July 25 -- The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) invites comments to OMB by August 24, 2023 regarding Water Resources Management—Institutional Resiliency and Data-Delivery Needs.
The United States is facing growing challenges related to the availability of water due to shifting demographics, aging water-delivery infrastructure, and the impacts of climate change, which include flood and drought. Working with incomplete knowledge, managers must consider the needs of various demographic groups and economic sectors when making management decisions as well as when responding to emergencies. We will collect information regarding the decision-making process, data, and data-format needs to support daily, short-term, and long-term decision-making. Information will also be sought on the resiliency of water-resource management institutions. A lack of resiliency within water institutions can lead to poor decision-making and outcomes that produce conflict between water-use sectors, states, or communities and ultimately may lead to crises. This information will support the delivery of appropriate data, in appropriate formats, at the right time for decision-making and will support recommendations on how water-resource institutions can be more resilient in the face of the many water-resources challenges the nation currently faces.
Water information is fundamental to national and local economic well-being, protection of life and property, and effective management of the Nation’s water resources. The USGS works with partners to monitor, assess, conduct targeted research, and deliver information on a wide range of water resources and conditions including streamflow, groundwater, water quality, and water use and availability. This information collection will provide information to the USGS Water Resources Mission Area that will allow for understanding the resilience of water management institutions (e.g., State Engineers, Community Water Systems, Irrigation Providers, State Fisheries Managers, State Department of Natural Resource Managers, Hydro-Electric Power Providers, Dam and Reservoir Operators Board Members for Conservancy Districts) and how best to deliver data to water data users. The Organic Act of March 3, 1879, authorizes the USGS to conduct this research and Section 9 of the SECURE Water Act directs the Secretary of Interior to consult with the USGS and ensure that strategies are developed to address potential water shortages, conflicts, and other impacts to water users and the environment of each service area – this information collection supports that work.
This information is being collected in support of strategic priorities for the USGS Water Mission Area (WMA) to understand socioeconomic factors that affect water availability and provide data and decision support tools to partners and stakeholders in practical ways. In addition to congressional mandates through the SECURE Water Act, this collection responds to recommendations made by the National Academy of Sciences in their 2018 report to the USGS WMA on Future Water Priorities for the Nation (NASEM, 2018). Specific recommendations included: enhance the development and delivery of integrated and dynamic models encompassing the full water cycle, increase focus on the relationships between human activities and water, and answer the question of how institutions, governance, and institutional resilience impact water quality and quantity (NAS, 2018).
To those ends, responses to the Institutional Resilience component of this ICR will be used by the WMA Social and Economic Drivers (SED) Program to:
-- Identify the organizational, environmental, and socio-political conditions that enhance or impair resilience in water management institutions through elicitation of participants’ tacit knowledge and professional expertise
-- Evaluate the utility of established metrics from engineering and safety research for assessing resilience in water management institutions
-- Explore repeated themes emerging from interviews for novel metrics or indices that may help illuminate organizational and management aspects of water insecurity
-- Understand how decision-making processes, across various levels of water governance, change in response to environmental or socio-political events, and the impact of those changes (or lack there-of) on institutional resilience
-- Develop metrics of resilience in water resource management institutions that can be integrated into WMA national and regional assessments of water security
Information collected to date for the Institutional Resilience component of this ICR has been used by the WMA SED Program to:
-- Expand and improve bureau and mission area understanding of the complex water governance landscapes in both the Delaware River Basin and the Upper Colorado River Basin
-- Understand how decision-makers in water management institutions conceptualize and operationalize resilience at both the organizational and the system levels
-- Validate existing resilience metrics from other management realms for use in the water sector and identify emergent themes for future exploration
Responses to the Data Delivery component of this ICR will be used by the Integrated Water Availability Assessment (IWAA) Program within WMA to:
-- Improve agency understanding of data delivery needs and preferences for users of water data including (but not limited to) spatial and temporal scale, update frequency, key variables of interest, data formats, access pipelines, and degree of interpretive or visualized content
-- Understand critical characteristics of short- and long-term forecasts to partners and stakeholders who use USGS water data for decision-making
-- Identify data gaps that could be filled with integrated water quantity, quality, use, and ecosystem models
-- Understand the utility and usability of data delivery prototypes, and necessary technological infrastructure
Information collected to date for the Data Delivery component of this ICR has been used by the IWAA program to:
-- Shape initial product prototypes of the National Water Census online delivery system including early versions of a web-interface, data portal, and model and data dictionaries
-- Inform development of metadata and metadata standards for modeled water data
-- Communicate with modeling teams within WMA about user needs in relation to variables of interest, temporal and spatial scale, update frequency, model uncertainty, and potential postprocessing steps to improve usability
-- Identify unmet partner needs for data that could inform the direction of future work within WMA
USGS Water Resources Mission:
https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources
USGS submission to OMB:
https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/PRAViewICR?ref_nbr=202304-1028-003 Click on IC List for questionnaire, View Supporting Statement for technical documentation. Submit comments through this site.
FR notice inviting public comment:
https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-15695
For AEA members wishing to submit comments, "A Primer on How to Respond to Calls for Comment on Federal Data Collections" is available at
https://www.aeaweb.org/content/file?id=5806