(upbeat music) - [Narrator] The climate's erratic behavior is impacting the global water systems and supplies from grouting Europe and Southeast Asia to the US southwest, water supplies are approaching catastrophic lows.

With many considering The Great Lakes region a climate refuge, is the world's largest freshwater supply at risk of being diverted?

We'll discuss that and West Michigan's groundwater supply at risk on NewsMakers.

(upbeat music) - The earth's oceans hold nearly 97% of the planet's water.

Water is also held in lakes, rivers, reservoirs, aquifers, glaciers and in the air as water vapor, yet 2.5% is considered freshwater.

How is climate behavior and human behavior impacting water supplies?

Doctor Alan Steinman, the Allen and Helen Hunting Research professor with the Annis Water Resources Institute at Grand Valley State University joins us to explain all things, hydrology.

There's a lot to talk about right now.

- There is indeed, Patrick.

It's an interesting time.

- Interesting with the drought that's happening around the globe, impacting rivers, impacting water supplies.

How do you observe all of this?

How do you take it in and process it?

- I'm gonna backtrack for a second and talk about the 2.5% that you just talked about being freshwater.

In fact of that 2.5%, almost all of that is tied up in glaciers or deep groundwater and really is not available.

So, it's a very thin sliver.

.007% of all the water on this planet, it's actually readily available for human consumption and use.

So, it's more dire than that.

And, you know, when you talk about these kinds of global droughts that are going on, water, like politics is always local.

And if it's in your backyard and you're running out of water, you don't care what's going on in the rest of the world.

You want water, you need water.

And it becomes a very, not just from a human health but a social and political element as well in terms of how you function.

How the society functions in which you live.

So, we first have to look at this from a global perspective.

You know, what's going on?

How is climate affecting this?

It's highly likely that climate change, the increase in temperature in our atmosphere is exacerbating the situation.

And the reason for that is with warmer temperatures, you get more evaporation.

And then pure physics shows that for every degree celsius, the atmosphere increases, it holds 7% more moisture.

So it's holding more water in as water vapor in the atmosphere.

When it does release, you get the floods that we're experiencing right now in Texas, while other parts of the country are undergoing drought, like in Arizona and Nevada in California.

And so the distribution of water changes, the amount of water in the atmosphere versus on land changes.

And all of that is exacerbated by increasing temperatures.

- You've been at this for how long?

I mean, water is your wheelhouse.

How long have you been at this?

- Oh, well, probably since my PhD, my master's.

So we're talking almost 40 years.

It's kind of sobering actually.

As you may recall before I got here, I was Director of Ecosystem Restoration for the South Florida Water Management District and working on the Everglades.

And of course, water there was critical.

We used to joke that the difference between a drought and a flood is 24 hours in South Florida because the landscape is so flat and things change so dramatically there.

And water really, it ruled the roost, right?

It was making the water right, is the tagline for Everglades Restoration.

Up here in The Great Lakes, it's a little different where you have an abundance of water and abundant reservoir, if you will, of water.

The question is, how does it get distributed?

How does it get used?

And just because we have so much water here doesn't mean that we can't abuse the heck out of it.

We can and we've done that in the past.

And we're in fact doing it in some places right now presently.

It's not in violent just because of its immensity.

We need to be protective.

We need to be vigilant.

And we need good science in order to understand how to manage it appropriately.

- I asked you that question because there's so many people, including myself, you think you're an expert in everything, right?

And you get fixed on your point in your direction on something, but for you experiencing the shifting tides, pardon the pun here, when it comes to water over the years, what have you been witnessing in your research?

And how do you talk with people about this issue when it comes to climate and weather and where you stand when it comes to that debate?

When did you notice the shift?

When did you say, "Hey, this is where we need to really focus because the trendline is not a good one?"

- You know, you're absolutely right.

Now, I would say the shift was gradual.

I'd like to say that there was some trigger inflection point.

But that's really not the case and I would suspect that's true of most of my colleagues.

Over time, you know, we've been seeing more and more drought conditions.

More and more conflict around water, particularly in the US.

I mean, it's always been in the Middle East you know, for 1000s of years.

But in the US we're seeing more of it now.

One of the problems is and I'm gonna divert just a little bit, you know, when we talk about the arid Southwest and the water that's being allocated from the Colorado River Basin, when that allocation was made in the 1910s, it was during one of the wettest periods in history.

So they had more water than they thought they did when they allocated it.

