A narrative method for analyzing transitions in urban water management: The case of the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department
Abstract
Although the water management sector is often characterized as resistant to risk and change, urban areas across the United States are increasingly interested in creating opportunities to transition toward more sustainable water management practices. These transitions are complex and difficult to predict – the product of water managers acting in response to numerous biophysical, regulatory, political, and financial factors within institutional constraints. Gaining a better understanding of how these transitions occur is crucial for continuing to improve water management. This paper presents a replicable methodology for analyzing how urban water utilities transition toward sustainability. The method combines standardized quantitative measures of variables that influence transitions with contextual qualitative information about a utility's unique decision making context to produce structured, data-driven narratives. Data-narratives document the broader context, the utility's pretransition history, key events during an accelerated period of change, and the consequences of transition. Eventually, these narratives should be compared across cases to develop empirically-testable hypotheses about the drivers of and barriers to utility-level urban water management transition. The methodology is illustrated through the case of the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department (WASD) in Miami-Dade County, Florida, and its transition toward more sustainable water management in the 2000s, during which per capita water use declined, conservation measures were enacted, water rates increased, and climate adaptive planning became the new norm.
Key Points
- Biophysical, regulatory, political, financial and institutional factors influence urban water management transition
- Data-driven narratives combine standardized measures with context to facilitate understanding of transitions
- Narratives enable cross-case comparison and theory development about transitions toward sustainability
Plain Language Summary
Securing sustainable freshwater supplies is one of the greatest challenges facing cities today. However, because each city confronts this challenge in the context of its own unique water sources, political structures, infrastructure, and management history, scholars struggle to understand and draw common lessons for success across cities. Using the example of Miami-Dade County, we present a new method for understanding cities' transitions toward more sustainable water management practices that can be used to compare multiple cities. This method integrates a city's individual context with standardized measures of variables that may influence a transition: water stress, media attention, financial health, and institutional structure. The method produces a concise, data-driven narrative of a city's transition, accompanied by a visual timeline. Using these narratives and timelines, researchers can explore important questions about water management transitions, such as what factors result in periods of rapid change, when cities take action over only a few years to adopt a number of new sustainable water policies.
1 Introduction
In 2006, at the height of a booming real estate market, Miami-Dade County nearly ran out of permitted drinking water for over 2 million residents. Soon after, recession struck the area, construction halted and foreclosures boomed, leading to a drop in per capita water demand. While economic and population growth have since rebounded, water demand has remained flat. Furthermore, the county's water utility, the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department (WASD), has shifted investment to water conservation projects and away from expanded supply infrastructure, an indicator of WASD's transition toward greater water supply sustainability. While some may consider the many interacting and overlapping factors that led to this transition unique to WASD's particular political, socio-economic, and hydrological situation at the time, we suggest that generalizable lessons can be drawn from this and similar cases to help inform successful transitions toward sustainability in other urban areas. Deciphering these lessons now may be more valuable than ever as urban areas respond to water supply challenges with a variety of solutions that may not be sustainable in the long term [Anderson et al., 2005; Hornberger et al., 2015].
To uncover lessons from urban water management transitions, research must employ interdisciplinary approaches that strike a balance between generalization and contextualization. Engineering and economic studies traditionally favor the former, while ethnographic and anthropological studies favor the later [Mollinga and Gondhalekar, 2014]. Neither approach captures the full picture of a water management transition, however. For instance, large, generalized studies tend to focus on variables such as rainfall and demography, and overlook human agency [Ragin, 2000]. Alternatively, in-depth case studies often emphasize contextual specificity, which can limit the identification of common causal pathways across cases [Srinivasan et al., 2012]. Both extremes restrict the transferability of research insights.
In this paper, we present a replicable methodology for analyzing a utility's transition toward sustainable urban water management that addresses these issues of transferability. The goal of this methodology is to aid scholars and water agencies in identifying windows of opportunity for utilities to transition toward more sustainable water management. Ultimately, the methodology should be applied to multiple cases and used as a comparative tool for developing empirically-testable hypotheses about theorized drivers of and barriers to transition across multiple urban water utilities. The methodology combines standardized, quantitative measures of variables that influence transitions with qualitative, contextual information to produce a structured, data-driven narrative of transition. The narrative facilitates a more complex understanding of water management transitions toward sustainability by examining what exposures influence transition at the city level and how these exposures interact to drive or slow transition.
After presenting the theoretical motivation behind this research, including our definition of a “transition toward sustainability” in the context of water management, we outline a methodology to construct a data-driven narrative of a utility's transition. Specifically, we describe how to collect and organize salient contextual information, identify four standardized measures of variables that may influence transitions, and integrate this data into a succinct narrative that describes the factors that influence a utility's transition toward sustainable water management. We use the case of WASD's water management transition to demonstrate our methodology, discuss potential conclusions revealed through the narrative construction process, and consider the next step of cross-case comparison.
2 Background and Theory
2.1 Defining Sustainability and Transition
- Develop and use water resources in a manner that can be maintained for an indefinite time.
- Ensure a reliable source of water consistent with customer needs.
- Minimize negative environmental, economic and social impacts.
- Increase resilience to short-term disasters and long-term challenges.
While sustainability has become a normative goal for policymakers, research agendas to identify pathways to transition toward sustainability remain in their infancy.
Following this, we define a transition toward sustainability as a permanent change in policy arrangements that results in increased system sustainability [Brown et al., 2009; Rotmans and Fischer-Kowalski, 2009] that has both a spatial and temporal component. Transitions scholars have increasingly turned to cities as a manageable spatial scale for studying pathways to permanent change in sustainable water management [Hodson and Marvin, 2010; de Haan et al., 2015]. Moreover, while major socio-technical transitions in cities often span multiple decades, scholars have also identified periods of accelerated change important to transition. During these sub-decadal periods, multiple changes accumulate and are often followed by a stabilization period [Rotmans et al., 2001; Geels, 2005; Geels and Schot, 2007]. For example, in a 50 year study of Melbourne, Australia's stormwater management, 2004–2010 was identified as a period of accelerated change in which the city made a significant shift toward sustainability as part of a larger transition [Brown et al., 2013]. Focusing on sub-decadal periods of accelerated change, nested within larger transitions, enables consistent data collection and facilitates detailed comparisons of transitions across multiple urban areas.
