Beyond Climate Ready? A History of Seattle Public Utilities’ Ongoing Evolution from Environmental and Climate Risk Management to Integrated Sustainability

Abstract

Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) is a municipal water supply, drainage, wastewater, and solid waste management utility in Seattle, Washington. This utility has explored the impacts of climate change and supported climate adaptation work since 1997. Faced with threats such as sea level rise, drought, wildfires, and extreme precipitation events, SPU has worked to “mainstream” climate science throughout its strategic planning, capital investments, management, operations, staffing, institutional culture, and more. This paper provides a descriptive, chronologically ordered account of how SPU’s climate-change-related work has evolved to become an aspect of a broader social and environmental sustainability orientation, aimed at resilience against climate impacts, but also towards improving greenhouse gas emissions reduction, carbon sequestration, water and waste circularity, green infrastructure, ecosystem and species stewardship, green and blue workforce development, affordability, an intergenerational perspective, and environmental justice. We frame this transition as a movement from a core focus on risk management toward a proactive and integrated mode of sustainable operations. While SPU’s journey has been enabled by a co-productive approach to climate services, we speculate on how this model can be broadened and diversified to help SPU pursue their goal of becoming a sustainable organization. It is our hope that this paper sparks reflection and discussion within the climate services community, amongst utilities, municipalities, and policy entrepreneurs that are interested in sustainability.

1. Introduction

Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) is a public utility serving the Seattle, Washington, metropolitan area and its surrounding communities. With service deliveries of water supply, drainage, wastewater, and solid waste services, it is important to understand that climate change first emerged as an unconnected issue in each of these service areas at different times and for different reasons. SPU first addressed climate change within water supply planning in 1997, following a series of extreme rainfall events and droughts between the mid-1980′s and mid-1990′s. Following that, SPU addressed climate change in its drainage and wastewater line of business in the wake of urban flooding and extreme rain events in 2006 and 2007. SPU’s work in solid waste management has long been guided by environmental considerations, with a specific analysis conducted in the early 2000s around the potential of effective waste management systems to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, amongst other financial and environmental benefits.

While each of these stories could be told in isolation, the staff at SPU are increasingly seeing that these stories are not separate. This leads to a more complicated story, one in which it is helpful to understand the standpoint of SPU’s leadership and staff, what they view as their future direction, and the kinds of assistance that they will need to realize their commitment to sustainability. The utility’s early climate-change-related work is now one aspect of a broader effort to foster sustainable utility operations and management, a portfolio of activity, that, in addition to addressing climate impacts, includes greenhouse gas emissions reduction, carbon sequestration, water and waste circularity, green infrastructure, continuity of service during weather emergencies, ecosystem and species stewardship, green and blue workforce development, affordability, an intergenerational perspective, and environmental justice.

We believe that our story can be characterized as an evolution from a risk management viewpoint to a commitment to a broader and more inclusive set of factors, which are organized under the concept of sustainability. While SPU retains focused climate and environmental risk management strategies and protocols within its lines of business, it is striving toward a proactive, utility-wide approach to sustainability and adaptive management. This evolution includes a concerted effort to look beyond being “climate ready” or understanding climate impacts, and modifying utility strategic planning, capital investments, and operations and maintenance to account for the changing climate conditions. SPU’s commitment to social and environmental sustainability and resilience is taking a more integrated, holistic approach by addressing the root causes of problems, often across multiple service areas, to realize conventional utility objectives such as affordability, service reliability, and service equity, while also pursuing new objectives such as racial equity, addressing displacement pressure, population growth, economic and environmental injustice, environmental stewardship, greenhouse gas reduction commitments, and the mitigating experiences of repeated climate impacts. The Director of Corporate Policy and Planning at SPU, Danielle Purnell, reflected that SPU’s transformation is about a “restorative balance in our relationship with the planet and with people. It is a re-remembering that everything is connected, and we must work together within our means. Climate science provides clarity about some of the fundamental conditions requiring restoration if we are to ensure sustainability.”

As emphasized in the final section of this paper, SPU is by no means “finished” with the difficult work of transforming our strategic orientation, capital investments, management, operations, staffing, and institutional culture, but we have moved far enough that the rough contours of our desired future state and required support can be discerned. We hope that SPU’s evolution will provide grist for the climate services community to use for reflecting on its own forward-looking priorities, as well as a precedent that is useful for peer utilities, municipalities, and policy entrepreneurs that are interested in sustainability.

The remainder of this paper is organized into six sections. First, we describe our technical approach (Section 2), followed by a short background on SPU (Section 3). We then describe SPU’s history with environmental and climate risk management (Section 4) and then expand into a summary description of SPU’s efforts to take a more proactive and integrated approach to achieving sustainable operations across all aspects of our service portfolio (Section 5). The paper concludes with two discussions: the first explores SPU’s need for and use of technical and scientific information that falls outside of the purview of traditional utility operational know-how (Section 6), followed by a discussion of the ongoing challenges and implications of this information for the climate services community (Section 7).

2. Technical Approach

This paper is an interpretive, mixed methods study of an American utility—Seattle Public Utilities. This paper is written to highlight SPU’s historical evolution, with major sub-sections framed as narrative chronologies. The research integrates: (1) participant observation [1] with (2) outputs from several third-party assessments and evaluations; (3) a review of utility archival materials, including planning documents, technical memoranda, commissioned research reports and internal analyses, capital project application and approval documents, internal policy statements, and regulatory documentation (e.g., Consent Decree); and (4) semi-structured, in-depth interviews with SPU staff working on different facets of sustainability, climate science, policy, and planning, between 1993 and the present.

(1)

The authors of this article are participant observers to SPU’s evolution. In total, two of the authors (Grodnik-Nagle and Sukhdev) lead the climate mitigation, adaptation, sustainability, and circular economy policy at SPU. The other two authors have worked in a consulting capacity for SPU or for entities that have drawn lessons from SPU’s work for more than a decade (Vogel and Herrick).

(2)

SPU has been the subject of several third-party assessments of climate resilience activity that have collectively documented the utility’s efforts to address climate readiness over the course of about 18 years, since approximately 2005 [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]. The most comprehensive of these evaluations is a detailed 2016 case study, funded by the Kresge Foundation [12] and co-written by one of the authors of this essay [8]. This paper draws significantly from this collection of assessments in laying out the basic history, sequencing of events, and causal linkages of the SPU story. A total of two peer reviewed articles have emerged from this body of work [3,12].

(3)

Archival materials were identified through participant–author familiarity with the utility (and predecessor organizations), its history, its standard operating procedures, and other formal and informal practices. Additional archival materials were identified through in-depth staff interviews. Other sources were identified through a limited review of the relevant technical literature and documentation produced by peer and partner organizations.

(4)

To ensure authenticity, the author team developed a preliminary narrative of the SPU experience using the evaluation and archival sources above, and then solicited direct feedback from the professional staff involved in SPU’s climate resilience and sustainability management, operations, and research, as far back as 1993. We conducted four semi-structured group interviews (1–4 interviewees per group) with a total of nine individuals. The interviewees included individuals involved in all three of SPU’s lines of business, as well as management, leadership, and core technical staff who had focused on climate impacts and resilience over the past three decades. Once this manuscript was drafted, we asked each interviewee, as well as additional staff, to review the draft and provide critical feedback to ensure that our account was consistent with the lived experience of these key participants (see the list of participating SPU staff in Appendix A 

Table A1. List of seattle public utilities staff who contributed to this article.