Now, when we're in a drought or even under normal hydrologic conditions, whatever normal is, there's not enough water for everybody to go around.

And most years, in fact, for the last 10 years the water hasn't even reached the Sea of Cortez.

The river hasn't reached the Sea of Cortez, where it normally would discharge to because so much of it is being withdrawn.

And now with their compact just undergoing last week, a change where there's gonna be more restrictions to Nevada, Arizona and Mexico, it's gonna be even worse.

How are they gonna allocate that water?

And you know, they have some ridiculous water rules out west and they need to change those for sure.

Where, you know, first and right gets the water.

And so sometimes they'll take the water even if they don't need it because they don't wanna lose that right to the water.

I mean, that's absurd.

We need better conservation guidelines.

It's insane that people are growing, you know, turf grass in the arid Southwest.

They need to xeriscape.

And you know even around here, we need to start conserving even more.

I think we'll talk about that in a minute.

- So, let's use the US as the example here because we can all relate to that.

And what we're seeing in the Southwest and with the Colorado River, Lake Mead, Lake Powell and the levels that have been dropping.

- Lake Mead has dropped 175 feet in the last 20 years.

175 feet.

I mean, it's a 27% of its capacity right now.

And pretty soon, you know, it'll get so low that they won't be able to use it for hydroelectric power.

So, now you've got not just a water problem, you've got an energy problem.

The societal implications just get ramified and ramified as you go down the line.

And it all starts with having an ample water supply.

- So this is where climate behavior and human behavior meet.

- Intersect.

- They intersect.

- Yeah, absolutely.

All of these issues, you know, what I teach my students is that every environmental problem we face on this planet ultimately boils down to human behavior and economics.

And you need to understand both in order to solve the problem.

And the reality is often in these technical fields, we're not taught that.

We're not taught how to, you talk about how do you communicate this to society over time?

And there is no one right answer.

It depends on your audience.

So you need to be nimble.

You need to be fluid.

You need to understand how to relay this information in ways that they'll understand, whether it's an informed public, whether it's a legislator, a member or whether it's, you know, sitting here talking to you.

I can throw numbers and facts at you and all sorts of jargon and, you know, I'll get a blank stare.

That doesn't do me any good.

It doesn't do you any good.

It doesn't do your audience any good.

- So when you look at these confluences, these two dynamics that have now engaged.

- This is not a confluence, Patrick.

- Yeah, I know.

(Doctor Steinman laughs) It's more of an engagement.

(Doctor Steinman laughs) When you look at what has happened, 23-year drought.

So, what has happened at least with weather behaviors?

And we'll just talk about El Niño, La Niña, maybe we get to the Atlantic's Conveyor, as well, but let's just stick with that and how the weather and the climate is impacting this region.

And then we have to figure out the challenges that you've already discussed and how those can be somehow mitigated.

- Well, we certainly can't control these large climate patterns like El Niño and La Niña.

But they are responding to the climate that we create.

So in theory, once we start getting a handle on the climate, assume that we do and reducing the temperatures or getting at least not increasing to the two degrees Celsius target, then the El Niños and La Niña should respond.

In the Atlantic, we have the Atlantic Meridian Oscillation, the AMO, which is also influencing our weather here in The Great Lakes.

So, we need to consider this at a global basis.

So, it's not like we can flip a switch and change these.

And each one of these changes, even though they predicted a hard La Niña a couple of years ago, it was a light La Niña.

So even with the best models that are out there, not just coming out of the US but coming out of the UK, you're gonna get different responses.

And you know, we often joke, pick your model depending on what weather pattern you wanna see.

And of course, then it'll probably be the opposite.

- But snowfall is big, right?

Because you're talking about the Rocky Mountains and that discharge in the spring.

- That snowpack really does help create, not just in the Colorado River Basin but throughout all of the west, that snowpack through the Cascades, through the Rockies.

It's the water supply for the ensuing summer.

And the snowpack has been abysmally low over the last, you know, 15 years in particular.

They occasionally get a big storm, but overall, it's been very low.

And that's why they're experiencing the droughts that they're experiencing right now.

It's pretty wild.

There is and I know you wanna focus on these, but I'm just gonna divert for a second to Spain, 'cause I just read this morning on this feed of reservoir in central southern Spain has gotten down so low that it has revealed basically a Stonehenge.

They call it the Spanish Stonehenge that had been underwater for millennia.

So I mean, while the farmers are definitely undergoing incredible pressures because they don't have enough water for their crops, these other aspects start to emerge.

