In this week’s look at the Georgia Climate Project Roadmap, we highlight the first question about water supplies in Georgia. It’s an especially timely topic this week as the US Supreme Court is due to release its opinions in the Georgia-Florida “water wars” case in the next few days. Many folks around the region are awaiting that decision with trepidation, since the decision could affect irrigation as well as water supplies for cities in Georgia and Florida. You can see all of the 40 roadmap questions at https://roadmap.georgiaclimateproject.org/.
21. How do climate change projections affect scenarios of quantity and quality of future water supply for Georgia through 2050 at local and basin scales?
Why this question is important: In 2017, Georgia revised 11 Regional Water Plans to help manage water resources in a sustainable manner through 2050. The plans (Georgia Environmental Protection Division 2017) identified gaps between projected water use across multiple sectors and modeled future surface water and groundwater capacities. Only one of those plans (Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District 2015) explicitly addressed climate resilience in its long-range planning. Other regions of Georgia would benefit from conducting appropriately scaled studies to assess how changes in patterns of precipitation will affect streamflows, groundwater availability, water quality, and water supply through 2050 and beyond. Advances in streamflow modeling (specifically correcting the known deficiencies in the unimpaired flow dataset) could help enhance water supply planning in the face of climate variability and change.