Interviewees
Name	Title
Chinn, Alan	Water Resources Planning Unit Supervisor
Edgerly, John	Water Resources Hydrologist
Garcia, Elizabeth	Water Resources Planner
Kennedy, Katie	Waste Diversion Planner
Kurtz, Kate	Landscape and Organic Resource Conservation Planner
Lee, Andrew	General Manager
Purnell, Danielle	Director of Corporate Policy and Planning
Schwenger, Stephanie	Solid & Hazardous Waste Lead Planner
Webster, Leslie	Drainage and Wastewater Planning Manager
Additional Reviewers
Name	Title
Emerson, Pam	Green Stormwater Infrastructure Planner
Gersonde, Rolf	Forest Ecologist
LaBarge, Amy	Watershed Management Director
Hilton, Chris	Risk and Resilience Advisor
Marre, Ben	Drainage and Wastewater Planning & Program Management Director
Munger, Julia	Watersheds Natural Resources Manager
Tackett, Tracy	Drainage and Wastewater Capital Projects Manager

).

3. SPU Background

Established in 1997 by consolidating the Water Department with the Solid Waste, Drainage, and Wastewater Utilities Departments, Seattle Public Utilities provides drinking water to 1.5 million retail customers and 19 neighboring utility wholesale customers throughout the region, and provides drinking water, drainage, wastewater, and solid waste services directly to residents and businesses within the city of Seattle. SPU has organized these four essential services into three lines of business: water supply, drainage and wastewater, and solid waste (see Figure 1). SPU has about 1400 employees. The utility manages two mountain watersheds, the Cedar River watershed, and the South Fork Tolt River watershed. Its system includes almost 200 miles of water transmission pipelines, 1680 miles of water distribution main, 1400 miles of in-city sanitary and combined sewer mainlines, over 480 miles of drainage pipes, and two major garbage and recycling transfer stations that process an estimated 750,000 tons of garbage, recycling, and organic waste each year. SPU operates a fleet of 606 vehicles, including 73 construction vehicles, and contracts with providers for garbage, organics, and recycling collection. With operating revenues of over $1.4 billion per year, SPU is considered a relatively large U.S. utility, and is uncommon in its consolidated water supply, drainage, wastewater, and solid waste services, which allow it to have a broad purview over Seattle’s resource management, environmental services, and pollution issues.

In addition to customer-facing essential services, SPU provides the Seattle area with a diverse portfolio of critical services. While most SPU customers equate the utility’s operations with traditional, high-visibility service streams, such as trash pick-up and the reliable delivery of safe, potable water, the reality is much more complicated, and includes operational priorities that are as diverse as managing wildland forests, salmon stewardship, urban tree planting programs, water and waste educational programs, pollution source control, graffiti removal, and recreational vehicle wastewater pump-out services.

The breadth of SPU’s core and corollary services provides a backdrop for the variety and range of SPU’s climate and sustainability risks and opportunities. The utility’s interface with climate change, in terms of its impacts and contributions, is varied and multi-sectoral. Figure 2 and Figure 3 provide an overview of SPU’s understanding of climate change, and its relationship to SPU’s management and operations.

4. SPU’s History as a Risk Management Utility

Seattle Public Utilities has been working to characterize and address climate change and environmental stewardship issues since its establishment in 1997. We characterize SPU’s management of environmental externalities and emergent climate risks in this earlier period as a risk management orientation. From a risk management viewpoint, distinct impacts (e.g., drought) are seen as threats to the stability of the existing and established utility services (e.g., the provision of reliable, affordable drinking water). In addition, environmental externalities (e.g., waste and pollution) are largely managed “downstream” (reactively), as opposed to “upstream” (preventatively). Such risks are typically addressed within a single line of business and are reactive within nature—two characteristics that are very different from the more integrated and adaptive sustainability standpoint are described in Section 5.

We focus our discussion in this section on the evolution of climate risk and environmental externality management at SPU. Notably, the risks that were associated with climate change were only one risk factor, among others, that were driving progress at SPU. Within water supply, other environmental externalities, such as salmon habitat protection, were critically important. Within drainage and wastewater, other environmental issues, such as improving surface water quality, were compelling and regulated. Within solid waste management, many environmental drivers (beyond greenhouse gas emissions) and financial considerations were taken into account when promoting recycling and composting programs for the city.

SPU’s risk management work continues as an important effort under the current sustainability orientation described in Section 5. However, SPU is striving for risk management to apply across all of SPU’s lines of business to treat the threats and opportunities in a more integrated and holistic fashion [24]. As such, the narrative of each line of business below does not have a clean break between the past and the present, nor is it intended to be comprehensive. Rather, each narrative provides background on the climate risk and environmental externality management activities at SPU that allows us to describe their evolution into a sustainability orientation in Section 5.

4.1. Water Supply

Following a series of extreme rainfall events and droughts between the mid-1980′s and mid-1990′s, SPU embarked upon an effort to characterize its climate-related exposures and risks, and to address its vulnerabilities. Early climate-related work was spurred on by the projection of a strong El Niño in 1997–1998, and an analysis of the city records to assess the historical water supply in El-Niño-like years [25]. SPU’s first climate change study, in 2002, was carried out in partnership with the University of Washington Climate Impacts Group (CIG) to develop analysis techniques to help SPU’s water supply planning staff and decision makers incorporate global climate change information into local long-range water supply planning processes. (Chinn, A., 1 September 2022, personal interview; [26]).

The concept of using climate services—relying on forward-looking projections of changing climate conditions—took root at SPU in their water line of business in the late 1990′s and early 2000′s [27,28,29]. This was before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projection forecasting and the science behind the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) patterns of climate variability were well established. As a result of these early efforts to understand hydrologic systems’ changes and impacts and the implications of ENSO, the utility began an effort to integrate climate-related risks across all levels of its operations—an effort that continues to this day.

By the mid-2000′s, SPU staff and leadership began to understand that climate change might affect SPU’s ability to meet its water supply mission. However, there was a gap between the level and type of climate change information that water managers needed, and the level and type of the information that was being disseminated by the scientific community. Consequently, a considerable effort was put into building relationships to share this information about climate change and its impacts on water resources. Much of this activity was reflected in a two-year (2004–2006) study, jointly sponsored by the American Water Works Association Research Foundation and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which included a case study that characterized SPU’s efforts to use climate science to inform water supply planning [30,31].

SPU continued to partner with CIG, nearby water utilities in Everett and Tacoma, and stakeholders in King County, and in 2007, developed downscaled climatological data for the Tacoma, Seattle, and Everett water utilities. The utilities ran this climate information through their own system models to generate the 2009 water outlook, which provided a long-range view of the future water demand in this three-county region [7,32,33].

Shortly after a January 2007 Water Utility Climate Change Summit, attended by more than 200 water and wastewater utility executives, SPU worked with several other United States water utilities to form the Water Utility Climate Alliance (WUCA), a self-funded and collaborative effort to provide leadership on the climate change issues affecting the country’s water supply agencies. This organization is now composed of 12 water providers nation-wide that supply water for more than 50 million people. The WUCA collaboration has funded its own research agenda to provide context-specific information on climate change and how to integrate that information into the utility decision making for SPU and its sister agencies. The WUCA launch built a bridge that is sustained to this day for the collaboration and information sharing between water utilities and the climate services community. WUCA-sponsored studies (see https://www.wucaonline.org/publications/ (accessed on 3 January 2023)) have provided important groundwork for SPU progress on integrating the climate into both planning and operations, as well as into capital project delivery.

