Arizona group wins $100K to spread water awareness

• Beyond the Mirage won the $100,000 New Arizona Prize from the Arizona Community Foundation
• The winner's website hosting hundreds of video clips on water-related issues will launch in January
• The prize comes in dire times of impending Colorado River water shortages and a drought that has no end in sight

Water. It is the critical issue for Arizona's future.

Residents have cut back on consumption. Cities have pushed conservation campaigns. State leaders have enacted laws to manage water use. But still a historic drought grips the state. And while Arizona is not facing an immediate crisis, more must be done to protect against future shortages.

Against that backdrop, hundreds of thinkers came together to take the next step in facing Arizona's water challenge. Wednesday, one group walked away with a $100,000 prize to launch a website hosting hundreds of video clips on water-related issues for viewers to create and share documentaries to spread awareness about water consciousness. It will launch in January.

The group, Beyond the Mirage, is comprised of videographers and other media professionals, including a video coordinator at the University of Arizona and an executive producer with Arizona Public Media.

The initiative was created to bring together innovative people from all professional backgrounds to flesh out solutions to problems gripping Arizona.

Republic Media, the Arizona Community Foundation and the Morrison Institute for Public Policy presented the award. A panel of judges selected the winning team Wednesday after reviewing five finalists' proposals at the Phoenix Museum of Art.

Proposals ranged from computer applications that simulate possible outcomes from policy decisions on water to social-media awareness campaigns. No group left empty handed: The remaining four received $5,000 each as seed money to launch their plans.

The crowd favorite, a group called Water is Life, took home an additional $2,500 for its plans, which involve building a coalition to share water-conservation awareness and host games and surveys about water use on their site. Attendants to the award-announcement event selected the group by voting via text message.

The foundation and its partners have worked on the initiative for about two years and launched the New Arizona Prize website in August, initially attracting 248 registrants and 34 teams. Twenty-one submitted valid proposals, which went before an evaluation panel made up of public officials, academics and water-resource experts.

The constant tone at the award event? Let's not become California.

California Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday ordered cities and towns to reduce water use by 25 percent. He also ordered that 50 million square feet of lawns be replaced with drought-tolerant landscaping and that campuses, golf courses and cemeteries use less water. The state will also create a rebate program to replace old appliances with efficient ones.

The order, the first-ever California-wide water-reduction mandate, requires more water-usage reporting by agriculture and water suppliers in order to track and go after users consuming unreasonable amounts of water.

"That has to seep into our consciousness and know that as California goes, so goes the rest of the nation," said Steve Seleznow, president and CEO of the Arizona Community Foundation.

Arizona is in a better position. For example, Phoenix, the state's largest city, uses only two-thirds of its share of Colorado River water and has made a deal to store its reserves in Tucson aquifers.

But the state's current success in water management cannot sustain economic development indefinitely, according to a 2014 report by the Arizona Department of Water Resources.

While the state "has the good fortune of not facing an immediate water crisis," the "lack of an immediate problem increases the potential for inaction, running the risk of procrastination and not sufficiently motivating ourselves to plan and invest in our future," the report said.

Participants of the New Arizona Prize Water Consciousness Challenge stressed the importance of starting now.

The challenge is the first phase of the New Arizona Prize from the Arizona Community Foundation in collaboration with The Arizona Republic and the Morrison Institute for Public Policy.

The second phase calls for entrepreneurs to launch business strategies and produce products to reduce water consumption. The foundation is in the process of fleshing out further details.

Spreading the word will be crucial in the pursuit to use less water in the Southwest, said Michael Cohen, senior associate at the Pacific Institute, a research organization that charts development and environmental issues.

"I think it's huge," Cohen said. "I think it's going to be the single greatest factor because then people start to accept that their water bills are going to go up. This idea that medians should have turf, or ornamental lawns, I think it's going to go out of favor."

The average Phoenix resident uses 27 percent less per day than they did 20 years ago and Tucson is delivering the same amount of water as it did in 1989 despite population growth.

Cohen found that population growth in most cities using the Colorado River far outpaced the demand for water. And if we weren't that water-conscious? Deliveries among cities using Colorado River water would have risen by two million acre-feet if consumption increased as the same rate as population growth according to Cohen's research.

That's the equivalent of 2 to 3 million families of four — and that's more than the current population of Arizona, Cohen said.

We can thank more water-savvy appliances for that, as well as changing personal preferences. Families are having fewer children, backyard swimming pools have become less popular and desert landscaping has become more popular.

But a Colorado River shortage may be looming.

The state's major metro area has relied heavily on the river since political and economic wrangling birthed the Central Arizona Project, a series of canals that routes the river water to cities such as Phoenix and Tucson.

Participants at the prize event stressed the importance to educate future generations.

"A prize like this draws the interest and curiosity of those who will feel the impact of today's decisions decades from now," Seleznow said.

The other four finalists

Water is Life

The team of marketers, water resource managers, professors, a meteorologist, lawyer and foundation director proposed a plan that would build a coalition to share water conservation awarness via social media, survey the public and release results on water consciousness and host major celebratory and learning events to attract community involvement.

Arizona State University

The group of academics, education and community engagement professionals proposed spreading an existing water resources simulation program to middle and high schools that allows users to explore water supply and demand dynamics and sustainable water trade-offs. The idea is to motivate the next generation to work on water supply solutions in the future.

Creating Actionable Water Consciousness

This team proposed an application fit for desktop and mobile that would project the impact of various city planning decisions. The tool would explore effects of urban agriculture, industrial development, residential dispersion and density, landscape standards and lifestyle choices such as swimming pools. The group aims for city planners to use the tool when creating their general plans.

Support Our Schools AZ Collaborative

This team proposed launching a water scarcity awareness campaign in public district schools that would inspire science, math and writing lessons on water usage and challenge students and entire schools to take pledges to reduce water usage. The group will also amass data from schools on water usage and changes to their consumption to chart success.