2019 Ten Across Water Summit Postscript

2019

Summit Postscript

The US Interstate 10 corridor provides the most compelling window on the future of the country, one which presents the challenges of the 21st century in the highest relief.

This singular transect strings together many of the most pressing societal, economic, urban and environmental topics of our time.

A project spanning the entire continent, Ten Across (10X) engages this region as a living laboratory for resilience and innovation.

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QUOTES!

...We can’t just be looking at putting band-aids on these things. We really need to back up and look at the big picture, and I think that’s what’s happening [at 10X] and I’m really excited about that.

“

— John F. Ross

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Author, “The Promise of the Grand Canyon: John Wesley Powell’s Perilous Journey and His Vision for the American West”

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— Will Sarni

Founder & CEO, The Water Foundry

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I think [10X] has the right balance of optimism and urgency.

“

I gravitate toward big ideas that have the potential to change the world quickly... I really do believe in the 10 Across construct... of taking key themes and looking at the diversity of location and how we can collectively solve a wicked problem.

— Marissa Aho Chief Resilience Officer City of Houston

We would like to thank those who came from across the country to participate in the second annual Ten Across Water Summit (10XW2), thus ensuring its success. Over the course of several days, the potential of the 10X framework and its geography was reconfirmed. Loosely tracking the 2400-mile U.S. Interstate 10, this continental transect is clearly on the front lines of social, economic and environmental change.

As was mentioned several times, we consider everyone—panelists, attendees, and observers alike—to be part of this initiative and able to contribute to it. This post10XW2 booklet is an invitation to remain in touch with us and to help advance some of the most compelling ideas which emerged from the event.

10XW2 was an atypical water conference, as was 10XW1 in Baton Rouge. While addressing scientific, policy, economic, and environmental matters related to water, we intentionally positioned this existential topic as a leading indicator of how we will address the major issues of our time, all of which are on vivid display across the I-10 corridor.

Equity Builds Resilience. Time and again, inequities were identified with regard to access and social mobility. Accordingly, we are in discussions about a 10X Summit in El Paso/Juarez that will highlight the deep relationship between resilience, security, and well-being in this vibrant, binational community.

Reducing Risk. The benefit of the 10X geography is its latitudinal orientation, scale and variability. Working with public and private sector partners, we hope to bridge the current gap between local resilience planning and emergent finance vehicles to advance a risk reduction facility leveraging the 10X region.

Language Matters. How do we communicate issues of great urgency to maximum effect? At the request of our Summit attendees, the next 10X Water Summit, to be held in Houston, will feature a session expressly dedicated to the use of language and narrative to inspire increased awareness and impactful action.

We believe Ten Across is the most compelling window on the future of the country.

Purposefully broad in both its span and ambition, 10X represents an open invitation to join in this vital conversation.

In this post-Summit document, we recommend four key takeaways from 10XW2: Re-envisioning cities. We can now imagine our futures in a precise and data-driven manner. Working with 10XW2 participants, we plan to pursue data visualizations which will further empower city leadership to act with a heightened awareness of impending opportunities and challenges.

We look forward to seeing you in Houston in 2020!

Wellington “Duke” Reiter Senior Advisor to the President, Arizona State University Founder, Ten Across

Participant Distribution

14% 26%

media business

22%

non-profit government academia

24% 14%

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Governor, State of Arizona

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— Doug Ducey

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The network that 10X has created is, I think, just as powerful as the insights that the people who participate bring to it.

— Justin Ehrenwerth President and CEO The Water Institute of the Gulf

Panelist Distribution

21%

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Along this I-10 corridor, we all have unique challenges with water. For a state like Louisiana, the challenges center on access and inundation. In Arizona, our challenges center on dryness and conservation. But even at a time such as this, when there is so much in the political arena that threatens to divide people, Arizona has proven that our greatest challenges, especially around water, can and should unite us. After all, it is what sustains us.

19% media business non-profit

19%

24%

government academia

17%

Given the location of the 2019 10X Water Summit in Phoenix, one of the fastest growing cities in the West, if not the nation, it seemed important to give explorer, citizen scientist, and cartographer John Wesley Powell his due.

His prescient map of the Arid West (1878) reminds us that we often have the means by which to see the future, especially so today with the benefit of contemporary earth observing technologies. The question is whether we can respond to the resultant facts, demonstrate inclusive leadership, be good stewards of the land, and optimize the well-being of all people in the process.

We would like to extend our warmest appreciation to John F. Ross and acknowledge the contribution of his book, “The Promise of the Grand Canyon: John Wesley Powell’s Perilous Journey and His Vision for the American West” in helping to frame the conversation at the 2019 10X Water Summit.

theArid AridRegion Regionofofthe theUnited United States, 1878 States, 1878 John Wesley Powell (1834-1902) John Wesley Powell (1834-1902)

Re-envisioning Cities What We Heard at 10XW2 The 10X geography connects many of the fastest growing cities in the United States. The 2019 10X Water Summit convened influencers in resilience planning and data visualization from across the country for frank, productive discussions about the future of urban growth and resource allocation. Leaders from four of the largest metro regions in the country — Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Antonio, and Houston — discussed the complex work of managing growth in the face of climate change and water management issues. Summit sessions provided opportunities for decision makers, community leaders, scientists and designers from 10X communities and beyond to share proven ways of mobilizing data to frame productive public conversations about long-term resilience.