In 2015, in partnership with WUCA and Oregon State University’s Climate Impacts Research Consortium, SPU carried out a climate modeling effort, known as the Pilot Utility Modeling Applications (PUMA) Project. This effort, which created a set of 40 scenarios that were downscaled to several point locations in SPU’s watersheds, fed into SPU’s hydrology model and utility system model, in order to enable the utility to consider the future water supply under a range of conditions [8,11,12]. This work focused on SPU’s system vulnerabilities instead of projecting reductions in supply, and shifted the focus from attempting to predict the future to considering adaptation measures to reduce any vulnerabilities. The results from this effort informed SPU’s 2019 Water System Plan (see the Overview of SPU’s Climate Change Approach in [34]).

SPU is currently working with CIG and King County to study the potential changes in the flood regime of major King County rivers due to climate change. Additionally, SPU is collaborating with scientists and west coast utility managers to improve the forecast tools and strategies for dealing with atmospheric rivers, which are anticipated to increase in frequency and intensity with climate change. Lastly, SPU is working to refine our supply and demand forecasting, and update our portfolio of options for improving the climate resilience of the water supply system.

SPU’s Watershed Management Division, also within SPU’s water line of business, has undertaken a climate-driven analysis and action beyond the issues of water supply, particularly in relation to wildfire risks, adaptive forest restoration, and watershed management [35]. The forest management plans for the Cedar River and South Fork Tolt River Municipal Watersheds focus on forest restoration and climate adaptation in Seattle’s two mountain-source watersheds. The watersheds group is also partnering with other organizations to pilot climate adaptive forest restoration, testing reforestation in the Tolt River watershed, with trees sourced from more southern regions where current climates are similar to the projected climates in western Washington later this century [36]. The current development of the Wildfire Risk Analysis focuses on planning for a climate-driven shift in fire regime and the potential impacts on drinking water quality and supply. SPU is collaborating with the US Forest Service and the US Geological Survey to collect ash samples and monitor the post-fire hydrology and water quality impacts from the 2022 Bolt Creek and Loch Katrine fires in the western Cascade Mountains, which will be used to improve the modeling analyses of the potential wildfire impacts on water supply, if a fire were to occur in one of SPU’s supply watersheds.

4.2. Drainage and Wastewater

The integration of climate impacts into SPU’s drainage and wastewater business started later than it did for water supply. The interest in climate change within SPU’s drainage and wastewater planning began in the wake of severe urban flooding caused by extreme rain events in 2006 and 2007. These events triggered a significant investment in natural flood management strategies, including floodable open space in Madison Valley, and floodplain reconnection projects, such as Meadowbrook Pond.

The city experienced more extreme storms from 2012 through to 2017, and during that period, Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) control projects were overflowing due to their insufficient control volume. The sizing decisions that had been made in 2009 based upon historic rainfall resulted in infrastructure constructed in 2012–2013 that had insufficient volume for the storms. Because of this, the utility’s CSO program began considering climate change in its analysis of reduction strategies. This action first shows up in SPU’s 2015 Long Term Control Plan (LTCP), which is the fifth CSO planning effort undertaken by SPU [37]. The LTCP was one volume of the city’s comprehensive reduction strategy for CSOs and stormwater pollutants. The LTCP, which runs through to 2035, was driven by a regulatory obligation to reduce the CSOs in Seattle’s water bodies and was developed under SPU’s Consent Decree with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Justice.

The LTCP applied a 6% scaling factor to historic rainfall to mimic climate-perturbed rainfall projections, providing an “upper bound” for the control volume values [37]. Following the initial implementation of the Long-Term Control Plan in 2015, SPU’s CSO program and systems maintenance staff continued to contend with extreme precipitation events and changing rainfall patterns. This challenge suggested that the sizing approach included in the 2015 plan did not amount to an “upper bound” for designing the infrastructure control volumes, which led to a renewed effort that focused on predicting and modeling future precipitation.

SPU staff updated the rainfall records used for establishing capital infrastructure sizing and included a climate-perturbed data set that used outputs from statistically downscaled global climate models [38]. Project modeling using the climate-perturbed rainfall data led to the utility’s first major upsizing decision based on future precipitation projections. This upsizing happened for SPU’s largest-ever infrastructure project: a 2.7-mile stormwater storage tunnel, known as the Ship Canal Water Quality Tunnel, which was designed to prevent 75 million gallons of stormwater and sewer pollution, annually, in Lake Union and the Ship Canal. The tunnel was upsized to accommodate future extreme precipitation and to provide more operational flexibility during highly localized extreme rainstorms. SPU chose to increase the planned 14′ diameter tunnel to 18′10″, increasing the project’s storage volume from 16.1 million gallons to 29.6 million gallons [6].

SPU’s work to develop climate-perturbed intensity–duration–frequency (IDF) curves led to additional climate risk management within their drainage and wastewater line of business. Sea level rise guidance was developed for drainage and wastewater capital projects in 2017 [39]. Shortly after the climate-perturbed IDF curves were developed, SPU’s integrated drainage and wastewater planning effort, Shape Our Water, used these projections to assess the future capacity impacts upon SPU’s drainage and wastewater conveyance systems. SPU’s planning team also assessed the risks of inundation due to extreme storm events citywide, and again for creek watersheds specifically. Finally, they used sea level rise (SLR) projections to assess the SPU system risks due to SLR inundation [20,40,41]. These analyses, which embed climate uncertainty, inform the utility’s 50-year drainage and wastewater system plan.

4.3. Solid Waste Management

In 1987, Seattle faced a waste management crisis. The city’s last two remaining landfills, closed in 1983 and 1986, had been designated by EPA as Superfund sites and would cost more than $90 million to remediate and make environmentally safe. Seattle began hauling garbage to the King County landfill, which increased Seattle’s garbage disposal costs and led to an 82 percent increase in solid waste customer rates. SPU’s predecessor agency responded to public concerns and used the crisis to design and launch a waste reduction, compost, and recycling program.

Seattle’s first solid waste plan was the 1989 Integrated Solid Waste Management Plan, On the Road to Recovery. In 1998, Seattle prepared its second Solid Waste Management Plan, On the Path to Sustainability. Seattle’s 1998 Solid Waste Plan incorporated and began to operationalize the concepts of zero waste, waste prevention, sustainability, and product stewardship, that continue today to drive SPU’s approach to solid waste management [42].

Climate change mitigation has become an increasingly important part of SPU’s materials management story. The solid waste line of business’ understanding of the climate benefits of waste prevention emerged early and has evolved over time. In 2004, as part of the Solid Waste Comprehensive Plan Amendment, SPU commissioned a consultant to estimate the environmental, human health, and economic benefits of recycling, including the impact of increased recycling (and the use of recycled materials in manufacturing), the reduced landfilling of organic materials, and waste prevention on greenhouse gas emissions [43].

The 2004 Solid Waste Comprehensive Plan Amendment included language indicating that “recycling programs could be an important element in the City’s global warming solutions”. The role that materials management could play in mitigating climate change was again recognized in the 2011 Solid Waste Comprehensive Plan Revision, acknowledging that “solid waste management as a cornerstone strategy in climate protection plans”. When the city of Seattle’s Climate Action Plan was released in 2013, it included actions around “Waste Reduction & Product Stewardship,” and shared the results of a consumption-based emissions inventory conducted by King County. These early plans laid the groundwork for SPU’s recent increased focus on “upstream” waste prevention and addressing of consumption-based emissions, as reflected in the 2022 Solid Waste Comprehensive Plan Update.

5. SPU’s Broader Vision of Sustainability

The last decade of climate impacts experienced by Seattle—as well as the global context of environmental and public health inequities—have resulted in an accelerated effort to pursue a more holistic approach to social and environmental sustainability across SPU, particularly since 2017. Building on SPU’s experience in climate and environmental risk management, as outlined in Section 4, there has been broad recognition that: (1) the urgency behind climate change impacts and global inequity requires a markedly different and accelerated approach toward action, (2) SPU will accomplish more on multiple fronts by striving for integrated, holistic utility services and adaptive management strategies across its operational service streams, and (3) this new approach must involve a focus “upstream” on solving the interconnected, systemic root causes of environmental externalities, as opposed to reacting to “downstream” risks or vulnerabilities.

