Assessing Water Resource Issues Among States in the US South East Region

Abstract

The US Southeast region is endowed with vast deposits of water resource assets located in numerous states. Considering the growing water use to serve rapidly expanding land uses from agriculture, residential areas, thermoelectric to industrial facilities. Over the years, the demand for water to meet the needs of various sectors in the zone has precipitated increased withdrawals, declining levels in aquifers and sectorial imbalance in the distribution. Accordingly, sectorial imbalance and stress attributed to socio-economic, physical and ecological parameters is now being felt in the areas many considered fully endowed with hydrological assets and less vulnerable to depletion. Beset by the management implications of the trends, various agencies in the zone have stepped up mitigation measures. Notwithstanding the gravity of the challenges and the fact that most studies are still festooned with projected depletion patterns in the US arid West, very little work exists in the literature on the changing patterns in water resource use in the Southeast region using a mix scale model. For that, this research will fill that void by assessing the variabilities in water resource use among some states in the Southeast. With emphasis on the issues, trends, factors, and impacts, the study uses secondary info from major data agencies analyzed by mix scale techniques of descriptive statistics and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to assess the tendencies. The results point to changes in usage among the sectors in the form of gains and declines, the emergence of hydroelectricity and irrigation as the largest users, the dominance of Florida, regional dependence on surface water sources, evidence of depletion and spatial dispersion of these trends across the states. With these changes attributed to various elements, the paper offered suggestions ranging from water conservation measures, the adoption of efficient polices to the design of a regional hydrological information system.