Working from this literature, the methodology that follows focuses on transitions in an organization that works at the urban scale: a water utility. It also highlights both the broad, multidecadal nature of transition, as well as particularly influential sub-decadal accelerated periods of change that can be compared across cases. Accelerated periods of change indicative of transition at the utility level may include things such as permanent conservation measures, shifts to tiered or higher prices, investments in local water sources (recycled water, shallow groundwater, etc.), investments in infrastructure for efficiency (smart metering, storage, canal lining, etc.), shifts to longer range planning/inclusion of climate change, or the introduction of water trading [ASCE Task Committee on Sustainability Criteria, 1998; UNESCO Working Group M.IV, 1999; Loucks, 1997, 2000; Rogers et al., 2002; Marlow et al., 2013].
2.2 Triple Exposure Theory
In order to identify and investigate factors that may contribute to a utility's transition toward sustainable water management, we work from an integrated, exposure-based theory of policy change that seeks to identify drivers that spur or barriers that impede transition in an urban utility's management of an environmental resource, such as water. Drawing on theories of policy change and transition management, Hughes et al. [2013] highlight three “mutually reinforcing” drivers of major change in how cities relate to the environment and natural resources: “political, regulatory, and environmental shifts” [p. 52]. Applying the theoretical framework to the case of Los Angeles, Hughes et al. [2013] identify environmental (drought and uncertainty), regulatory (water delivery restrictions), and political (public and city-level increases in environmentalism) exposures as drivers of change that led to a transition toward securing local water sources, water conservation, and agency collaboration. Financial and institutional factors were identified as barriers to further transition, but the integration of barriers into triple exposure theory is underdeveloped, and no systematic method to consistently measure exposures exists. We use these facets of the “triple exposure theory” as our starting point for understanding and measuring the conditions that influence a utility's transition toward sustainable water management.
Our method builds upon triple exposure theory by utilizing four standardized measures. Three of the measures are longitudinal and describe components of a utility's biophysical, regulatory, political, and financial exposures. The term “biophysical” is used here instead of “environmental” to explicitly incorporate water supply infrastructure. We develop a utility-level Water Supply Stress Index (WaSSI) as a composite measure of longitudinal biophysical and regulatory exposure. We estimate political exposure by measuring attention to water issues in annual media coverage in the area's largest newspaper. Financial exposure is approximated by the percent change in a utility's net position. The fourth measure, the institutional grammar (IG) tool, is used to describe and assess a utility's decision making structure and its relationship with regulators, as institutions are known to moderate change [Lubell et al., 2009]. Unlike the longitudinal measures, IG rules are not assessed annually, though they can measure how institutional structures change over time when charters, constitutions, or regulations are adjusted. While biophysical, regulatory, political, and financial exposures can act as drivers or barriers to transition, institutional structure, on the other hand, is expected to function as a moderator of exposures by introducing friction into the decision process. Placed together, these four measures enable comparison of a utility's exposures over time and support better understandings of how specific combinations of exposures drive or inhibit transitions within a utility's specific context.
While triple exposure theory categorizes the types of exposure that may drive transition (biophysical, regulatory, and political), it does not predict how such exposures align to produce transition (i.e., whether all exposures need to be present, how certain exposures interact, etc.). Broader policy process theories have hypothesized that policy change, such as a transition toward sustainability, happens when entrepreneurial actors take advantage of windows of opportunity that occur when political, problem, and policy spaces overlap [Kiser and Ostrom, 1982; Kingdon, 1984], when outcomes feedback and cause policy punctuations [Baumgartner and Jones, 1993; Pierson, 1993], when there is goal disagreement [Sabatier, 1998], and when policies diffuse across governmental jurisdictions [Berry and Berry, 1990]. Our research expands the power of triple exposure theory and adds to this body of research on policy change by creating a method for systematically identifying, and ultimately testing, hypotheses about the interaction of exposures leading to transition over time through cross-case comparison.
3 Narrative Methodology and Data Collection
The core of our approach to analyzing transitions across cities lies in the construction of data-driven narratives that couple unique contextual information with standardized measures of exposures that drive or inhibit transition. A narrative is a temporal sequence of events [Jones and McBeth, 2010] that hierarchically arranges actors and events to create layers of meaning [Barthes and Duisit, 1975]. Through their work on the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), McBeth et al. [2014] demonstrate the value of examining deliberately-structured narratives to understand policy change. NPF studies identify familiar narrative elements such as setting, characters, plot, and morals in “stories” to understand how policy actors may influence change. In addition to being effective ways to analyze the richness of policy change at local, regional, and national levels [McBeth et al., 2014], narratives are useful tools to integrate, contextualize, and communicate complex scientific information [Dahlstrom, 2014] including climate science and policy information [Moser, 2010].
Building on this logic, we outline a methodology to construct a narrative that describes a utility's transition toward sustainable water management – not to advocate for a specific policy position, but instead to provide a tool for systematically understanding, and ultimately comparing, how such transitions unfold over time (see Figure 1). The methodology produces both a written narrative of a utility's water management transition and a timeline of important events. In this paper, we use the case of Miami-Dade County's water utility, WASD, to demonstrate each step in narrative construction. After creating the narrative, we use it to draw conclusions about factors that influenced this particular transition. Ultimately, however, the methodology must be applied to and compared across multiple water utilities to develop generalizable lessons about transitions toward sustainability.
Methodology for Creating a Data-Narrative. Case specific contextual information is combined with four standardized measures to produce a narrative and timeline. Dark grey boxes indicate newly created measures described below, and light grey boxes indicate measures commonly reported by utilities. White boxes identify theoretically-important factors associated with each standardized measure.
3.1 Determining a Multidecadal Study Period and Collecting Contextual Information
As aforementioned, major socio-technical change typically occurs in a society over multiple decades, often resulting from the accumulation of smaller changes [Geels, 2002; Brown et al., 2013]. The first step in constructing a narrative is to identify a “study period”–a multidecadal period of interest during which sub-decadal changes occur at the utility-level to produce an overall effect (in this case, greater sustainability). In other words, examining a 20 to 30 year period sufficiently captures factors influencing the need for transition, important sub-decadal changes in utility practices, and the broader effects of these changes in an urban area. Moreover, because this methodology should ultimately be used to compare transitions across multiple cases, selecting a study period with future comparative goals in mind (such as comparing transitions during similar time frames and among similar actors) can help constrain exogenous variables that may influence transition across cases, such as the general technology available to water utilities or major national economic trends. Finally, these temporal constraints also suggest that while researchers can study how a specific transition increases a utility's sustainability for a number of decades, a utility will have to transition many times over the course of decades and centuries to remain responsive to ever-evolving social, political, and environmental conditions.