In other words, SPU has begun to understand limitations of focusing predominantly on narrowly scoped problems and single-purpose solutions associated with the “risk management orientation,” or looking at sustainability issues in a siloed manner. SPU began a process to pursue a mission of holistic environmental and social sustainability, where it engages in complex, inter-connected challenges with multi-benefit, multi-partner solutions. SPU sees this sustainability mission as both a social and environmental commitment. It includes managing the risks associated with climate impacts and other environmental externalities, but also includes commitments to environmental justice, greenhouse gas emissions reduction, carbon sequestration, water and waste circularity, green infrastructure, ecosystem and species stewardship, green and blue workforce development, and affordability.

This adaptive, integrated focus on sustainability can be seen today across four levels of organizational activity: (1) strategic planning, (2) capital investments and pilot innovation programs, (3) staffing, employee engagement, and culture, and (4) partnerships, collaboration, and alignment. SPU is working to establish an integrated sustainability approach in each of these areas. This section illustrates how the utility is prioritizing multiple benefits and contrasts the actions being taken within SPU today to its past efforts.

5.1. Strategic Planning

Sustainability principles are becoming institutionalized through SPU’s major planning initiatives. These planning efforts define the sustainability priorities for the utility in the near- and long-term. We address the overarching SPU strategic business plan, which covers all three lines of business, and reflect on a selection of business plans in turn. The key observation here is that these strategic planning efforts are evolving from a risk management orientation towards a new sustainability orientation, which adopts a more integrated, holistic approach to social and environmental concerns, as well as climate resilience that addresses the root causes of problems, often across service areas and lines of business.

5.1.1. SPU 2021–2026 Strategic Business Plan

The development of SPU’s 2021–2026 Strategic Business Plan was the utility-wide turning point that first brought its individual lines of businesses together to galvanize the utility’s shared commitments to affordability, equity, and resilience [44]. While the turning points from the risk management approach to a proactive focus on sustainability for each service area were unique, and pre-dated 2021, the Strategic Business Plan acted as a culmination and acknowledgement of these shifts across the entire organization.

The plan provides a roadmap for the utility to meet the needs of customers and communities and establishes a rate path for six years. It also defines SPU’s utility-wide vision as “Community Centered, One Water, Zero Waste,” illustrating the multi-faceted goals to which SPU and the broader Seattle community aspire. It represents a shift from the prior business plan (which had been the first to mention climate change). In that plan, climate action was tied in a siloed way to expanding the implementation of green stormwater infrastructure and water supply system improvements [45]. The 2021–2026 plan goes beyond a risk management approach, with objectives being framed in terms of environmental justice, adaptation, and mitigation for water and waste. Its key commitments include adaptive management within water supply and stormwater management, sea level rise adaptation planning that supports anti-displacement goals, and a consumption-based emissions inventory to assess the impact that SPU’s solid waste management and waste prevention programs have on community-wide emissions. The need to assure affordability, service reliability, and service equity across all three lines of business in the face of weather extremes and changing climatic conditions, population growth, economic and environmental injustice, and increasingly stringent regulations, is persistent throughout the plan.

5.1.2. Shape Our Water

Shape Our Water is SPU’s integrated system plan to guide the utility’s next 50 years of investments in its drainage and wastewater systems. Climate change vulnerability reduction is a key driver for Shape Our Water, along with population growth, affordability, and equity. Previous drainage or wastewater system planning efforts were conducted in relative isolation, and the primary foci included regulatory compliance, levels of services, and financial constraints. Shape Our Water represents a shift toward utility planning that focuses on the value of the investments that are made from both a community benefit and environmental benefit perspective.

Community visioning and technical analyses provide the foundation for this planning effort. The analysis stage of Shape Our Water occurred from 2018–2021 and was focused on identifying and prioritizing existing and future risks and opportunities citywide, including future climate change and growth impacts. The Shape Our Water team assessed a range of drainage and wastewater challenges, including flooding, sewer overflows, creek and shoreline health, water quality, and the sustainable operation and management of drainage and wastewater systems over time. For the first time, SPU assessed the citywide impacts of extreme storm events and sea level rise on drainage and wastewater systems, as well as on Seattle’s communities. Finally, SPU assessed the community context through studies that highlighted Seattle’s current racial inequities within health, wealth, and environmental quality.

The Community Vision for Shape Our Water was co-developed with community members, and hinges on an equitable, resilient, and community-centered infrastructure. SPU’s community visioning process adopted a community-centered approach that illustrates the utility’s evolution toward a sustainability-focused organization. From 2019–2021, the Shape Our Water team used pandemic-responsive engagement strategies to create a shared vision for SPU’s infrastructure investment with the communities that SPU serves. The engagement strategies created space for community partners to share their enthusiasm, knowledge, lived experience, talent, and inspiration. The insights gained through this engagement process were distilled into the Community Vision for Shape Our Water [46].

This vision, together with the foundational analysis, will drive the next 50 years of drainage and wastewater infrastructure. In the next stage of Shape Our Water, SPU will brainstorm solutions for Seattle’s future challenges. These solutions will build upon the ideas that arose during the visioning—from efficient resource use and reuse, like stormwater harvesting, to expanding the partnerships that support skill-building and job opportunities. The highest-value long-term and short-term solutions will be identified and included in the Shape Our Water plan. Throughout the next steps in planning, SPU will continue to create opportunities to co-create and evaluate future solutions with community-based organizations, other city departments, government agencies, and tribal governments.

5.1.3. 2022. Solid Waste Comprehensive Plan Update

The 2022 Solid Waste Comprehensive Plan Update, “Moving Upstream to Zero Waste”, built on a foundation of leading policies in the solid waste management space, this time with a renewed and increased focus on waste prevention strategies that would advance SPU’s Zero Waste goals and accelerate the transition to a circular economy. SPU is required to develop a comprehensive solid waste management plan and update it every six years. This plan provides a roadmap for how Seattle will manage and finance its solid waste services and facilities, and projects the system management needs over 20 years. The plan describes how the city handles, collects, processes, and disposes of Seattle’s waste. It also describes current waste prevention, recycling, and composting programs, and SPU’s progress towards its solid waste goals.

The 2022 Plan Update prioritizes waste prevention within solid waste management to eliminate waste and toxics, prevent pollution, conserve natural resources, and to reduce carbon emissions, while recognizing the role that SPU plays in addressing the community-wide emissions associated with the production and consumption of goods and food. This increased focus on preventing waste and toxins “upstream” is an effort to maximize the environmental and public health impacts of Seattle’s solid waste and hazardous materials management system. The plan update represents a shift in SPU’s approach, with an understanding that we must look upstream of SPU’s traditional purview of “managing” waste, to partnering with others and preventing it in the first place. With this “upstream” focus, SPU is attempting to address the mitigation of climate change and environmental and public health pollution prevention through effective material management.

5.2. Capital Investments and Pilot Innovation Programs

SPU expends approximately $1.4 billion dollars a year on its operations, maintenance, and system expansion and upgrades. SPU’s infrastructure and system improvement investments are designed with a multi-decadal service life. SPU is working to deliver capital projects that incorporate climate mitigation and adaptation opportunities, and that contribute to social and environmental sustainability for years to come through their design and procurement choices.