I mean same in Lake Mead, only there it's dead bodies.

So take your pick.

But you know, it drives tourism.

I mean, so there is this weird byproduct that comes out of these kinds of crises.

But overall, this is not good.

I mean, you know, you look at that trend, we need water.

We need water for so many different things, and it's not just agriculture and not just drinking supply, but we need it to, you know, make semiconductors, we need it for manufacturing.

I mean, all aspects of our life are dependent on water.

And when there isn't adequate supply, we have to figure out how to deal with it.

And the best thing to do is try and deal with it before we run out of water.

That's the smart thing to do.

- So, what happens at West?

We're gonna eventually make our way here to West Michigan for this program.

But what are some of the solutions, desalinazation?

- Desalination.

- Desalination, correct.

- It's certainly one thing, but it's expensive.

It's outrageously expensive.

The energy to do the reverse osmosis is very, very expensive to get the salt out.

And then you're left with brine, so you have to deal with the residue.

And that's not gonna be a solution on a global basis.

It's a solution in developed countries that can afford, you know, the energy to do that.

Conservation, we are so poor at conservation.

In most places in the US, the price of the water molecule that we're drinking is absolutely free.

We are paying for the treatment and moving it to our tap, but we're not paying for the actual H molecule.

Well, maybe we need to change that.

So that it wouldn't be incentive, people would be incentivized to conserve water.

There's all sorts of pricing structures that are out there.

We're seeing a lot of venture capitalists move into the water business.

I mean, sometimes not all that well.

Veolia in the Flint River.

You know that disaster.

But there's all sorts of VC about new technologies, micro-irrigation, things that avoid evaporation.

So these, the technology, the changing human behavior and perhaps smarter political compacts are all part of that equation.

There's no one panacea.

- But what is the timeline?

- Well, you're seeing it right now.

We have a crisis right now.

So there's no time to waste.

There really isn't.

It's now.

It's yesterday, is really what it comes down to, at least for the arid Southwest.

If we wanna get ahead of it in The Great Lakes, which we did, and The Great Lakes Compact of a few years ago really was a piece of creative legislation to try and get ahead of this issue that was driven by, you know, people trying to divert water out of The Great Lakes.

So it wasn't that we did it without there being some kind of crisis.

But still, it was, you know, it's a strong piece of legislation that basically prevents large water withdrawals from The Great Lakes other than the straddling communities on the ground of the basin.

Its 100,000 gallons per day is considered a large water use.

There are some aspects of that, there's a couple of exceptions.

But overall, that's the main goal.

Legislation comes and legislation goes.

So we recognize that.

What's really preventing diversion right now, in addition to the compact, I think they think of the compact as a short-term solution, the long-term implications.

The economics of moving the water, the energy of moving the water is so expensive that it just doesn't make economic sense.

Who knows if the drought gets incredibly severe then, you know, maybe economics can be thrown out the window because people need water.

Nobody wants to think that far ahead 'cause it's just, it's such a gloomy prediction, right?

But yeah, that's a possibility.

I think, you know, most people who are protective of The Great Lakes water, think if you in Arizona wanna use our water?

Come here, right?

Don't send our water there.

And then, of course, there are the people who wanna close the gates behind them and they don't want any Arizonans coming back to The Great Lakes region, which I think is a short-sighted solution.

What we need to do is think about this reverse migration and how do we plan for it?

Because we could make this a positive, right?

Bring back talent, bring back, you know, ecotourism, bring back people that are gonna spend money.

And you know, there's some of us who have, we have proposals, we have projects that are focused on what's gonna go on in these coastal communities as a function of reverse migration, as a function of climate change.

How do we plan for that for the future?

Because that's the way we need to be thinking.

- Are you beginning to see some of that migration?

Is anybody keeping track of those types of population numbers?

- I don't know.

Yeah, that's a really good question, Patrick.

If they are, you know, I'm not a demographer.

So we'd have to bring in somebody from geography and let us find out if that's the case or from the right place.

I suspect if anybody's tracking, it's gonna be the right place and see whether we're seeing that or not.

It's a really good question.

- It's interesting.

I can think back to, I'm trying to remember.

I remember the billboards, the big drinking straw and that was probably right around the time when the compact was formed.

- It was a few years before the compact.

It was when the tanker, I can't remember the name of the Japanese company, but the tanker was gonna take water out of Lake Superior and bring it elsewhere to sell it.

And that really started the process and it led to lots of action, political action, studies and legislation ultimately, in terms of the compact.