We began to gather background information on the case of WASD with a broader goal of comparing its transition toward sustainability to other early 21st century water management transitions. We suspected that WASD underwent a transition sometime between 2000 and 2014 based on familiarity with the series of events described in the introduction to this paper. In order to capture sufficient context, we selected 1991 to 2014 (the year this study began) as the multidecadal study period in which to examine variables potentially related to WASD's transition.
- Interview data with utility staff about challenges, risks and priorities over time
- Utility reports including Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFRs)
- Relevant regulatory documents (i.e., consumptive use permits and drought reports)
- Local, regional and national economic or population trends (i.e., the Great Recessions)
- Newspaper articles or journalism during extreme events and moments of change
- Measures commonly tracked by utilities that may be relevant to transition (i.e., Palmer Drought Severity Index, annual per-capita water consumption, and monthly reservoir water levels, for example Lake Okeechobee which recharges Miami-Dade's groundwater)
We compiled contextual information from interviews with two WASD managers (each with over 15 years of experience at the utility), text within WASD's CAFRs, drought reports and reservoir levels from the South Florida Water Management District, consumptive use permits, and Miami-Dade County planning documents. We used this contextual information to identify approximately 20–30 events and policy changes relevant to sustainability in WASD's water supply management from 1991 to 2014. These include utility-level actions (rate structure changes, conservation plans, etc.) and major regulatory events (drought restrictions, permits, critical reservoir levels, etc.), listed chronologically in Table 1. Additional relevant regional and national events were added to this list based on contextual information and team member expertise. These events include the introduction of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) WaterSense program, a state bill requiring water conservation plans in Florida, and the founding of the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, a network in support of climate adaptation that created unified sea level rise projections.
| Water Policy Changes and Events | Scale | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Priority is to increase water supply | County-Utility | 1991 |
| Begins permit consolidation | County-Utility | 1992 |
| Hurricane Andrew | State-National | 1992 |
| Outdoor water use restrictions | District | 2001 |
| Lake Okeechobee levels fall below 11ft | District | 2001 |
| Demand approaches supply | District | 2005 |
| State Bill requires conservation plan | State-National | 2005 |
| EPA WaterSense begins | State-National | 2005 |
| Emergency 18-month use permit | District | 2006 |
| 1st Rate increase approved | County-Utility | 2007 |
| Water Use Efficiency Plan | County-Utility | 2007 |
| Water restrictions & conservation surcharge | District | 2007 |
| Lake Okeechobee levels below 11 feet | District | 2008 |
| Rebate program begins | County-Utility | 2008 |
| 1st full-time conservation staff hired | County-Utility | 2008 |
| 1st system-wide permit implemented | County-Utility | 2008 |
| New water efficiency standards | County-Utility | 2008 |
| Budget shortage | County-Utility | 2008 |
| Water Loss Reduction Program | County-Utility | 2009 |
| Begins modelling salt water intrusion w/USGS | County-Utility | 2009 |
| Permanent watering restrictions | District | 2009 |
| County cedes water shortage authority to district | County-Utility | 2009 |
| Southeast Florida Climate Change Compact | State-National | 2009 |
| Conservation considered supply source | County-Utility | 2011 |
| Revised WASD implementing order adopted | District | 2011 |
| Climate Action Plan passed | County-Utility | 2011 |
| Aquifer storage recovery deprioritized | County-Utility | 2012 |
| 20 year consumptive use permit renewed | District | 2012 |
| Increased watering restrictions | State-National | 2012 |
| $12B infrastructure improvement plan adopted | County-Utility | 2014 |
| Rates increased to support infrastructure bond | County-Utility | 2015 |
- a Scale indicates the nearest level of authority to each event, and year indicates when the event occurred.
3.2 Identifying an Accelerated Period of Change
Earlier, we defined a transition toward sustainability as a permanent change in policy arrangements that results in increased system sustainability [Brown et al., 2009; Rotmans and Fischer-Kowalski, 2009]. We also note that broad socio-technical transitions often result from the accumulation of multiple sub-decadal changes on smaller scales, such as at the utility level [Geels, 2005]. The next step in narrative construction highlights the importance of these smaller-scale events by examining clusters of utility-level changes across the study period. In other words, the next step is to find a sub-decadal accelerated period of change where utilities implement multiple permanent changes in their management practices. An accelerated period of change begins with challenges to current management practices and ends when the utility begins to implement practices indicative of a transition to sustainability as described above (i.e., permanent conservation measures, tiered or higher prices, etc.). While any one sub-decadal period obviously does not capture all of the events necessary for a utility's long-term transition toward sustainability, circumscribing an accelerated period of change allows for in-depth, tractable comparisons of major changes related to transition across cases.
In the case of WASD, the identification of an accelerated period of change was somewhat iterative. We initially identified the 2007–2011 period based on the list of events in Table 1, beginning with the rate increase in 2007 and ending when conservation was adopted as a supply source in 2011, followed by the stabilizing effect of a renewed 20 year consumptive use permit in 2012. However, after presenting this information to a WASD manager, we were prompted to take a closer look at 2006, which included WASD's preparation of plans for conservation and pursuit of alternative water sources. Ultimately, we expanded the accelerated period of change for WASD's broader transition toward sustainable water management to 2006–2011.
3.3 Standardized Measures
While contextual information allows us to define important multidecadal and sub-decadal periods related to a utility's transition toward sustainable water management, the context provides little information about exposure to theorized drivers of or barriers to transition. Furthermore, contextual details alone fail to provide a way to systematically compare transitions across urban utilities, thereby preventing us from gleaning generalizable “lessons learned” about transitions toward sustainable water management. To address these issues, we supplement the above contextual information with four standardized measures of exposure: Water Supply Stress Index, media attention, institutional structure, and net financial position. Together these enable consistent measurement of biophysical, regulatory, political, financial, and institutional exposures. Each measure is described below, followed by a discussion of the information collected pertaining to that measure in the case of WASD. While the following measures do not capture all possible aspects of exposures, they provide a way to collect, analyze, and eventually compare standardized data that is representative of exposures across utilities.
3.3.1 Measuring Biophysical and Regulatory Exposure: Water Supply Stress Index (WaSSI)
3.3.1.1 Description
WSx is the annual available water supply, and WDx is the annual sum of water demands for the utility estimated using water management plans or water consumption data for a given year, x. Higher values of WaSSI indicate higher utility-scale water stress; a WaSSI value equal to 1 indicates that demand equals supply, leaving no room for growth or variability.