SPU’s capital projects are required to demonstrate that climate change has been considered as an aspect of their design, construction, and planned operation. This began with the 2014 addition of climate change considerations into SPU’s capital improvement program review process, known as Stage Gates [15,39]. Initially, the climate change component of Stage Gates was seen as cumbersome and difficult to implement due to a lack of guidance or actionable steps for the project teams. In some cases, it was criticized as more of a “box-checking” exercise than a critical review of the opportunities to reduce GHG emissions or to design flexible, climate-adaptive solutions. Since climate-perturbed rainfall data sets and localized SLR projections have become available, teams have been able to use these tools to evaluate the climate risks for various project alternatives. SPU continues to develop its approaches to further embed climate resilience, climate mitigation, and broader sustainability objectives into project Stage Gates and its decision making.

Over the last ten years, many of SPU’s capital projects have taken on sustainability-focused metrics and outcomes, and the utility has begun funding pilot innovations that allow for the learning and testing of new approaches. This shift is due to several supporting factors:

• Climate science has become mainstreamed, understood, and relatively more certain and regionally articulate, allowing utility leadership more clarity on the probability of future climate impacts, and therefore the risk (and cost) of inaction.
• Contextual changes, such as an increased awareness of and emphasis upon racial, environmental, and public health inequities, the need to reduce displacement pressures, and consistent and negative lived experiences with climate impacts, have driven an urgency to take action.
• An acknowledgment that the co-benefits of infrastructure (e.g., jobs, access to parks, and extreme heat mitigation) need to be considered when selecting a preferred option for addressing the primary system challenge.
• A focus on “no regrets” investments has emerged, grounded in flexible practices that are informed by the best available science, where operational modes can be adaptively managed. This allows for the utility to capitalize on community input and innovations that we do not yet have.

Below, we describe a small sample of SPU’s pilot innovation programs to illustrate the various ways that we are pursuing our sustainability vision, often across lines of business.

5.2.1. Green Stormwater Infrastructure for Climate Resilience and Community Wealth Building

SPU’s green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) program is illustrative of the utility’s actions towards proactive climate resilience and natural solutions. SPU began this work in 1999 with a green street retrofit project [47], and began working in close partnership with King County in 2010 to deliver the RainWise program. In 2013, SPU and the city of Seattle’s elected officials passed a policy to make GSI the preferred method of managing stormwater citywide, and set a reach target to manage 700 million gallons of stormwater runoff annually with GSI investments (such as bioretention, rain gardens, urban forestry, and pervious pavement), in order to improve water quality, manage flooding, reduce regulatory costs, build resilient infrastructure, and invest in nature-based, urban carbon sinks [48]. Thanks to an array of programs such as those highlighted below, Seattle appears to be on track to meet this 700 million gallons target by 2025 [49].

5.2.2. RainCity Partnerships

While SPU has long promoted and invested in GSI for its multiple benefits, the utility is now seeking ways to explicitly prioritize these benefits in Seattle’s black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities. RainCity is a 5-year, $15 million pilot program, focused on larger-scale GSI projects and riparian area restoration. The program includes required performance metrics for both water quality outcomes (e.g., the area of impervious surface managed and the area of riparian area restored) and community-identified benefits (e.g., the percentage of local hires, small business mentorship and subcontracting, 40% women- and minority-owned business contracting targets, and metrics for community-initiated, community-led projects). If the pilot proves successful, the utility is poised to invest $100 million over 20 years to generate stormwater management and wealth-building outcomes [50]. RainCity is new for the utility, not because of “what” project types it is delivering, but because of “how” it is being planned and operated. RainCity is SPU’s first foray into utilizing a community-based public–private partnership, which has been promoted by the U.S. EPA and the Washington State Department of Commerce, as a contract mechanism that focuses on improving water quality, as well as a community’s quality of life and opportunities [51]. Mami Hara, SPU’s General Manager leading up to the launch of RainCity, underscored the intention of programs like this, “As we look to the future, we are intent upon demonstrating how job creation, workforce development, and community wealth building can fruitfully intersect with our missions of environmental enhancement and reliable, equitable service” [52].

5.2.3. Natural Drainage System (NDS) Partnering

SPU’s 2016–2025 NDS Partnering Program is a multi-year capital improvement program that is focused on providing significant water quality improvements to Seattle’s three major creek watersheds: Longfellow, Piper’s, and Thornton Creeks, by managing roadway runoff. The program designs and constructs multi-block, roadside natural drainage systems—primarily vegetated bioretention systems that are located on the public right-of-way planting strip or shoulder—that filter and manage the stormwater runoff and improve neighborhoods with street trees, traffic calming, and, in some cases, new sidewalks or pedestrian walkways. To deliver holistic projects, SPU partners closely with the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT), the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture 1% for the Arts Program, and the King County Flood Control District, as well as with a wide variety of community-based organizations. Since its inception, this program has delivered projects in all three major creek watersheds and has integrated a range of public art and pedestrian infrastructure improvements [53,54].

5.2.4. South Park Water Quality Facility

This facility is a stormwater quality facility in Seattle’s South Park neighborhood that will treat the stormwater from the surrounding industrial roads so that it is clean before it is pumped into the adjacent Duwamish River. This is a second example of SPU’s efforts to embrace community-led infrastructure planning, and is described in more detail in Section 5.4, as an example of philanthropic and community-based organization partnerships. The facility is part of an effort to provide equitable development and environmental justice for a historically underserved, overburdened community, as prioritized in the City of Seattle’s Duwamish Valley Action Plan [55].

Like the Natural Drainage Systems Partnering and RainCity partnerships, the goals of this facility include conventional stormwater quality improvement metrics, but also community benefit metrics that are defined by the adjacent residential and business communities, and which will tie to community wealth building and sea level rise adaptation. It is an example of the utility aspiring to use its water quality investments as anchor investments, which are designed to anchor additional community investments to benefit current businesses and residents. While stormwater quality improvement is a priority in this neighborhood, so is community-owned space, affordable housing, and local career pathways for youth. SPU is working to partner with public and private entities in the development of this water quality project, so that the final outcomes of the SPU’s investment will span beyond just stormwater quality improvement.

5.2.5. On-Site Non-Potable Water Reuse

Because of its relatively abundant water supply, Seattle has been slow to embrace water reuse. SPU is now laying the groundwork to support voluntary action by the private sector to advance a more widespread adoption of on-site non-potable water reuse systems, enabling the utility to recapture, clean, and reuse water within the footprint of one or more buildings. In 2021, the Washington State Legislature passed a bill requiring the Department of Health to develop statewide rules for the use of on-site non-potable water reuse systems, and SPU is preparing to work with other public sector agencies and private sector partners to advance this work, once the rules are finalized. SPU is also an active member of the U.S. Water Alliance National Blue Ribbon Commission for Onsite Non Potable Water Systems. The Commission develops tools based on the best management practices and current science to support the advancement of on-site non-potable water systems. This initiative marks the beginning of a broader conversation on water reuse at SPU, which will connect the work of all the water-relevant lines of businesses and view drinking water supply, drainage, and wastewater as part of an integrated system.