And then here in Michigan, of course, Ice Mountain, when they started to withdraw water from the springs, that incentivized Senator Birkholz, Patty Birkholz, rest in peace, for you know, incredible incredibly forethought in terms of legislation visionary on Patty's behalf, to come up with a water withdrawal assessment tool in the state of Michigan.

And again, preventing, if you're gonna do a large water withdrawal, you have to go through a series of these steps to make sure it's not gonna have an impact.

An adverse resource impact was the terminology in the legislation.

So, you know, and that model that was developed with the Conservation Advisory Council of which I was a member, as well as DNR and DEQ at that time won awards all over the nation and has been adopted elsewhere throughout the world.

I mean, it's just it was really ahead of its time.

Good stuff.

- How much of it is just the psychology of it all, right?

We've got this giant, beautiful freshwater lake in our backyard.

We talked about population.

Ottawa County, one of the fastest growing counties in the state and yet it has a groundwater problem.

- And it's a harbinger.

So it's a harbinger of what's gonna go on elsewhere in the state.

The reason for that is the aquifers.

The aquifers is the underground water storage reservoirs, if you will.

It's not underwater lakes or rivers.

It's actually, when we talk about groundwater, it's the water that's the moisture between the sediment particles.

That's why you have to pump it to get it out.

And the aquifers in the state of Michigan are a series of nested bowls.

So if you think about in the middle of the state, we have the all that glacial drift from when the glaciers were left behind the sand.

Really good yield.

Easy to get that groundwater out of there.

And then as you get closer towards the whether it's Lake Erie, Lake Huron on the east side or Lake Michigan on the west side of the state, we get towards the Marshall Formation which is bedrock and also sits on an ancient seabed.

I mean, this was a seabed, you know, half a million years ago.

And so there's salt water down below there.

So and unfortunately for Ottawa County, underneath that glacial drift is a clay layer, what we call an aquiclude.

It basically prevents water from migrating up and down.

It's a barrier.

And so there's not enough recharge.

And as we have people coming in, particularly in the middle part of Ottawa County, Robinson Township, Olive Township, Allendale Township, we have more development that's based on what historically had been on wells and we have more agriculture.

We've always had agriculture and they require irrigation as well.

So nothing is recharging that.

And so they're digging wells deeper and deeper, once they basically wipe out the glacial drift and as they go deeper into the Marshall Formation, they're starting to drop some of this brine water.

Now, you can treat that if you're on a domestic well but if you're a farmer, you're not gonna treat that.

You're gonna start burning your crops because there's gonna be too much chloride in that water and they can't handle that, whether it's soy, corn or blueberries.

And that's what we're seeing right now in Ottawa County, particularly in the middle part of the county.

The static groundwater level, it's fancy term for saying that the water in your well, when you're not putting the pump on, you don't have the pump on, but it's just sitting there static, has dropped more than 50 feet in the last 40 years in some parts of Ottawa County.

50 feet, it's insane.

That is not sustainable.

So Ottawa County to its credit, I mean, Paul Sachs, who's the Planning Development Director has done an incredible job with him and his staff.

They have put together a plan to figure out how to deal with this.

And they went out and talked to all the different sectors, real estate, AG, residential, environmental and said, you know, this is what we need to do.

We need your help.

You need to help us with this.

It was not mandated.

We said we want you at the table and get your ideas.

There's an executive team that oversees this approach.

I'm a member, which is why I have the information that I do and I've been involved with it for the last 10 years as they've started to try and figure out how to solve this.

And ordinances are one of the ways, where right now residential development, I think it's in Allendale Township, I don't know if it's in Blendon and Olive and Robinson, you cannot develop a residential development on well water.

You have to connect to municipal mains, which comes out of Lake Michigan, but the amount you're drawing out of the Lake Michigan is gonna be trivial.

You're not gonna affect your groundwater that way.

And that makes sense, but it's expensive.

You know, sometimes the mains have to be extended, connecting to a mains is expensive and developers don't wanna add that cost to the homes because they're trying to sell the homes.

But you know, when your decision tree is residential on mains or no residential at all or running out of water, connecting the mains makes a lot of sense.

- And farmers have, to their credit have done a lot.

- They have.

- On this issue with their own small ponds, irrigation ponds that they have constructed, changing the way they irrigate their fields.

It's almost like the farmers had been a leader and they are on board, maybe helping with this campaign.

- Certainly as an example of what can be done, yes.

They are a great example.

And you know, it's in their best interest, right?

