(38b) Metrics Driven Systems Analysis for Water & Energy Sustainability

This presentation focusses on showcasing how sustainability metrics can be utilized to drive energy and water sustainability outcomes in communities. Communities and local governments play an important role in developing people centric sustainable solutions as they have broad influence over activities that result in energy and water consumption within their boundary and jurisdiction. But most often their decisions are characterized by lack of quantitaitve information regarding the complex and often conflicting interactions between different aspects of the problem including the so called water-energy nexus. The authors will present how carbon footprint and water footprint metrics can be utilized within the framework of scenario modeling to help policy makers evaluate sustainability outcomes and tradeoffs associated with different policy choices. Several interesting results related to the sustainability analysis of San Luis Basin in south-central Colorado will be presented.