Water utilities have dealt with a plethora of problems related to water provision through traditional infrastructure- e.g., aging systems, growing affordability, equity, and water quality concerns. As a result, localized water infrastructure offers an innovative path for water management.
Recently, WaterNow Alliance released the Tap into Resilience Toolkit, an interactive resource designed to help elected water leaders and utility management professionals realize cost-effective, localized water innovations within their communities.
As part of the ongoing Tap into Resilience (TiR) initiative, the toolkit is a portal to everything professionals need about decentralized water infrastructure in one place.
- Interactive and customizable online modules. The TIR Toolkit’s modules cover over 60 topic and issue areas including finance, tax, accounting, legal “how-tos,” and steps to securing the long-terms benefits of distributed strategies.
- Success stories. The TIR Toolkit gathers success stories from communities already using localized infrastructure as real-world case studies of how water managers can scale investments in these sustainable solutions to meet their drinking water, stormwater, and wastewater management challenges while avoiding reinventing the wheel in their service areas.
- Downloadable models. The TIR Toolkit provides examples of onsite reuse and stormwater ordinances, memoranda of understanding, and conservation easements with contextualizing summaries that can be easily downloaded.
- Videos. To help water leaders understand complex topics around building more effective distributed infrastructure programs, the TIR Toolkit includes videos that walk through how to debt-finance decentralized solutions, what environmental impact bonds are and where they’ve been issued before, stormwater credit trading systems, and rethinking water conservation as a source of supply.
- WaterNow’s curated localized infrastructure library. The “All resources” library provides both a quick reference guide to the TIR Toolkit materials as well as additional resources on localized infrastructure.
- An Ask an Expert feature. WNA recruited several amazing experts in the field who have offered to be available to answer questions about distributed and onsite systems, financing, law, tax and accounting questions.
To help professionals use the toolkit to start the implementation of water solutions in their community, WNA will host a series of webcasts to walk you through everything the Toolkit has to offer. In addition to learning how to access these resources on our website, participants will also hear from Tap into Resilience Expert Panelists on how the toolkit can connect water managers with certain pro bono legal, tax, and accounting professionals.
Speakers will provide real-world utility perspective on how the TiR Toolkit helps local decision-makers increase investments in water efficiency strategies by presenting their experience with using the Toolkit for their community.The first webcast, available to sign up here, will be on July 23 at 10 am.
With the toolkit, WaterNow Alliance hopes that water leaders can grow their strategies, solutions, and projects that make the most sense for their communities to build a sustainable and resilient water future.