5.2.6. Promoting Multi-Benefits of Composting

Composting organic materials, such as yard and food waste, recycles them into a beneficial soil amendment and imitates the natural processes of decay and regeneration. However, when organic materials such as food and yard waste are landfilled, they produce large amounts of methane as they decompose in this anaerobic environment. Composting organic materials avoids these potent greenhouse gas emissions, and the finished composted organic material is a critical tool for sustainability because of its many environmental benefits. Compost supports the restoration of soil health, stormwater management through improved infiltration, biofiltration, erosion control, water conservation, and soil carbon sequestration. Moreover, compost supports healthy plant growth in urban landscapes and agricultural sites alike. To gain these broader environmental benefits, it is critical to ensure that the compost is good quality, free of harmful chemical and physical contaminants, and widely used. SPU requires residents and businesses to participate in organics recycling programs (it is illegal to place food and yard waste in the garbage in Seattle), and SPU creates programs to encourage the use of compost. SPU works collaboratively with King County and other agencies across Washington state to develop compost markets, including the expansion from landscaping practices into agriculture (encouraging the compost created from Seattle’s organic waste to be used in regional agriculture). In recognition of the interconnected nature of this work, SPU has created a Landscape and Organics Resource Conservation Planner and Program Lead position, which works for both its solid waste and drainage and wastewater lines of business. This position is a hub for sustainability work, “connected with the water conservation team, the urban forestry staff, and Green Stormwater Infrastructure staff” [Kurtz, K., 1 September 2022 personal interview]. The initiative is also a part of SPU’s broader efforts to create nature-based carbon sinks, alongside green infrastructure investments, the forest management of SPU’s 100,000 acres of watershed, and investments into urban forestry programs such as Trees for Seattle.

5.2.7. Sustainable Energy Management

SPU has created a Sustainable Energy Management Program to coordinate SPU’s greenhouse gas reduction and energy management efforts across all three lines of business. This program aims to manage utility-wide energy use and associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions throughout its operations, contracting, construction projects, and service delivery [56]. The program has three goals: (1) achieve carbon neutrality by 2030, (2) encourage energy efficiency and awareness, and (3) generate renewable energy. In pursuit of these goals, SPU is conducting an operational greenhouse gas inventory and a supply chain greenhouse gas inventory, has developed building and fleet electrification strategies, and is taking part in energy efficiency programs. SPU is also exploring ways to generate its own renewable energy, using sources within the utility’s existing infrastructure through pilot projects. The North Transfer Station, for example, was the first SPU facility to install solar panels in 2016, with the potential to generate enough electricity to power up to 130 homes. SPU is also exploring the installation of its first in-line hydropower generation station at the Lake Forest Park Reservoir, which would take advantage of the excess pressure in our water distribution network to generate as much as 700,000 kilowatt hours of electricity annually. These carbon-free sources of electricity can not only help to offset the operating costs within the utility’s facilities, but could also provide a pathway to help offset some of the most carbon-intensive electricity in our emissions profile. SPU plans to build upon the results of these pilot projects to prioritize new renewable energy generation opportunities throughout the utility’s infrastructure.

5.3. Staffing, Employee Engagement, and Climate-Aware Culture

SPU is building on its long history of staff-led climate initiatives, and as sustainability emerges as a guiding vision for the utility, that work is being highlighted and celebrated in a more prominent way. Andrew Lee, SPU’s General Manager and Chief Executive Officer, serves as the environmental justice chair for the National Association of Clean Water Agencies, and has made a “holistic approach a priority, out of necessity, because challenges and impacts are coming at us so fast” [Lee, A., 30 August 2022 personal interview]. However, this commitment to sustainability has deep support from SPU staff, as the organizational culture shifts toward the connectivity, coordination, and orchestration of efforts, with a focus on intergenerational planning. We include two examples of this staff culture shift below.

5.3.1. All Utility Staff Are Climate Practitioners

In 2006, SPU hired its first climate program manager and established a Climate Resiliency Group to help the utility to understand its exposure and sensitivity to climate change, and to build its capacity to adapt. When this group was formalized, it was widely seen as a separate enterprise from the daily decision making of the utility’s strategic planning, capital investments, operations, and maintenance,. While this group still exists and is co-led by a climate adaptation policy lead, alongside a climate mitigation and circular economy policy lead, it is no longer seen as separate or as an add-on: the group’s focus is to embed climate science and sustainability into strategic planning, capital investments, operations, and maintenance. As climate science has been mainstreamed, the mantle of “climate staff” has spread beyond this team to include staff from all lines of business and all branches. Reflecting this trend, SPU’s Climate Community of Practice has emerged as an internal force for climate-related work. Acting as a locus of climate-related activity, this group of nearly 100 staff gather quarterly to learn, share information, and build collaborative partnerships [8,50,57]. This community of practice does not focus solely on the impacts of climate change, but on the broader set of issues entrained in our sustainability-oriented utility.

5.3.2. Frontline Staff Are Precipitation First Responders

Climate planning has historically been the work of desk-bound, science- and policy-focused staff. However, water utility crew staff, including those who perform system maintenance and operations in the field, are experiencing climate impacts firsthand, and are SPU’s “precipitation first responders”. These crew members have relevant, experiential knowledge about precipitation risks that is often not communicated and integrated into the utility’s strategic planning and implementation activities. SPU partnered with the University of Minnesota to survey 115 frontline staff in the drainage and wastewater and water lines of business about their experience with rain, and their thoughts on priority adaptation investments for the utility. These frontline staff experience climate change impacts on a daily basis, and anticipate the need to take actions around communication, infrastructure/facilities, equipment, and workforce capacity. Throughout this survey, and throughout additional related initiatives that are focused on building a better connection between frontline staff and leadership, SPU is learning that intra-utility communication and worker engagement is a critical strategy for mainstreaming adaptation and sustainable operations [58].

5.4. Partnerships, Collaboration, and Alignment

Sustainability is showing up in the networks and collaborations that the utility prioritizes and invests in. SPU benefits from and builds upon collaboration with scientific-, peer-, and community-based partners throughout all three lines of business.

5.4.1. Philanthropic and Community Organization Partnerships

In 2018, SPU was awarded a $200,000 Connect Capital grant from the Center for Community Investment (CCI). This grant brought value to the utility beyond financial support: it seeded an effort to leverage the SPU’s drainage and wastewater investments in Seattle’s South Park neighborhood to drive the planning and investment in sea level rise adaptation and anti-displacement policies [59]. South Park is a majority people of color community in South Seattle’s Duwamish Valley that has a documented average life expectancy of thirteen years less than other less diverse, wealthier neighborhoods in Seattle. It suffers from poor air quality due to nearby highways and freight traffic, chronic flooding, and a dearth of green space. It is also the area in Seattle that is most vulnerable to sea level rise, due to its low elevation, flat topography, and adjacency to the tidally influenced Duwamish River [60]. The CCI grant work ultimately led to a subsequent climate cities equity grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for the city of Seattle to develop a resilience district in the Duwamish Valley to implement these adaptation and anti-displacement goals [61,62].

In 2018, SPU was at the beginning of a three-project suite of drainage and wastewater investments in the neighborhood, including road improvements and conveyance, a pump station, and a water quality facility. This grant-funded effort to leverage these projects for a broader community benefit illustrates SPU’s transition to a sustainability focus, which is due to how the development strategy has evolved: the original climate-focused emphasis upon drainage infrastructure, as described in the Stults et al., 2016 case study, was in elevating the South Park pump station to ensure that it would continue to function alongside the rising seas in the adjacent Duwamish River. As SPU’s sustainability vision evolved, the focus of the project shifted from asset protection to using the investment as an anchor to address community-identified challenges such as displacement pressure and future sea-level-rise-related flooding.

These grant-funded efforts have fostered a collaboration between SPU, the Duwamish River Community Coalition (DRCC), and the Seattle Foundation. This collaboration is remarkable because DRCC and SPU sit on opposing sides of the Lower Duwamish Waterway Superfund Cleanup, where the city of Seattle is a liable party and DRCC is a community advocacy and technical advisory group. It is intended to provide a platform for the long-term sea level rise adaptation strategies that will ultimately be integrated into the design for the water quality facility, while also addressing the long-standing needs of the local community.

