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(Music)
(sound of water rushing over rocks)
Wendy Graham: Actually the idea for the Water Institute was was born about ten years ago
where groups of faculty got together and were challenged with problems that went
beyond their own discipline, so
the water problems are getting so complex that
just an engineer or just a scientist or just a lawyer can't
put all the pieces together needed to provide a solution so
faculty started talking about establishing
an institute that would bring together all the disciplines.
The types of issues that the Water Institute deals with are typically those
that are broader than the single discipline.
you can see these by picking up a newspaper
any day of
of the week. You know recently in Florida
the drought that has affected Lake Okeechobee and that has implications for
the Everglades Restoration; it has implications for
agriculture, it has implications for public water supply, so our goal is to provide
the fundamental understanding, the technologies and the policy alternatives
so that when we're confronted with an issue
we don't unknowingly trade off consequences between say, water users. We
don't have that ecosystem suffer because the urban area wants more water or we
don't have wetlands drained because we want a pump more ground water.
Or we don't take water from one region of the state or the country and
transfer it to another, and with it,
transfer unintended consequences. So we try to build from the science, the physical
and the biological and the chemical sciences
to try and understand those interactions then we try to understand how humans attitudes
and perceptions about water affects the way they use it
design policies, pricing strategies, engineering technologies
that help us use water more efficiently
and with less water quality impacts and less
downstream ecosystem impacts.
Once we have all those pieces put together
then we can look at scenarios and decision makers can
play those out, you know, "If the climate changes like this, we expect the
ecosystem to respond like that."
Our goal is to provide that policymakers with that understanding in the tools
they need to make the decisions
we're not the decision makers, we're the knowledge makers
but really getting to the point where people understand that we have a limited
resource
and a growing population
and that sets up a conflict.
We have lots of users of water in Florida and in the world and the ecosystem was
using water before humans
made their impact on the landscape so there is some
an natural competition between the development of cities and the
maintenance of agriculture and maintenance of the natural ecosystems.
It doesn't necessarily have to be a win-lose situation and what we're
looking for a situations where we can
use the
minimum amount of water and water at the appropriate quality
for the use we need. So for drinking water
that the highest quality water we only need to 2 liters a day.
for watering out lawns, there's really no reason that we should
the putting drinking water on our lawn. There's got to be a better way
uh... lower energy cost way
on efficient way to use our water than that.
It's a challenge to go from
laboratory understanding to field understanding to decision making and
that's what we're trying to do in the Water Institute
Florida has a very dynamic hydrologic system. We have intensely rainy periods,
we have the Floridian Aquifer, which is one of the most productive aquifer is in the
world, we have the Everglades which is one of the most unique
wetland ecosystems in the world and we have a population that's projected to
increase faster than either the national population or the global population over
the next
twenty or thirty years so all of that produces a unique mix where a
a great place to try to develop
knowledge and test solutions to becoming
a sustainable society.
We need to gather information
about human behaviors, we need to gather information about climate, we need to
gather information about water levels and stream flows. We need to gather information about
ecosystems
and estuary
behaviors, so all that is very expensive, and much more expensive than a typical
National Science Foundation grant would support.
The Water Institute is very young
and continued private funding is crucial to the future of our work.
I don't know why
water wouldn't be the most important thing to everybody.
You know, when I
look around at the
rivers and streams in this area
and I see the changes happening
You know it's important to me to understand it
and then to understand the trade offs
associated with how we live.
There's no free lunch, if humans are going to move around on this earth
we're going to have an impact on our water
and ecosystems
that it supports but
it's important to me to understand with those trade offs are, so we know what
they are,
and we know when we choose
this sort of lifestyle, these are the consequences and I think we'll
make good decisions if we understand those trade offs.
My vision for
the University of Florida Water Institute is that we would have
capacity to do the laboratory experiments to do the field experiments
to bring all that data together in a unified statewide database
to put into models that
could predict the interactions
between all the aspects of the system and that we would be able to bring
decision makers to gather in
a multimedia decision theater and allow them to make different choices and
to look at the impacts.
So I can see
that we would bring our knowledge and our models and our data together to
really have an impact on
on the future of Florida's water.