The 10X Platform

Re-envisioning

CITIES

The transcontinental scope of 10X challenges us to think beyond our traditional jurisdictional boundaries to improve the development of our cities. The 10X platform enables communities not only to debate technical solutions, but to step back and reassess our fundamental approaches to growth with the perspective offered by peers. This initiative provides a new scale of analysis and action, facilitating dialogue around collaboration and governance at regional scales while staying focused on local social, demographic, and environmental realities.

Collaborative Action Evidence-based resilience planning oriented to the unique needs of individual cities is essential for success. Fortunately, our collective ability to assemble, visualize, and respond to the impact of multiple stress points is advancing significantly, as demonstrated by many of our presenters. New ways of knowing the future with unprecedented precision obligate us to plan accordingly. Moving forward, 10X will actively support and connect practitioners around emerging planning and visualization tools as well as corresponding governance models aimed at re-envisioning urban life. We look forward to working with you to identify and share solutions that fuel new knowledge and vision.

Jacksonville

2.5M 1.2M 413K

Tallahassee

7M

Mobile

Baton Rouge New Orleans

2.5M

Houston

13.3M 4.8M

385K

830K 1.5M

Cumulative Estimates of Resident Population Change and Rankings: April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2018 Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division Release Date: April 2019

city growing faster than the national average of 5.6%

San Antonio

1M

El Paso | Juarez | Las Cruces

Phoenix Tucson

Los Angeles

METROPOLITAN STATISTICAL AREA POPULATIONS

nearly

40 MILLION people live in 10X cities Many of these cities are the fastest growing in the nation

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As we look across the cities of the I-10 corridor, growth is going to come whether people want it to or not, and the future is going to be one of moving water — either moving water where it needs to go, or moving water away from places where you don’t want it. And that future depends on our political will to invest in the infrastructure necessary to enable sound decisions and management. And that political will vests on the culture that underlies our communities — it’s hugely important.

Director, City of Phoenix Water Services

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— Kathryn Sorensen

Equity Builds Resilience What We Heard at 10XW2 The topic of equity repeatedly emerged at the 2019 10X Water Summit, especially with regard to political boundaries which constrain productive discussions and solutions around water, a critical resource.

Wholesale re-imagining of the social, political, and technological systems governing water will become increasingly important to meet resilience goals and ensure equitable water management for all. By framing water as a leading indicator of how we deal with other great challenges such as social equity, the summit shifted conversation to the efficacy of conventional boundaries and the challenge of overcoming traditional confines, whether physical borders between countries or social and institutional constraints on human livelihoods.

EQUITY Builds Resilience Resilience

The 10X Platform The 10X framework is well positioned to advance social mobility and equity by examining and questioning standard patterns. By connecting communities across municipal and state lines, 10X provides a necessary regional perspective to approach these problems together, holistically, without becoming mired in abstraction or overwhelmed by local context.

Collaborative Action To directly explore the deep relationships between social equity, resilience, and security, planning is underway for a binational 10X summit in El Paso/ Ciudad Juarez. This event, to be convened on both sides of the border, will specifically highlight examples of social and physical mobility in this vibrant urban region. With our partners from 10X cities and towns, we hope to address issues of equity as one of the most critical elements of effective community building and disaster preparedness. In doing so, the summit will also reposition the notion of security more broadly, not as a narrowly militarized term, but as an inclusive concept emphasizing the ongoing well-being of all populations. Lessons from this summit will be highly relevant to other 10X cities who struggle with equity challenges while relying on human migration for continued growth and prosperity.

Stay tuned for more information on this unique and relevant 10X event.

POPULATION RESIDING IN DISTRESSED ZIP CODE Distressed zip codes are calculated using poverty, income, housing vacancy, high school graduation, employment and establishments

nearly

20 MILLION 5.9M 1.2M 430K

877K

10.0% – 19.9%

20.0% – 29.9%

642K

4.5M

El Paso | Juarez | Las Cruces 30.0% – 39.9%

Jacksonville

Tallahassee

Mobile

Baton Rouge New Orleans

Houston

3.2M San Antonio

Phoenix Tucson

Los Angeles

915K

Economic Innovation Group. October 2018. FROM GREAT RECESSION TO GREAT RESHUFFLING: Charting a decade of change across American communities.

people in the 10X region reside in distressed zip codes

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The impact of climate change depends very much on where you live, what your starting climatology is, and the composition of your local economy […] We see a decline in economic output of 25% or larger, particularly along the I-10 corridor, which is by far the most vulnerable part of the U.S. to climate.