5.4.2. Tribal Partnerships

SPU has worked with indigenous peoples on salmon recovery, the preservation and repatriation of cultural resources, sediment cleanups, land access for cultural practices, and permanent artworks for the Ship Canal Water Quality Project. Water to support fisheries is key to maintaining indigenous communities, as is their access to protected natural lands for the hunting and gathering of food and medicine to sustain their cultural practices and community health. For example, the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe (MIT) has access to the Cedar River Municipal Watershed under their reserved treaty rights to hunt and gather. SPU continues to work with the MIT on fisheries and forest management to ensure that these resources are available, and plans to work with other local and regional tribes on similar sustainable management challenges in the future.

5.4.3. Collaborating with Private Sector Partners for Waste Prevention

SPU is engaging in public–private partnerships to encourage waste prevention in the areas of food and packaging, recognizing the critical role of the private sector in the development of a circular economy. As a signatory of the Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment, SPU is collaborating with grocery retailers and manufacturers in an effort to reduce the food that goes to the garbage across the west coast by 50% by 2030. In addition, SPU is partnering with businesses and nonprofits to improve how edible, unsold food gets diverted from organics or garbage streams and donated to those who need it in the Seattle area. SPU has also formed a public–private partnership (Reuse Seattle) to create a standardized, city-wide reusable food and beverage container system. This system was piloted in 2022 in over 10 participating entertainment venues, including the Woodland Park Zoo, Paramount Theatre, and The Showbox. The goal is to make food and beverage container reuse scalable and affordable for customers, businesses, and the city. Greenhouse gas emissions reduction, solid waste diversion, and economic development are among the drivers for these programs.

5.4.4. Impact Investment in Waste and Water

In 2021, SPU launched an impact investment pilot program, Seeds of Resilience, to invest in and to incubate the water- and waste-related businesses that advance the community resiliency, circular economy, and green job opportunities for underrepresented communities. This program directs $600,000 annually into private sector endeavors that help SPU to achieve its waste and water management goals. In addition to helping advance SPU’s mission of better managing waste and water, these investments grow Seattle’s green economy, deliver environmental benefits, and expand equity and opportunity. With mixed funding from all three lines of business, the program can invest in projects and activities that cross the traditional utility service silos, addressing waste and water issues in an integrated manner. One of the first projects funded by Seeds of Resilience is aimed at increasing the access to and demand for water cisterns on residential properties, by finding ways to make captured rainwater more easily usable inside the home, in order to lower drinking water bills [63].

5.4.5. Intersectional Peer Networks

SPU staff are heavily engaged in a number of peer networks, including the Water Utility Climate Alliance (WUCA), the US Water Alliance, the National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA), the Evergreen Chapter of the Solid Waste Association of North America, C40 Cities, Water Environment Foundation, and the West Coast Climate & Materials Management Forum. SPU has benefitted from modeling scenario planning projects and other thought leadership collaborations with these organizations, and is now working with them to integrate One Water and Zero Waste principles, community leadership and engagement, and equity into planning and operations.

SPU’s founding membership in WUCA has been productive, and WUCA’s trajectory has mirrored the utility’s evolving focus on sustainability. WUCA was formed in 2007 to provide leadership and collaboration on the climate change issues affecting the country’s water agencies. SPU’s membership bolstered the utility’s early efforts to mainstream climate science and downscale the climate models for western Washington applicability. Today, SPU is building out its environmental justice efforts as a part of WUCA’s water equity workgroup and is learning from peer utilities about how best to plan for sea level rise and inventory, and how to reduce operational and supply chain greenhouse gas emissions. The US Water Alliance and NACWA’s Environmental Justice committee are also valued partners for the utility.

6. SPU, Sustainable Operations, and New Questions for the Climate Services Community

As illustrated above, SPU is evolving from a risk management mode of operation toward a sustainability orientation. This evolution includes looking beyond being “climate ready” and modifying utility strategic planning, capital investments, operations, and maintenance to account for the changing climate conditions. SPU’s commitment to social and environmental sustainability is taking a more integrated, holistic approach by addressing the root causes of problems, often across business lines, to realize conventional utility objectives such as affordability, service reliability, and service equity, while also pursuing new objectives such as racial equity, anti-displacement policies, environmental justice and stewardship, and climate mitigation commitments.

Given this juncture in planning and operations, we wonder if the climate services enterprise can also evolve into a more technically diversified, value-driven, and integrated realm of activity, something that more closely matches the operational commitments of SPU and other utilities. Below, we illustrate three examples, out of a much larger universe of newly relevant questions, of how this is playing out today, and outline the new types of questions being posed:

(1)

Analysis of financing and affordability challenges: While the climate crisis compels near-term action, there are difficult questions that remain less than fully answered. For instance, it is not clear who will ultimately be called upon to pay for climate-resilient investments and incremental add-ons to absorb or buffer future climate impacts and protect SPU’s core service delivery operations. Additionally, more broadly, who should be paying for the efforts to create a city that is more climate resilient? Should all ratepayers bear an equal burden of these costs, or should individual carbon footprints be used to prorate cost allocations? Will costs be borne by today’s customers or future generations? Should this be government funded, and if so, at what level? Or should the private sector be playing a role as well? If it is entirely left for SPU to pay for climate resiliency, it is important to bear in mind that SPU rates are already unaffordable for an unacceptable number of customers, and keeping essential services affordable is a key concern for the utility. Can we make incremental “no regrets” investments that can be expanded in future decades to spread that cost out? Are there ways for climate service providers to engage in this sort of value-driven discourse and analysis?

(2)

Development of strategies, programs, and support mechanisms to build community resilience and wealth alongside climate-resilient infrastructure: Infrastructure is only part of the solution to preparing communities for climate impacts. SPU is striving to drive policy, standards, and job creation opportunities to support incumbent communities, particularly low-income communities and communities of color, so that they can continue to thrive in place instead of being displaced as a result of public infrastructure improvements. The potential for wealth-building “green jobs” and blue/green workforce development in the water supply, drainage and wastewater, and solid waste arenas is significant [52,64,65,66]. Can climate services be designed to help us identify the existing spatial relationships between climate vulnerability and systemic racism? Or, more positively, how can the climate services community work with utilities and municipalities to develop scenarios, models, or other tools that reflect this fundamental commitment to communities-in-place?

(3)

Holistic and standardized approaches to accounting for greenhouse gas emissions and sinks: Like many utilities and companies, SPU has begun to track its operational greenhouse gas emissions [56]. Additionally, while SPU has adopted a protocol for tracking these emissions, significant uncertainties remain with respect to the emission tracking methodologies. Additionally, there is no correlative protocol for tracking carbon sinks. This is important because SPU’s carbon story is broader than the emissions inventory that we currently maintain. How can we accurately measure, track, and account for the carbon sinks that we maintain in our watershed forests, in our urban forests and vegetation, and in our soils? In addition, SPU is uniquely positioned as a solid waste management service provider to have a significant impact on the community-wide GHG emissions related to the production and consumption of goods and food. How can this broader carbon impacts story be tied into our existing climate and emissions story and tracking?

7. Moving from Climate Resilience to Sustainable Operations: Ongoing Challenges and Observations

Although this paper has been framed as a series of promising developments, the authors are under no illusion that SPU’s transformation to sustainable operations is a foregone conclusion. As conceptualized by a range of professional experts and academic researchers, meaningful sustainability will be disruptive of current practices and pathways, and can be expected to radically alter incumbent technological regimes, institutional structures, and organizational culture [67,68,69,70,71]. At any scale and in any context, sustainability is a wicked problem fraught with challenges [72,73]. The challenges facing SPU include, but are likely not limited to, the following.