We modify the original WaSSI by redefining the boundary from watershed to utility service area and alter the calculation of water supply to include all sources available to a utility including constructed infrastructure such as aqueducts (imported water and purchased water) and constructed water supply sources (recycled water and stored water). We define water supply as the legal amount of water that can be withdrawn and/or is accessible to the water provider, making supply a function of water rights/allocations, restrictions (environmental, drought, etc.), and infrastructure capacity for the respective year (i.e., source will only be accounted for if infrastructure exists). While some studies take both hydrologic conditions and infrastructure into account when calculating water stress [Padowski and Jawitz, 2012], they still ignore the impacts of legal constraints on water supply and do not reflect the range of mechanisms through which utilities experience and prevent water stress. Here, the limiting constraint of hydrological availability, legal access, and infrastructure capacity is used to compute supply. For example, a utility may have legal rights to more water than they have capacity to transport from a water source; in that case infrastructure would be the limiting constraint. The WaSSI normalizes the varied pressures experienced by each utility and is therefore a comparable water stress metric across climates, water sources, and demands.
3.3.1.2 Application
The WaSSI calculation for WASD was developed from two sources. Demand was calculated using annual finished water supplied to commercial and residential customers as reported in WASD CAFRs. Supply was calculated using historic water permits collected from the South Florida Water Management District's website. See Appendix A in the supporting information for further details on developing this measure.
The results of the annual WaSSI calculation are presented in Figure 2 alongside monthly Lake Okeechobee water levels. Due to the strong connection between surface and groundwater in southern Florida, Lake Okeechobee water levels are a local barometer of hydrological conditions and serve as the hydrologic context for the WaSSI results. In Figure 2a, Lake Okeechobee water levels are shown in conjunction with shortage threshold levels and South Florida Water Management District-declared drought periods. Water supply and demand are also shown in Figure 2b to illustrate their contributions to the WaSSI.
Utility Scale Water Supply Stress Index (WaSSI). (a) Monthly water levels for the primary regional reservoir Lake Okeechobee (black lines), shortage thresholds (dark grey lines), and droughts (dark shading) represent a standard measure of regional water stress. (b) Supply (solid line) and demand (dashed line) components of the annual WaSSI calculation for Miami-Dade WASD presented in Figure 2c.
As demonstrated in Figure 2, total water demand rose in the early 1990s and remained stable until dropping in the mid-2000s. Water supply rose throughout the 1990s as the WASD periodically requested, and obtained, an increased groundwater permit to keep up with a growing population. During this period, WASD succeeded in keeping pace with demands as evidenced by a slowly decreasing WaSSI. Water stress peaked in 2006 as demand almost exceeded supply, after which an emergency extension of permits temporarily relieved the pressure. After 2006, falling demand led to a decrease in water stress despite contracting supply.
3.3.2 Measuring Political Exposure: Media Attention to Water Issues
3.3.2.1 Description
Triple exposure theory posits that “political changes in the public's attitude toward [their] resources” is one of the three “determinants of major change – or transition – in the city's relationship to [its] resources” [Hughes et al., 2013, p. 52]. Because it is often impossible to measure change in public attitudes retrospectively when attempting to understand a transition, we gauge longitudinal changes in the public's general attention toward such issues through a proxy variable: newspaper coverage of water-related issues. While an assessment of media attention to water issues is not an all-encompassing measure of the political exposures a utility may face, this measure can be standardized across cases and is representative of the public's general level of attention to water issues.
The Pew Research Center's 2012 Media Consumption Survey finds that the majority of the U.S. public still receives their news primarily from mass media (newspapers, television, and radio) [The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 2012]. Mass media plays a crucial “agenda-setting” function, influencing the level of salience or attention media consumers ascribe to issues [McCombs and Shaw, 1972]. Moreover, newspapers have repeatedly been found to “set the agenda” of other media sources [McCombs, 2004]. Thus, although newspaper readership has declined substantially in recent decades [The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 2010], newspaper coverage is still a reliable measure of the salience level of topics in mass media overall.
To create an annual index of media attention to water issues, articles are collected across the entire study period from the largest local newspaper in the urban area served by the utility of focus. Search terms are iteratively developed based on researchers' knowledge about important and often-used terminology surrounding water management in the specific case and preliminary reading of a small set of articles. A statistically representative sample of articles returned by these terms is then coded to ensure relevance. To account for changes in the total number of articles printed over time, results are normalized to the total number of articles printed in the newspaper annually.
3.3.2.2 Application
In the Miami-Dade case, newspaper articles were collected from the Miami Herald from 1 January 1991, to 31 December 2014. The following string of Boolean search terms were used in the final search: (drought AND water) OR “water conservation” OR “water allocation*” OR “water restrict*” OR “water rate*” OR “water suppl*.” The search returned approximately 3094 articles, and a statistically representative sample was collected (310). Sampled articles were analyzed and assigned a “relevancy code” from 0 to 2 based on whether the article focused on public water supply, major water issues, or water-related weather events (2), made mention of these topics (1), or was unrelated to these topics (0). The percentage of relevant articles meeting the search criteria was determined based on coding of the sampled articles. The percentage of relevant articles was then normalized to the total number of articles printed annually. See Appendix B for further details on developing this measure.
Annual media attention to water issues in the Miami Herald is shown in Figure 3. The percent of total articles relevant to water issues varied greatly over the study period, ranging from 0.04% in 2004 to a peak of 0.4% in 2001. Media attention to water issues increased during some, but not all, droughts throughout the study period. For example, media attention spiked during the 2001 drought, which was the most severe in the study period, while there was no increase in attention during the 1995 drought. Intuitively, media attention to water issues usually returns to historic levels after the drought conditions subside. However, in the 2007–2009 drought event, media attention initially increased, but returned to historic levels as the drought persisted. This atypical trend may have been due to the presence of other major economic and political issues (the Great Recession and a historic presidential election) overshadowing coverage of the drought.
Media Attention to Water Issues. Normalized annual percentage of articles in the Miami Herald about water issues are plotted (black line) with droughts in gray.