Partner, Rhodium Group

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— Trevor Houser

Reducing Risk What We Heard at 10XW2 The explicitly geographic focus of the 10X initiative provides a cross-regional vantage point on the various combinations of risks faced by rapidly changing communities across our southern tier. The 10X scope is important for framing local risks in a larger context and at a higher profile than our individual cities can access on their own, yet with local perspectives and best practices at the fore. The diversity of challenges found across this corridor — including extreme weather and flooding in the East and seismic risk and fire in the West, with water supply and heat management issues throughout — prevents one-size-fits-all solutions. However, this same diversity provides the conditions necessary to create robust financial mechanisms like risk pools. Building on previous presentations at the 2018 10X Water Summit in Baton Rouge, the 2019 10X Water Summit provided a vital platform to discuss the merits of market-based approaches to these challenges and featured an expert panel discussion on the topic. Local governments require the ability to protect not only physical assets but also their greater economic durability, continuity of city functions, and community livelihoods in the face of disaster.

The 10X Platform The conversation at the 2019 10X Water Summit was purposefully designed to provoke consideration of financial mechanisms that mitigate risk across the 10X geography. 10X is situated to explore formation of collaborative regional funding models that shift focus from disaster response to proactive fiscal resilience strategies.

Reducing

RISK

Collaborative Action 10X is about transforming talk into action. To contribute to a culture of preparedness and resilience among our cities, we are actively pursuing the creation of a risk reduction facility to better understand, reduce, and insure risk within this region. By connecting expert perspectives on innovative insurance and financial products to decision makers, knowledge producers, and local points of view, 10X will facilitate exploration of a pool pairing risk reduction with risk transfer across the southern U.S. We believe emergent resilience finance is a critical component to enable 10X communities to adapt successfully to uncertain futures, and we invite those with a particular interest in this complex undertaking to join us in this effort.

$10 BILLION AND GREATER NATURAL DISASTERS SINCE 2000

Since 1980, natural disasters have cost

$900 BILLION in the 10X region $18.5B Fire 2017

$24.2B Fire 2018

$11.5B

Drought 2011

$10.3B Hurricane 2004

$13.4B

Hurricane 2005

$28.1B

Flooding 2016

Houston

$24.5B Hurricane 2018

$25.3B

Hurricane 2018

Hurricane 2008

Hurricane 2017

Hurricane 2017

Hurricane 2016

Hurricane 2004

$25.2B

$10.7B

$36B

$92.7B

$10.7B

$21.9B

Hurricane 2004

Tropical Storm 2000

Baton Rouge New Orleans

$128.8B

Hurricane 2004

$24.6B

$12.4B

San Antonio

El Paso | Juarez | Las Cruces

Phoenix Tucson

Hurricane 2011

$166.3B Hurricane 2005

Los Angeles

$15.5B

Tornado 2011

Hurricane 2005

$51.5B Hurricane 2017

Adam.Smith@noaa.gov. (n.d.). Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: Table of Events.

$10.5B

$13.8B

Jacksonville

Drought 2002

Tallahassee

Drought 2012

Drought 2013

$13B

Mobile

$33.6B

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We can’t just think about the physical assets, or the shifting of population within a region, we have to think about the ability of that jurisdiction to raise revenue and actually meet the plans and the political objectives they’ve set out.

“

— Alex Kaplan Head of North American & SVP Global Partnership, Swiss Re

Language Matters What We Heard at 10XW2 The lively conversations generated at the second annual 10X Water Summit often returned to one key challenge: effective communication of provocative topics. Successful mitigation of climate impacts in 10X communities was shown to be deeply connected to the tenor of narratives attached to climate change risks, environmental science, and proactive planning. “Resilience literacy” was repeatedly identified as an essential aspect of addressing the cultural status quo at the core of wicked problems. Assuming we can increasingly know the challenges and opportunities before us (see Re-envisioning Cities section), how can that knowledge be communicated most effectively to the public and to decision makers to effectuate positive change?

The 10X Platform The 10X geography stretches across some of the most politically polarized and socioeconomically mixed areas of the country, connecting an array of urban and rural extremes—an ideal test bed for developing and assessing the success of various communication strategies.

Collaborative Action Feedback from 2019 summit participants indicated that delving into language issues continues to be one of the most innovative and distinctive contributions of 10X. Accordingly, the upcoming 2020 10X Water Summit in Houston will amplify 10X’s existing focus on communication, journalistic practice and media formats in the service of resilience literacy. Diversity of opinion and practice is a strength of 10X and the search for common denominators and core truths will always be a hallmark of this project. 10X is your platform. We welcome your input, experience and recommendations regarding how it can be used to address the most critical issues of our time.

LANGUAGEEGAUGNAL Matters

srettaM

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Adjunct Faculty, Louisiana State University

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— Lynne Carter

— Pat Mulroy

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Tell people something that matters to them… and always talk about what you can do about it.

I think probably one of the more important conversations [around water] is how do you mobilize the general public… we talk in language that most people won’t understand. We need to find ways to communicate in very basic terms the changes we want to see happen, the positive participation the rest of the community can engage in... learning those communication skills will be the difference between us being able to adapt and not being able to adapt.

Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Climate Adaptation and Environmental Policy, The Brookings Institute

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We can figure out what the real problems are, and how big they are, and then we can get started in solving them. There are solutions. People say we have to change the way we think…we just have to act, just have to get started.

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— Kathy Baughman McLeod Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, Atlantic Council

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