You could take a look, for example, at the 1994 Lower West Coast Regional Water Supply Plan (large PDF) published by the South Florida Water Management District. They forecast that water demand in 2010 would be 917 million gallons a day (p. IV-2). The 2012 version of this plan reports that actual demand in 2010 was only 630 mgd (p. 29). How much money would have been wasted if supply facilities actually been constructed back then to meet an illusory future demand for water?

Other demand projections also routinely overestimate future water use. The SWFWMD 2001 regional water supply plan estimated that 2010 water use would be 1,454 mgd (p. 63). The district reported that actual water use in 2010 was 1,135 mgd (p. 41) and that 2011 water use was 1,059 mgd (p. 53).

Why so far off? One reason is a tendency to underestimate likely improvements in water use efficiency. Another is that many people (not just agency staff) love to predict water supply problems.

Let’s not build a bunch of unnecessary but very expensive reservoirs, wellfields, and desalination plants.

[Addition: This is not to say that current withdrawals are sustainable. Some watersheds could benefit from development of alternative supplies to displace current excessive withdrawals.]

According to the statute, the term means “efficient” irrigation and fertilization. That allows you to use a huge amount of water for a large expanse of “appropriate” plants. The program tells you, however, not to “overwater” the plants (however many). It also is possible to be “Florida-Friendly” while fertilizing an enormous lawn with a broadcast spreader–but only when the fertilizer is “really needed.” There is no quantified requirement that the “Florida-Friendly” landscape use less water or fertilizers than other landscapes.

Another approach might be better. Maybe you don’t irrigate or fertilize your fairly conventional home landscape. You don’t bother to apply pesticides. I think you probably are more “friendly” to the Florida environment than your neighbor with a carefully-tended landscape with an “efficient” irrigation system and fertilizer practices that comply with “Florida-Friendly” guidelines. (And you saved a lot of money and time!)

The most heated disputes about water in Florida history probably are those in the Tampa Bay region some years ago. They involved some name-calling, a few million dollars of lawyer fees, and some judicial decisions. The eventual result was a very large reduction in groundwater pumping, a billion dollars of regional water construction projects, and a stable regional water supply authority. No one was killed, no one was injured, no area was laid to waste, no one ran out of water. No “war.”

The point is broader than merely some regions in Florida. Aaron Wolf, probably the world’s leading researcher on water disputes, concludes that “Water Can Be a Pathway to Peace, Not War.“ A 2012 study done for the World Wildlife Federation found that, ”While there have been instances of conflict arising at the various geographical scales over a shared water source, history reveals that cooperation is the predominant response.” Wendy Barnaby, who wrote a book on biological warfare, was asked by her publisher to follow up with one about water wars. She concluded that water wars were a myth:

I offered to revise its thesis, but my publishers pointed out that predicting an absence of war over water would not sell. Book or no book, it is still important that the popular myth of water wars somehow be dispelled once and for all. This will not only stop unsettling and incorrect predictions of international conflict over water. It will also discourage a certain public resignation that climate change will bring war, and focus attention instead on what politicians can do to avoid it: most importantly, improve the conditions of trade for developing countries to strengthen their economies. And it would help to convince water engineers and managers, who still tend to see water shortages in terms of local supply and demand, that the solutions to water scarcity and security lie outside the water sector in the water/food/trade/economic development nexus. It would be great if we could unclog our stream of thought about the misleading notions of ‘water wars’

Same for Florida. We gots lots of water problems and need to deal with them. We don’t need to spend energy figuring out how to solve mythical problems. The “war” metaphor is not helpful.

Groundwater poses problems of its own. Monitoring wells can be very costly to install. Even with many wells, the boundaries of springsheds are hard to determine. They naturally move back and forth with the patterns of regional rainfall. Withdrawals too can cause boundaries to move many miles.

Precipitation in Florida is an additional highly variable factor that also is subject to measurement error. Even worse for creating an accurate water budget, rainfall patterns are changing because of climate change. 

When we look at the effects of withdrawals on hydrologic budgets, we see that many permits impose no monitoring requirement at all. Withdrawal location matters and that makes the evaluation even harder to carry out. A well in one place might have dramatically different water resources impacts if it were at some other place in a watershed. An inexpensive static water “budget” cannot account for that. Same for recharge activities.

So, we need the best possible hydrologic budgets but have to face the fact that there always will be some uncertainty about the results. That problem is made worse by the second kind of “water budget”: the legislative appropriation process. The best “water budget” is a well-funded management regime that can monitor water conditions as well as possible, act even with imperfect information, and continually adapt to new information and problems. It isn’t helpful for the Legislature to divert needed water money to pork barrel projects or to erratically move budgets up and down.

There could not be a clearer signal that Floridians do not support hard-right conservative ideas. Nonetheless, that is exactly what is coming out of this session of the Legislature. Something is very wrong with democracy in Florida and it damages water policy as much as anything else. This failure of democratic institutions is as serious a problem as the old “pork chop gang” that held back the state in the 1950s and 1960s.

When I set out to write this book I immediately sensed a danger looming. It was that I was almost bound to fall into the trap of nostalgia and indignation, of turning this book into a diatribe against the passing of original Florida….I decided simply, “What the hell, you cry the blues and soon nobody listens. And that made me see there was really no sense writing another vanishing Eden book at all….The way to get my point across would be to talk mostly about what joy still remains in the Florida landscape and then just sneak in some factual tooth-ghashing every now and then when the readers might really be reading. 

No significant preserving of nature can be done with slight sacrifice. The true test will come when great sacrifices are needed, when it becomes necessary to fight the indifference of the world and the active opposition of much of it, to surmount man’s ingrained determination to put the far future out of his mind in matters of current profit. 

In listing some reasons for optimism over the state of nature and man in Florida, one favorable development outweighs all the rest. It is not another species on the mend or a new park or preserve or sanctuary established. It is rather a change in the heart of the people.

One session of the legislature, even as dismal as this one, can be followed by other ones with better politicians.

All of that material was excised from the 2012 and 2013 versions. Floridians are now asked only to practice some “environmentally-friendly habits” and “embrace efforts toward conservation.” The proclamation ignores the 2013 world theme of the “Face of Climate Change.”

Can’t wait to see next year’s even more exciting proclamation.

We can extend the metaphor far beyond leaky pipes, however. A good many of the state’s water problems are just as absurd. Consider House Bill 109 as a minor example. It lengthens permits for alternative water supplies from a very long period of 20 years to an even longer 30 years.

How come? It is supposed to remove “uncertainty” in the development of alternative supplies. The only effect, however, is to punch a hole in the state’s ability to adapt to future water circumstances. The bill won’t provide any additional certainty because almost all water facilities must obtain other permits (drinking water [treatment plant], NPDES, etc.) that federal law limits to a maximum term of five years. A special 30-year term for a water supply permit makes no practical difference. The only effect is to move the state closer to a system of permanent property rights in water use permits. That would be a leaky public interest sieve, indeed.

The headline to Craig’s most recent story notes that the administrative law judge order “blasts DEP” for the proposed permit. The judge fully accepted the mitigation credit recommendations of the department’s leading expert–the one that was peremptorily pushed aside in order to award higher credits to Highlands Ranch. He also found that a special “Guidance Memo” written to facilitate the Highland Ranch permit was an illegal “unadopted rule” and cannot be used by FDEP. Moreover, the Department’s issuance of a special variance for financial responsibility requirements was reversed.

In short, once put to an impartial judicial test, this permit fell completely apart. That’s terrific. The legal system worked, in this case, because the Florida Wildlife Federation took on expensive litigation. But how many other bad permits have been issued because nobody could afford to challenge them?