3.3.3 Measuring Institutional Structure: Institutional Grammar (IG)
3.3.3.1 Description
Institutions influence the policy process by determining who makes decisions and the processes by which decisions are reached, enforced and re-evaluated. In order to measure the potential moderating effect that institutions exert on a utility in a systematic way, we use the Institutional Grammar (IG) tool [Crawford and Ostrom, 1995], which is a coding scheme for translating the syntax of formal institutional rules, norms or shared strategies into standardized measures. To use the IG tool, relevant texts (city/county charters, constitutions, utility regulations) must be identified and relevant statements from within these texts selected based on search terms chosen to capture water management actions [Basurto et al., 2009; Feiock et al., 2016]. Then, the selected statements must be coded to identify the set of actors and the range of actions allowed, required, and prohibited in collective decision-making situations. These statements are identified within three nested “layers” of water management governance and decision making: the constitutional level, which identifies actors involved in collective decisions; the collective choice level, which governs how decisions are made; and the operational level, which implements collective actions.
At each level, quantitative measures generated by the IG tool enable tracking of changes in institutional structures over time as well as cross-case comparison based on a rule typology [Ostrom, 2005]. The typology identifies water management actors (“attributes”) and their functional duties within seven categories of rules. These rule types are: (1) The definitions of formal decision-making Positions actors hold, (2) the Choices or authority assigned to each position, (3) the Information available to actors, (4) Boundaries for actors to enter into a position, (5) the Scope or range of available outcomes, (6) Aggregation methods for reaching collective decisions, and (7) Payoffs to incentivize or enforce agreements.
Additionally, the IG tool classifies rules as either constitutive rules which imbue rights, or regulatory rules, which constrain actions. For example, a constitutive rule may state the policy objectives for a water agency in a specific jurisdiction, while a regulatory rule may specify actions which must, may or must not be taken within that jurisdiction. This step provides an estimate of a utility's ability to change its policy. Relatively more constitutive rules suggest more flexibility to adjust policy without needing to change the formal rules.
3.3.3.2 Application
In the case of WASD, multiple researchers coded statements relevant to water management embedded within government documents using the IG tool to identify actors within the three levels of governance and to classify each statement by rule typology and as regulatory or constitutive. The source documents included city/county charters, the state constitution and statutes, and water management implementing orders for WASD. Before completing the coding, coders established intercoder reliability (> 80% reliability) through iterative rounds of coding sample statements. Detailed steps for collecting and coding statements are provided in Appendix C.
This coding identified the actors (“attributes”) present within formal rules at the three decision-making levels in Miami-Dade County, see Table 2. Coding reveals that water management in Miami-Dade County has a relatively hierarchical structure. Many actors impacted by transitions – including water consumers, polluters, and contractors – are represented only at one level of decision making, such as the operational level where actors' focus is on policy implementation. City governmental actors are absent at both the constitutional and operational levels, suggesting a limited role for municipalities in key water management decisions. This aligns with the fact that WASD operates within a “functionally consolidated” government in which most service-delivery responsibilities are vested within the county, which in turn has many key water management decisions determined by a regional coordinating agency, the South Florida Water Management District, overseen by the State of Florida.
| Constitutional Choice Level Attributes | Collective Choice Level Attributes | Operational Level Attributes |
|---|---|---|
| [polluters] | Public water utility | Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners |
| State | Water management district | Contractor |
| State agencies | Department of Agriculture | County |
| The Legislature | Any municipality | Customer |
| Code enforcement officers | Private company | Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Dept. (WASD) |
| Designees of the city manager | Independent special district | Miami-Dade Dept. of Environmental Resource Management |
| Property owners [landowners] | County commission | Developer |
| Residents | A local government | [WASD] Director |
| Businesses | All state agencies | Florida Department of Health |
| County | Wastewater facility applicants | Florida Department of Environmental Protection |
| Miami-Dade County Commissioners | Any person violating law | Hauler |
| South Florida Water Management District (WMD) | Applicants for [water] projects | Property owner |
| Committees with fiscal jurisdiction | ||
| Commissioner of Agriculture | ||
| WMD budget officer | ||
| Domestic wastewater treatment facilities | ||
| WMD governing board | ||
| Executive Office of the Governor | ||
| Legislative Budget Commission | ||
| Florida Public Service Commission | ||
| Governor | ||
| Permit Applicant | ||
| Permitting Agency | ||
| Regional Water Supply Authority | ||
| Transportation Secretary | ||
| Environmental Protection Secretary | ||
| South Florida Water Management District | ||
| County Clerk | ||
| Alternative water supply development entity | ||
| Basin boards | ||
| Utilities implementing reuse projects |
- a Attributes common to all levels are bold, including county and state agencies.
A detailed look at just the broadest, constitutional-level rules provides insight into who participates in critical collective choice decision making. Constitutional-level arrangements remained unchanged during the study period, meaning the regulatory transition occurred–through state legislation, permits, and ordinances–without requiring constitution-level changes to who was allowed, required or omitted from local collective decision making.
Miami-Dade County's rules are 70% constitutive, as opposed to regulatory, which suggests WASD have some flexibility to adjust management policies over time. Additionally, the majority of Miami-Dade's constitutional-level rules, based on the rule typology described in the previous section, are scope rules (65%), which define the range of outcomes prohibited or allowed, or choice rules (25%), which constrict the actions an actor in a given position may take (Figure 4). One way to interpret this concentration of scope rules is that Miami-Dade actors have significant discretion in their formal obligations as long as they achieve stated outcomes, like provision of safe and reliable drinking water.
Miami-Dade Institutional Rule Typology. Miami-Dade's water management regulatory regime contains a wide range of rule types but is dominated by scope rules which prescribe the range of duties assigned to actors.
3.3.4 Measuring Financial Exposure: Percent Change in Net Position
As Hughes et al. [2013] found in Los Angeles, financial exposures can act as a barrier to transition when financial constraints and competing demands for funds limit a utility's ability to invest in conservation programs and to develop local water sources. To investigate the role of a utility's financial health on the occurrence and rate of transition, a standardized metric is needed. However, a new metric is not necessary as water utilities report an annual measure of financial health: the net position of a utility.
The net position of a utility is equal to the total assets, including capital assets, investments and cash, minus total liabilities [Mead, 2012]. The annual percent change in net position is the year to year increase or decrease in this quantity normalized by the annual net position. It reflects changes in available cash due to income and expenditures as well as depreciation in assets and fluctuations in investment value [Waymire et al., 2015]. Thus, it correctly accounts for capital improvements as an investment and deferred maintenance as a liability, making it an appropriate measure for utility financial health. Normalization makes it comparable across utilities of different sizes. Further, as a widely reported metric, it facilitates the ultimate goal of comparison across utilities.
Like many municipal utilities, WASD reports its net position as part of its Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFRs). Recent reports are available on the county website and copies of older reports were provided by WASD. The utility's percent change in net position was positive and generally increasing from 1991 to 2001, after which it declined until 2006. Cumulatively net position increased between 2007 and 2014, but annually the percent change in net position cycled between positive and negative (Figure 5).
Percent Change in Net Position. Annual increase or decrease in WASD's total assets from 1991 to 2014 including capital assets, investments and cash, minus total liabilities.
3.4 Creating the Narrative
While the above standardized measures of exposures can be replicated and compared across utilities, they cannot be directly compared with one another. For example, the IG tool identifies the important actors in a case and characterizes the rules governing their actions, while the WaSSI calculation and media analysis longitudinally track changes in water stress and media attention. However, combining these measures with the contextual information gathered earlier into a narrative can provide insights into interactions between theorized exposures that can drive or inhibit utility-level transitions. To accomplish this, we compose a narrative of approximately 1000 words that integrates all data collected. It includes the following four sections: (1) an introduction, (2) a pretransition history, (3) an in-depth exploration of the accelerated period of change, and (4) a posttransition situation (including the current state of management and any “lessons learned”). This narrative format captures necessary content with enough brevity to facilitate review and encourage readership from multiple audiences, including academics and practitioners.
Narrative creation is iterative and interactive. To create this narrative, we used the IG tool to identify key actors, specifically the utility (WASD), its regulator(s) and any secondary actors who make significant decisions, such as the Miami-Dade County Commission. Section 1 introduces actors and context, including a description of the utility's history and current service area, the utility's relationship with regulator(s), and the primary sources from which the utility gets its water. Section 1 concludes with a short description of the effects of the transition, as can be seen through present day.
Sections 2–4 follow a standardized structure. Each section begins with a statement of the utility's primary concern during that time period, followed by a description of key events and interactions between the utility, regulators, and secondary actors. Numeric measures of WaSSI, media coverage, and net change in position, as well as other important metrics like per capita consumption and reservoir levels, are integrated into the description of events and interactions. The narrative is grounded in data, and it also tells a coherent, compelling story from which useful conclusions can be drawn.
After completing the narrative, an accompanying timeline is created. It provides a visual representation of the relevant utility-level events (e.g., changes in rates, regulation, or conservation policy) and longitudinal measures (i.e., WaSSI, media attention, net change in position, per capita consumption, and biophysical markers including regional droughts and Lake Okeechobee levels) across the entire study period (1991–2014), with the accelerated period of change highlighted. In the case of Miami-Dade, events on the timeline are coded as occurring at the County/Utility level, the District level, or State/National level.
Drafts of the narrative and timeline were shared with local area experts including academics, journalists, and water utility managers in order to discover missing events, unexpected data, and inaccurate interpretations. Seeking and incorporating feedback from experts familiar with the case who have direct experience in water management decisions during the transition has multiple benefits: it confirms the validity of the story, facilitates factual discussion of past decisions with stakeholders, and informs editing decisions in order to ensure all relevant data are included. At the same time, however, we recognize that local experts such as water utility managers may be incentivized to tell the best story, especially in areas where water management is a highly politicized issue; thus, it is crucial to consult with a variety of experts from different sectors, particularly from different positions within the water management utility or related agency (i.e., finance staff, conservation staff, etc.).
For WASD, the timeline and narrative were developed in parallel. These are included below in Figure 6 and section 4. Through the data analysis stage and consultation with experts, some elements were emphasized and included as key points in the narrative of WASD's transition while other details were deemed unnecessary. For example, an EPA Consent Decree and lawsuit regarding wastewater coincided with WASD's transition to sustainable urban water management. While these events were important within WASD, they were not included in the narrative because they had little direct impact on the transition to a more sustainable water supply.
Transition Timeline. Graph of water management transition in Miami-Dade County with accelerated period of change marked in grey across four plots (a) key water supply management events (circles) and droughts (black bars); (b) normalized annual measures of water stress (WaSSI) with media attention (Media); (c) the annual measure of percent change in net position (Financial); and (d) annual per capita water consumption.
4 Narrative of the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department Sustainability Transition
4.1 Introduction
In 1972, Miami-Dade County and the City of Miami consolidated water and wastewater services under a new agency. The Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department (WASD) is now the largest water utility in the southeastern United States, servicing over 2.3 million residents of Miami-Dade County [Miami-Dade WASD, 2014]. WASD's primary water source is the Biscayne Aquifer, a shallow porous limestone aquifer recharged by Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades watershed. The South Florida Water Management District (the District), a state agency, regulates WASD's access to the Biscayne Aquifer with a mandate to balance urban supply needs against regional environmental, agricultural, and flood protection goals.
Facing a number of financial and permitted water supply challenges, WASD underwent a major shift toward sustainable water management between 2006 and 2011. Drought response, regulatory changes, and conservation measures led to a drop in per capita demand and an increase in system resilience.
4.2 1990–2005: Building Concern Over Supply
Beginning in the early 1990s, WASD's primary concern was securing future access to water supplies to meet the demands of a growing population–without raising water rates [Miami-Dade WASD, 2000; Interviews]. Water supply was threatened by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, aging infrastructure, droughts, and a new focus on Everglades health, ultimately motivating WASD leaders to take action to assess system-wide vulnerability. As a result, the utility began working with the District to receive a single consumptive use permit for groundwater withdrawal [SFWMD, 2015]. WASD also began exploring water reuse and aquifer storage and recovery as potential supplementary water sources, particularly during the dry winter season [Interviews].
In 2001, the region faced a particularly stressful drought [Interviews], and public attention was turned to water issues (0.4% of all articles addressed water issues, three times the historic average). Lake Okeechobee water levels fell below 11 feet for seven months, a key indicator of regional water supply security. In response, the District's board implemented temporary restrictions on outdoor water use and irrigated agriculture, reinforcing the salience of the drought for water managers.
Per capita consumption in Miami-Dade County plateaued in the mid-2000s at 160 gallons per day (gpd) per person, though overall water demand continued to increase with the rapidly growing population. The utility faced some financial pressure as its net position declined after 2002 and political leadership maintained a focus on affordability. In 2005, the Florida State Legislature passed a bill requiring communities with over 150 gpd per person use to create conservation plans with specific consumption reduction goals. Along with pressure from the District for the County to adopt ultra-low-volume fixture and irrigation ordinances, focus increased on local responsibility for regional water management.
