Creating Resilient Water Utilities Initiative

Providing drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater utilities with the practical tools, training, and technical assistance needed to increase their climate resilience.

On this page:

• About the Program
• Types of Assistance
• How This Program Helps Build Resilience
• Connections to Other EPA, Federal, or Non-Governmental Efforts

About the Program

The Creating Resilient Water Utilities (CRWU) Initiative provides drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater (water sector) utilities with practical tools, training, and technical assistance to increase system resilience to climate change impacts. CRWU helps promote a clear understanding of climate data and helps water sector utilities identify relevant climate risks, potential adaptation strategies, implementation options, and infrastructure financing.

Types of Assistance

CRWU primarily provides technical support for applying climate and asset condition data as part of risk assessment, as well as support for climate adaptation planning. CRWU also conducts workshops, trainings, and webinars for information sharing and education purposes.

Technical Assistance

• CRWU provides direct technical assistance to water utilities using Resilient Strategies Guide (RSG) and the EPA’s Climate Resilience Evaluation and Awareness Tool (CREAT). Exercises with individual utilities and communities help establish utility partners and build adaptation planning experience that can be shared with others. The information collected through these exercises can inform effective management, hazard mitigation, capital investment planning, and upgrades of critical facilities.
  • The RSG helps utilities develop and update their adaptation plans using the experiences of utilities already pursuing adaptation. Users can filter by geography and the types of strategies to focus a search and support plan development. The Guide links resilience priorities and response strategies to funding sources from the EPA’s Water Finance Clearinghouse for assessment and implementation.
  • CREAT is a decision-support framework that guides the assessment process and generates information to make screening-level decisions on which strategies may be most effective at building resilience for a range of climate-related challenges to both infrastructure and operations.
• Utilities can export their results from the EPA’s Vulnerability Self-Assessment Tool (VSAT) into CREAT to better assess the long-term impacts of their natural disaster threats. VSAT allows utilities to comply with the risk and resilience assessment requirements in Section 2013 of the America’s Water Infrastructure Act (AWIA).

Convening and Outreach and Education Assistance

CRWU provides workshops, trainings, and informational webinars to share information about how changing environmental conditions and extreme weather events may impact drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater utilities. During these events, presenters introduce CRWU’s resources and tools, along with water utility case studies using these tools like CREAT. Participants include drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater utility staff and management; technical assistance providers; local, state, federal, and Tribal government officials; watershed planners; and water sector associations.

How This Program Helps Build Resilience

CRWU provides data services and decision support across a wide range of climate and economic factors. Water utilities can review historical and projected (modeled) future conditions using online maps and scenario-building tools to identify conditions of concern. These services help program partners establish the initial building blocks for risk assessments and adaptation planning.

The suite of CRWU data services available online is continually growing, including the following:

• The CREAT Climate Projections Map provides easy-to-access scenario-based climate change projections, including extreme heat and intense storms, that present challenges to water utilities and the communities they serve.
• The Storm Surge Inundation Map illustrates historical hurricane tracks, strike frequency, and potential areas of coastal flooding and inundation from storms.
• The CREAT Streamflow Projections Map provides projections of possible changes in flow conditions for U.S. streams and rivers under a range of future environmental conditions.
• The Wildfire Conditions & Risk Map provides information on current, past and potential future wildfire conditions in the United States for water, wastewater, and stormwater utilities to assess the potential for wildfire near their facilities or within their watersheds.
• The Snowpack Change for the Western United States Map provides information on how snowpack conditions in the Western United States could change due to changes in climate, which is valuable for water, wastewater, and stormwater utilities assessing the reliability of snowpack as part of their water supply.
• The Adaptation Case Studies Map shares case studies from partner utilities and communities that are currently building resilience and pursuing adaptation efforts. The issues addressed by these utilities are divided into categories: droughts, floods, natural disasters, water quality, and service reliability. In addition to these climate-related concerns, the stories on the case study map include other issues or priorities that demonstrate the potential for solutions with multiple benefits, such as energy management, sustainability, socio-economic factors, and public health.

Connections to Other EPA, Federal, or Non-Governmental Efforts

The adoption of CRWU products and resilience building strategies in the water sector depends on collaboration and partnerships with other leading organizations and government agencies.

• CRWU has gathered and translated data from government agencies, academia, and other water utilities to provide support focused on specific, relevant challenges from historical (yesterday), current (today), and projected (tomorrow) climate and hazard datasets. Maps and assessment tools use both real-time and archived data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to support the exploration of scenarios and decisions regarding the most effective strategies to prepare for challenges if those scenarios were to occur.
• CRWU coordinates with the EPA’s Water Technical Assistance (WaterTA) to respond to utility inquiries and track ongoing TA across offices.
• CRWU engages Environmental Finance Centers through the technical assistance process to provide funding information and resources to communities.
• EPA’s National Stormwater Calculator (SWC) uses projections from CREAT climate scenarios.
• CRWU’s Resilient Strategies Guide also provides data drawn from the Water Infrastructure and Resiliency Finance Center’s (WIRFC) Water Finance Clearinghouse to point users toward eligible funding sources.
• CREAT includes economic data from the EPA’s Community Water System Survey to estimate potential losses from infrastructure damage or operational failures.
• CRWU has partnered with the Water Utility Climate Alliance and NOAA to support a series of workshops focused on enhancing understanding of the capabilities and limitations of climate science, as well as the best practices for using it in long-term planning, learning about planning methods for addressing uncertainty when incorporating climate science into utility decision-making processes, and practicing communication strategies to address institutional barriers and generate engagement around building adaptation and resilience.