The five principles of better water resources management

This is my list of five -

1. Find opportunities to substitute away from scarce resources.  This is always tough with water.  Instead of substitute, a better approach would be segmentation - matching the right water with the right purpose.  The household of the future might think in terms of three waters - bottled water for drinking, tap water for showering, and grey water for the lawn.
2. Eliminating waste throughout the system, from production and treatment through end use.  Think about it - why is an 8% water loss rate considered good.  What other industry would you have a job if you lost 8% of your product?  If you were the CEO of a railroad and lost 8% of your box cars, how long would you have a job?
3. Increasing "circularity" - upgrading, reusing, or recycling of water resources.  We need to be thinking more in terms of closed-looped water systems.  Tap-to-toilet-to-treatment-to-tap-to-toilet . . . the issue in the future will be how many times will we be able to complete this cycle.  Think coffee cup slogans - The Effluent Society.
4. Optimizing efficiency, convenience, safety, and reliability.  Better asset management practice needs to come to the world of water resources management.  What assets to we own, where are they, what condition are they in, how long will they last - every pipe, every pump, every asset needs a plan.  We also need to better match fixed costs with fixed revenues and variable costs with variable revenues in a more transparent manner.
5. The services and processes associated with water resources needs to move out of the physical world and into the virtual world.  Better water resource productivity starts with better real-time data.  With better data, managers and customers will have better information and the opportunity to make better decisions.  Better data helps with a broad range of water resource issues we need to be better at - from better accounting, bargaining, codifying, delegating, engineering, and feedback mechanisms.