Quantifying Water Security in West Virginia and the Potomac River Basin

Abstract

All healthy ecosystems, communities, and economies are founded on access to clean, adequate water sources to support ecosystem services, provide clean drinking water, and allow the production of water-intensive goods and services. The state of available water resources must be analyzed through the lens of water security, defined as the capability to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities of acceptable quality water for people, the economy, and ecosystems. Mountain regions are sources of freshwater resources for downstream regions, which produce disproportionately higher runoff than downstream regions. As a result, mountain regions are often referred to as natural water towers for that disproportionately high rainfall and snowpack due to orographic processes and their contribution of freshwater resources to downstream communities and ecosystems. Despite the importance of these water towers, they are vulnerable to the growing global anthropogenic and climatic change impacts. Anthropogenic factors such as population growth, urbanization, and pollution alongside increasing temperatures and seasonal shifts threaten the ability of global water towers to sustain the water supply to between 1.6 to 3 billion people today and a projected 1.5 billion more people by the mid-twenty-first century. Studies analyzing the importance and vulnerability of global water towers state that immediate action is required to safeguard future water supply. While present water security studies have predominantly focused on arid regions, there is a myth of abundance of water resources in humid regions. Coarse spatial scale models that analyze the water security of global water towers provide important insight into regional, continental, and global scale water systems but mask the localized scarcity and water security of individual watersheds. An example of this is the state of West Virginia in the eastern US mid-Atlantic region, an important headwater region to the Mississippi and Potomac water basins. West Virginia is characterized by low population, high forest land cover, over 88,232 km of tributaries and rivers, high surface roughness, and steep topographic gradients of the Appalachian Mountains. Despite these favorable water supply characteristics, West Virginia faces water insecurity stemming from frequent flooding, widescale pollution, degraded ecosystem function, poor access to safe drinking water, and a political economy that prioritizes resource extraction and chemical manufacturing. The development of sustainable management of water resources for both quantity and quality demands an understanding of current water resource availability and who, when, and where water is used. To contribute to addressing these needs, this thesis is comprised of two studies: