The Future of Water: A Startling Look Ahead

The Future of Water: A Startling Look Ahead (Cat. No. 20692) is the reader’s time machine, with an examination of the trends and conditions that will have a significant impact on the twin challenges of water quantity and water quality around the world. 

To be released on Earth Day, April 22, AWWA’s newest book is written for the public, as well as the water professional, and challenges them to grapple with issues of life-shaping import.

In The Future of Water, the authors present possible and even probable scenarios for population, economic growth, energy, climate and pollution as they affect water. There are sweeping and transformational changes coming in the not-too-distant future–changes in how we value water, how we use water, and how we get water.

Written by Steve Maxwell, a strategic business consultant specializing in water, and freelance writer Scott Yates, the book takes a serious look at the future of residential, agricultural and industrial water use and of water supply and storage, with enough imagination to make the reader take the possible outcomes seriously too.

The authors also delve into the future for water utilities—consolidation, increasing rates and better communication with their customers. Maxwell sees a bright future for the water business, estimated at $500 billion to $600 billion a year, as a growing array of private companies line up to deliver innovative, advanced solutions to the challenges of water scarcity, storage, treatment and distribution.

Although water is mostly a local issue, it can take on regional, national and international ramifications, as sources and pollution cross political borders. Unlike any other commodity, there truly is no substitute for water.

The Future of Water not only looks into the future, it offers suggestions about what to do now to steer away from catastrophe. In the forward to the book, Bruce Babbitt, former US Secretary of the Interior wrote, “Steve Maxwell takes us straight into the realities of the water crisis that is now spreading through all parts of the country, and indeed the entire world.”