They need that water.

And so I give, certainly give credit to the producers out there that are doing this kind of stuff.

But you know, we also have to recognize the fact that they're doing it in order to stay in business, right?

The kind of planning that I was doing will be like I said, it'll be a harbinger for other counties along the lakeshore.

We're seeing it in The Thumb right now.

We're seeing it, you know, down in Southeast Michigan.

These kinds of problems.

And it's just a function of the geology that we're facing here in Michigan, the way these nested bowls are set up for our aquifers.

So hopefully, the kind of pain that Ottawa is going through right now will, you know, make things easier for other counties in the future.

The real problem, we've talked about human behavior is that it's tough to get people to conserve water when they see Lake Michigan in their viewshed.

There's tons of water there.

Why do we need to conserve?

But we do.

We really, really do.

- And that's why you mentioned yet new developments will tie into municipal water sources, which is the big lake.

Are we seeing people xeriscaping?

Because I mean, West Michiganders love their green lawns and you see the sprinkler systems humming along.

Are you seeing people shifting the mindset when it comes to those simple?

- [Doctor Steinman] Steps?

- [Pactrick] Yeah.

- Well, it's not simple because, you know, when people love a manicured lawn, it's tough for them to give that up.

It really, really is.

So we're hoping to find some leaders, you know, business leaders that are willing to change their landscaping to show that you don't need to have sod.

You can do some beautiful beautiful xeriscaping.

And for those people not familiar with xeriscaping, it's X-E-R-I scaping and it's basically using things that don't require a lot of water.

So you'll see it in the arid Southwest.

Stones, cacti.

Obviously we're not gonna have cacti here.

But you can have other plants that are low, you know, if you're living in the sand dunes then dune grass is a perfect example of that.

But it's a tough sell.

That's one of the things we really need to do about educating people and recognize and getting people to convert the way that they landscape.

It's a big change.

And the landscapers, you know, can still make profits off of this.

They just are gonna be selling a different product to make this happen.

But turf grass makes no sense.

Not only does it not make sense from a water perspective, I mean it's a terrible habitat.

It's a desert, you know, nothing wants to live in there.

So having a diverse habitat would make a lot more sense for butterflies and pollinators and things like that.

It's a really sticky, it's a wicket problem.

It's a sticky wicket in terms of how you convince people to make that change.

And somebody needs to take, you know, the lead on that.

And hopefully with the incentives being implemented in Ottawa County Planning Department rolling out this groundwater plan, we're gonna start seeing that change in mentality.

- We have about three minutes.

Sometimes good things do take some time to occur.

You're up in Muskegon, great news there for the lake.

- Yes.

So Muskegon Lake is one of the 43 originally designated areas of concern.

These were the toxic hotspots that the EPA and the International Joint Commission listed in 1987.

And there were many more than just those 43, but a lot of communities didn't wanna get on the list because it was a stigma.

After you know what, almost 40 years of management actions, restoring habitat, dealing with contaminated sediments and you know, a whole list of other impairments, we're on the cusp of being delisted.

We have met all of the targets restoration targets and now we're just going through the management actions that EPA needs to go through.

Hopefully next spring, we'll have an official delisting process.

So it's very, very exciting in that regard.

And then just one last thing, with funding from the Meijer Corporation, tomorrow, we're gonna be rolling out a BeBot and a Pixie drone.

BeBot is a semi-autonomous robot that goes along the beach and cleans up microplastics and plastics.

And then the Pixie drone goes through the water and basically sucks up plastics like a whale with baleen and taking krill.

So we're really really excited out on Pere Marquette Beach doing that and kudos to Meijer Corporation and the Council of The Great Lakes region.

There are four of these going on around The Great Lakes.

One in Muskegon because we're in the backyard of Meijer Corp and also Charlevoix, no, Traverse City, Charlevoix, Wisconsin and Cleveland.

I didn't even know Cleveland had a beach.

So, but very cool stuff.

- There's a lot of this material floating around.

I mean, how long could it take to clean it all up?

- Well, it's a good question.

You know, in The Great Lakes, it doesn't accumulate the way it does in the Great Plastic, you know, Pacific Plastic areas.

But some of it does due to natural circulation patterns, accumulates in certain areas.

So you focus on those areas.

- All right.

Doctor Alan Steinman, Annis Water Resources Institute Grand Valley State University, thank you so much.

Always a pleasure.

Great work, keep it up.

- Thanks for having me, Patrick.

- And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you again soon.

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