Water stress & water salience: implications for water supply planning

Water stress prompts a durable reduction in water demand under some circumstances. This demand reduction has the potential to alter the benefits and costs of demand- and supply-side alternatives in water supply planning. This paper takes a socio-hydrological approach to assess the implications of this feedback, in the context of Las Vegas, Nevada. This application demonstrates feasibility first by developing and testing a novel model of water salience as a function of proximity to water supply thresholds, and then linking modules to account for feedback between subsystems. Lastly, by comparing this model to a water use scenario model to assess system performance under a range of future conditions and potential responses, this work illustrates the trade-offs between scenarios and the socio-hydrological approach. This model, while specific to Las Vegas, demonstrates a prototypical modeling framework capable of examining water supply–demand interactions by incorporating water stress-driven conservation.