4.3 2006–2011: Crisis Accumulation, Accelerated Change, and Permanent Conservation
Between 2006 and 2008, WASD experienced numerous unanticipated challenges including a water supply shortage followed by a sharp drop in demand, the start of the Great Recession, and extended drought (WaSSI = 0.95 in 2006 compared to historic rates near 0.8). It responded to this water supply and budget instability with a combination of rebate programs, rate increases, staff cuts, and irrigation restrictions.
In 2006, as home construction in Miami-Dade boomed, water demand nearly exceeded permitted supply. The District granted WASD temporary emergency access to additional water from the Biscayne Aquifer. In response to this supply crisis, new state regulations, and public attention (media coverage tripled in 2007 from previous years to 0.27%), the County Commission passed the Miami-Dade Water Use Efficiency Plan, its first 5 year water conservation plan, along with the first water rate increase in years–reflecting a shift in priorities away from low rates [Miami-Dade WASD, 2010].
From 2007 to 2009, South Florida experienced 3 years of moderate drought conditions (PDSI = 0.25–0.35) and Lake Okeechobee periodically fell below 11 feet. In response, the District implemented new water restrictions and imposed a conservation surcharge on all households. WASD also faced many financial challenges. Per capita water use dropped 14% to 138 gpd per person in 2007, the most dramatic decrease in the utility's history, leading to a temporary revenue shortage. Furthermore, as a result of the Great Recession, unemployment in Miami-Dade increased from 3.6% in 2006 to 12.7% in 2011; WASD revenue fell and positions were cut across the utility to fill budget holes as demand dropped and foreclosures exploded across the service area.
Conservation was identified as a potentially cost-effective response to these crises. In late 2007 after years of negotiation, the District granted WASD its first system-wide 20 year pumping permit which contained specific conservation goals [SFWMD, 2007]. WASD hired its first full-time conservation staff to implement a rebate program for low-flow water fixtures and toilets [Interviews]. It also invested in a water loss reduction program to identify and fix leaking pipes and began a $2.5 million project to model saltwater intrusion into the Biscayne Aquifer, a major threat to long-term water supply. In 2009, the County Commission formally ceded decision making about water shortages to the District and passed strict water use efficiency standards for new buildings. In 2010, the District made permanent the lawn watering restrictions first implemented in 2007–2008 [SFWMD, 2014].
WASD began to experience the benefits of its new conservation focus (WaSSI fell to 0.8 in 2011). In the winter of 2011 when another drought hit the region, residential and agriculture restrictions were increased again without major objections and minimal media attention (0.14%). The County Commission again raised rates, and WASD's budgets were balanced despite a persistently poor economy [Miami-Dade WASD, 2012].
4.4 2012–2015: Long-Term Investment
As a result of its shift in focus and careful response to threats, WASD is now in a new context. The consolidated 20 year pumping permit has extended the utility's planning horizon. Per capita and system-wide water demand have continued to fall, and droughts have been handled easily (WaSSI = 0.72, per capita = 135 gpd per person in 2014, and change in net position is volatile but overall positive). WASD's current self-identified greatest challenge is funding a $12.8 billion 20 year infrastructure investment begun in 2015 [Miami-Dade WASD, 2014]. To fund this project, WASD staff have successfully advocated for rate increases for all consumers, with higher increases for higher-volume users. Despite a resurgent economy and growing population, water demand is low enough that aquifer storage and recovery and reuse programs have been set aside [Miami-Dade WASD, 2014].
Since 2007, WASD has continually revised its original system-wide pumping permit to ensure a reliable long-term water supply. Since 2012, conservation has been included as a major source of future supply, up to 9.55 million gallons per day by 2030. These revisions allow WASD to earn credit for existing cost-effective conservation measures and justify future budgeting for conservation. While WASD has emerged as a water conservation leader, Miami-Dade County continues to face threats such as climate change and sea level rise, which threaten its primary source of water, the Biscayne Aquifer, and will likely prompt additional future transitions.
5 Discussion: Analyzing and Interpreting the Data-Narrative
The narrative and timeline provide a more complete understanding of Miami-Dade's recent water supply transition than either contextual information or the specific measures of exposure do individually. The documents display both the alignment of exposures and the outcome of increased sustainability, and provide support for triple exposure theory's proposition that accelerated change is the result of specific exposures aligning. However, a single case leaves some questions unanswered, prompting the need for future cross-case comparison.
Consistent with triple exposure theory, measures of regulatory, biophysical, political, and financial exposures align at key moments during Miami-Dade's transition toward sustainable water management. The timeline reveals a cluster of rate increases, conservation measures, and other management changes during an accelerated period of change from 2006 to 2011. The WaSSI peaks in 2006 as changes in supply and demand result in the highest level of water stress observed during the study period. Media attention to water issues increases early in the accelerated period of change. Financially, after a multi-year drop in net position following the 2001 drought, WASD experienced a shift toward financial stability as it raised rates and cut staff to address decreased revenue in the mid-2000s. Miami-Dade has a hierarchical institutional structure, usually associated with greater resistance to institutional change. However, IG analysis reveals the concentration of constitutive rules and the presence of more scope than choice rules, suggesting that the governance system has enough flexibility to accommodate transition without constitutional-level changes.
The drop and subsequent stabilization in per capita water demand supports the conclusion that the transition, and particularly the events captured in the accelerated period of change, led to increased system sustainability. While the decline in per capita water use began earlier in the mid-1990s (consistent with the trend in many U.S. cities; [Coomes et al., 2010]), it was fastest in years where media attention to water issues was high, such as in 2001 and 2007 (see timeline Figure 6). Once water issues became less salient, per capita demands rebounded in 2002 and 2009. However, in 2006/2007 when high water stress and high media attention to water issues aligned, the decline in per capita water demand was relatively large and the rebound effect was relatively small.
Drawing generalizable conclusions from the findings of this single data-narrative is difficult. However, the case has revealed questions that can be tested if compared with other cases about how exposures interact to drive or restrict transition, if exposures create barriers that block transition opportunities, what enabling conditions may exist during transition, and why a transition consists of certain actions and not others.