Going forward, SPU will continue to focus on building momentum at all levels of the organization around sustainability, resilience, and climate preparedness. This will include supporting and educating executives, management, and field staff about the need to make decisions that are robust under current and future climates. Overlaying a sustainability orientation on top of departments that were—and to some extent, remain—driven by a traditional mindset of linear problem solving is an organizational and cultural challenge, but also a personnel and staffing issue. It is clear that staff can experience frustration because of a lack of definition and a sense of occupational scope creep [71,74,75]. For example, SPU still struggles with competing priorities in its project delivery, as extensive and meaningful community engagement can prolong and complicate the project scope, schedule, and budget. In addition, having to assess the sustainability considerations of new projects (e.g., the greenhouse gas emissions associated with a capital investment) requires a new skillset, and this work may often be seen as a trade-off for expedient project delivery or budget limitations. SPU remains challenged by the need to help staff effectively address the uncertainties associated with climate change and other projections of future conditions. Staff feel pressured “to take the median or to take one of the scenarios we are using and base all decisions on that scenario” [13]. In the case of capital improvement funding, project managers want to know what range of temperature, precipitation, or sea level rise they are expected to plan for [13]. Because of this, SPU continues to work on techniques to help its staff become more comfortable with this uncertainty and to be able to make informed judgements regarding which future projections to privilege in their planning exercises. According to Paul Fleming, SPU’s former Climate Resiliency Group manager, the goal remains “to understand and embrace uncertainty so that you can make informed decisions that are robust under multiple futures” [8].

Another set of challenges to the achievement of sustainable operations can arise due to organizational structure. In the context of a large water and waste system, structural demarcations can act to impede the recognition and deployment of cross-disciplinary, integrated solutions to environmental-, resilience-, and sustainability-related problems. So-called “siloing” within agencies or among departments can frustrate even concerted top-down efforts to impose change upon an organization [71,76,77]. As an organization, SPU is not—and likely will never be—a monolith. Champions of sustainability within SPU recognize that changes will accrue slowly and that the issues that arise among and between branches and divisions must continue to be navigated with care.

It is undeniable that tensions exist—and will continue to exist—between the future goals for sustainable operations and service affordability in the present day. The rising cost of service delivery is a vexing challenge faced by utility and municipal leadership. With basic service provision already too expensive for some residents and customers, the question of how to finance new, sustainability-related practices and technologies is critical. Clearly, economic downturns and utility-scale financial issues could disrupt the achievement of SPU’s sustainability initiatives.

Another potential chokepoint in SPU’s transition toward sustainable operations involves the development of rigorous yet practically applicable metrics to help evaluate the utility efforts to reduce vulnerability and increase resiliency and sustainability. According to James Rufo-Hill, a former SPU meteorologist and climate science advisor, SPU needs to improve its efforts to document and monitor the effectiveness of its operations, decision making, and planning processes [8]. Without such metrics, SPU will be less able to provide robust analyses that demonstrate whether and how its efforts have increased sustainability and reduced the utility’s vulnerability to climate change. The development and operational implementation of benchmarks and metrics is important to the long-term viability of SPU sustainability initiatives.

As demonstrated in this essay, the enterprise of climate services has positioned SPU to be better prepared for and more resilient against the present and future impacts of extreme weather, climate variability, and climate change. In other words, climate services were—and are—crucial to SPU’s evolution as a risk management utility. As illustrated above, SPU still has a need for scientific and informational expertise beyond the capabilities of its current utility staff to make progress as a sustainability-oriented utility. It stands to reason that climate services can and will continue to play a vital role and help organizations like SPU, as they work to move beyond the goal of climate resilience to pursue the broader objective of social and environmental sustainability. Climate resilience and sustainability share important characteristics. They both require:

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That utilities become aware of and are competent in nontraditional areas of science and technical understanding, such as the science of climate change and the impacts of redlining on community wealth and opportunity;

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That utilities, stakeholders, and technical specialists must co-produce models, decision aids, scenarios, data sets, plans, and other boundary objects;

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That utility staff and their partners understand and appreciate that their interactions and outputs will necessarily involve a mix of factual materials and public values.

However, the SPU experience also suggests that climate resilience and sustainability differ in ways that may necessitate changes in emphasis, or perhaps even basic alterations to the co-productive model.

As articulated by Dilling and Lemos [78], the co-production of knowledge refers to the contribution of multiple knowledge sources and capacities from different stakeholders, spanning the science–society interface with the goal of jointly creating knowledge and information to inform decision making. In general terms, the quest for sustainable modes of operation entails a multi-generational perspective and integrates economic vitality, social equity, and environmental stewardship. Studies of sustainability are necessarily multi-disciplinary, cross-sectoral, and inter-organizational. As recognized by Cvitanovic et al. [79], the practitioners implementing sustainability programs “do not necessarily consider scientific information to be more important than other knowledge…” [80]. They recognize that sustainability initiatives involve a mix of scientific characterization and projection, technological and engineering applications, professional standards and expectations, and clearly articulated commitments to value-based objectives. Furthermore, sustainability seems to be place-based and circumstantially specific [72] and is sometimes characterized as a societal process of learning and creation.

Based on this, we observe the following:

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As recognized elsewhere in this Special Issue [81], a hard and fast distinction between the knowledge producers and knowledge users is neither helpful nor realistic in the context of sustainability. Sustainability is always a composite of values, knowledge, natural conditions, technological capabilities and constraints, and stakeholder life experience. Within such a milieu, there is no one who is simply and purely a knowledge user or a knowledge producer.

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The co-productive enterprise requires scientific and technical inputs across a far broader range of knowledge and competencies than can be provided by the “traditional” disciplines of climate science, i.e., climate model projections. Additionally, for this reason, climate service providers need to expand their networks and prepare to interact with numerous other disciplines.

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Climate literacy in the water sector is defined as “water managers’ knowledge of the climate system and the impact of climate variability on the availability of water relative to annual operating decisions and long-term plans” [82]. While it is inarguable that responsible managers and decision makers need to be aware of the factors and conditions that can influence utility operations, it is not clear to us that a concept like “climate literacy” is helpful in the water or waste sectors, especially if one shifts their point of reference from climate change to sustainability. As the examples in Section 5 illustrate, sustainability can be site- or situation-specific, making it nearly impossible to stipulate in advance how much of any given knowledge domain will be necessary to inform a particular effort to pursue sustainable operations. SPU sustainability initiatives involve perhaps dozens of disciplines or topical domains, including the physiological factors that influence the population-level dynamics of endangered species; the socio-cultural determinants for equitable and generational planning; the hydro-geological variables that affect watershed functions; the principles of sustainable landscape design that emphasize native species; and the financial forecasting and modeling capabilities that can help to actualize concepts such as intergenerational planning.

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As discussed above, the efforts to achieve lasting organizational sustainability need to accommodate an increased operational comfort with stubborn uncertainties, possibly through the adoption of robust decision-making practices. The exercise of professional judgement is therefore critical to the development of pragmatic, usable, relevant, and acceptable outcomes. As described by Donald Schon in his seminal work The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, decision making under conditions of uncertainty involves a tacit skill set called “reflection in action”, or a willingness and ability to reframe problems and adjust the means to ends (or ends to means) in real time. As demonstrated by Lempert and others in this volume [83], climate service providers may need to adopt an elastic, on-the-fly mode of interactive support.

Climate change represents a clear challenge to efforts to forge a sustainable future. In our view, the effort to develop and apply climate services is—or at least ought to be—part of the larger enterprise of sustainable development.