2012): In the US, aging, broken or under-designed wastewater collection and treatment systems discharge billions of liters of untreated wastewater into surface waters each year. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that $390 billion (today’s dollars) will be needed over the next 20 years to update or replace existing systems and build new ones to meet increasing demands (ASCE 2010). Just where is this amount of money going to come from? How will the necessary political support be created and sustained over the next 40 years? Do we need to wait until the failure rate and associated inconveniences exceed some threshold before people say enough? Perhaps we need to market this gaping long-standing need in infrastructure (and not just water-related infrastructure) as a “war” on infrastructure decay ... Can we develop and implement a sewerless technology? Can we eliminate the use of sewers and the use of treated high quality water to transport wastewater from our toilets to wastewater treatment plants? Can wastewaters from urban apartments and office buildings be “treated” on site, eliminating, in a cost-effective way, the need for sewers in urban areas? Can we think of cities that are green with vegetation that effectively and substantially reduces the need for stormwater sewers and instead promotes runoff infiltration into the ground? As a vision for 2050, why not? Indeed steps in this direction are already being taken in various cities of the world.