For example, biophysical events like droughts are insufficient indicators of the stress experienced by a utility and poor predictors of when a transition window will appear. Miami-Dade's accelerated period of change coincided with a prolonged drought, but previous droughts did not prompt similar clusters of utility-level changes. Additionally, drought and falling Lake Okeechobee levels do not consistently correspond with changes in WaSSI values. This counterintuitive observation can be explained by understanding local institutional arrangements in context. In many municipalities, the responsibility to maintain water levels and the authority to impose water restrictions is vested locally. However, this is not the case in Miami-Dade where consumer drought restrictions are declared by the South Florida Water Management District. Furthermore, WASD's permitted groundwater supply is not restricted during droughts while consumer restrictions suppress demand, leading to a slightly lower demand to supply ratio.
In addition, while one standardized measure (the WaSSI) shows that water stress peaked right before the accelerated period of change began, it does not provide insight into what caused this water stress in the system, limiting full understanding of what prompted transition. Again, the narrative is useful because it couples contextual information—the fact that water demand continued to rise as supply was restricted by the permitting process—with a standardized indicator of water stress. The narrative further explains why such extensive utility-level changes may not have occurred during previous droughts but did occur in conjunction with the 2007–2009 drought. During the 2001 drought, for example, WASD was able to moderate the impacts of water stress to not exceed its permitted supply through infrastructure and restrictions on water use, preventing the need for extensive changes. Yet in 2006, regulatory exposures accumulated to a sufficient level (i.e., WASD was nearly unable to moderate demand to a level below its permitted supply) in the context of existing political and biophysical exposures, thus prompting a period during which a consolidated supply permit (i.e., a regulatory change) helped relieve the water stress.
The narrative and timeline also provide insight into how variables converge and accumulate pretransition. For example, WASD initiated a cluster of management changes beginning in 2006 (i.e., the start of the accelerated period of change) when biophysical, political, financial, and regulatory exposures aligned. Preceding events prepared the utility for this window of opportunity. During a period of declining finances, regulatory changes that directly affected the available supplies were incorporated into the WaSSI calculation, but as documented in the narrative, other regulatory changes also occurred in the mid 2000's (e.g., the Florida State Legislature bill requiring water conservation plans in communities with over 150 gpd per person and pressure from the South Florida Water Management District to adopt conservation ordinances). Thus, when exposures aligned, Miami-Dade had already begun the process of developing a conservation plan.
Importantly, Miami-Dade's transition was not inevitable. Hornberger et al. [2015] raise the point that not all cities or regions respond to water stress with conservation. In some cases they seek out additional supply, while in other cases, political exposure in the form of public opposition acts as a barrier and blocks action [Hornberger et al., 2015]. While Miami-Dade could have increased supply through wastewater treatment and reuse or aquifer storage and recovery (and has previously explored such options), these options are historically relatively expensive. Miami-Dade experienced a series of droughts of varying intensities in the two decades before they experience an accelerated period of change. Examining the quantitative data alone, one could hypothesize that the cost of supply options may have increased the attractiveness of conservation to Miami-Dade decision makers, or repeated exposure to water stress may have shifted the regional culture with respect to water conservation [Caldas et al., 2015]. While both cost and shifting attitudes may have played a role, the narrative illuminates the role of the Great Recession in facilitating the utility's transition to sustainability through conservation. The temporary decline in demand allowed WASD to shift resources from supply augmentation to demand management.
6 Conclusions
The case of Miami-Dade illustrates that shifting focus away from increasing supply and toward managing demand helped WASD decrease stress levels during droughts, handle increased population, and begin preparing for serious climate change challenges. The data-narrative method shows the alignment of exposures (biophysical, regulatory, financial, and political) during a transition in water management can lead to increased sustainability without requiring major institutional changes. Further, it suggests that the Great Recession may have played a role in facilitating accelerated change. While this narrative documents WASD's shift toward more sustainable practices, it is crucial to remember that WASD will likely transition once again in coming decades. Current practices will not remain “sustainable” as new environmental and socio-political challenges, like sea level rise, emerge.
As is clear in the example of Miami-Dade, examining individual data sources is insufficient to understand transitions. It is through the structured synthesis of quantitative and qualitative data sources, including the tacit knowledge of practitioners gained through iterative review of the documents produced, that researchers can begin to understand what specific factors drive a utility's transition toward sustainable water management.
While our narrative and timeline illuminate factors related to WASD's sustainable water management transition, particularly the accelerated period of change from 2006 to 2011, they are more illuminating when interpreted comparatively. For instance, the observations from Miami-Dade prompt questions including: Why do some water stress events lead to a lasting decline in water demand while others have more temporary effects? Is the impact of water stress driven by regulatory change different than water stress driven by drought or demand growth? What threshold level of drought or water stress increases the salience of water issues on the public agenda? Is this increase in salience necessary for a collective response to water stress? What is the impact of changing institutional arrangements?
To answer these and other questions, we must synthesize data not only across variables relevant to transition, as demonstrated here, but across cases as well. Using this methodology to compare narratives of transition across multiple utilities can uncover patterns in the drivers and barriers that lead to transitions. However, there is also a limitation to examining only cases of successful transition. Therefore, an important next step is to analyze cases in which barriers blocked transition. As our understanding of the drivers of sustainable water management transition increase, cases and time periods can be identified in which transitions would be expected, but did not occur, based on observed drivers. Then, data-narratives can be applied to these types of cases to examine how drivers and barriers interact.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Sara Hughes, Jessica Bolson and Deserai Anderson Crow for their invaluable help reviewing this manuscript and for their advice throughout this process. Also, thank you to Bertha Goldenberg of the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department for her continued assistance and insights throughout this project. This work is supported by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) under funding received from the National Science Foundation (DBI-1052875). The South Florida Water, Sustainability, and Climate Project is supported by the National Science Foundation's Water, Sustainability, and Climate (WSC) Program (EAR-1204762 and EAR-12040235) with joint support from the United States Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA Award 2012-67003-19862). This material is also based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (DG1E-0951782), Water Diplomacy Traineeship (IGERT-0966093), STEM Leaders Fellowship (EEC-1444926), and Engineering Research Center for Reinventing the Nation's Urban Water Infrastructure (EEC-1028968). To the best of our knowledge there are no conflicts of interest for any of this paper's authors. Data supporting the conclusions in this paper are publically available at the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department http://www.miamidade.gov/water/publications-reports.asp; the South Florida Water Management District http://www.sfwmd.gov/portal/page/portal/sfwmdmain/home%20page; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Centers for Environmental Information Historic Palmer Drought Indices http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/drought/historical-palmers/; and the Miami-Herald http://www.miamiherald.com/site-services/archives/.
