David Lewis FeldmanUniversity of California, Irvine | UCI · Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy
David Lewis Feldman
PhD
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121
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2,496
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Citations since 2017
Introduction
Additional affiliations
January 1997 - present
University of Tennessee
Publications
Publications (121)
Natural treatment systems (NTS) for stormwater have the potential to provide a myriad of ecosystem services to society. Realizing this potential requires active collaboration among engineers, ecologists and landscape planners and begins with a paradigm shift in communication whereby these groups are made aware of each other's perceptions about NTS...
Stormwater infrastructure substantially impacts water quality and supply. In the U.S., local agency investments rely on public support from taxes or fees. Assessing individuals’ knowledge and willingness to pay helps inform potential pathways to funding and green infrastructure implementation. Using a 2018–2019 survey of 868 University of Californi...
Outdoor watering of lawns accounts for about half of single-family residential potable water demand in the arid southwest United States. Consequently, many water utilities in the region offer customers cash rebates to replace lawns with drought tolerant landscaping. Here we present a parcel-scale analysis of water savings achieved by a “cash-for-gr...
Pluvial flash flooding (PFF) is a growing hazard facing cities around the world as a result of rapid urbanization and more intense precipitation from global warming, particularly for low-resourced settings in developing countries. We present collaborative modeling (CM) as an iterative process to meet diverse decision-making needs related to PFF thr...
Abstract Existing needs to manage flood risk in the United States are underserved by available flood hazard information. This contributes to an alarming escalation of flood impacts amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars per year and countless disrupted lives and affected communities. Making information about flood hazards useful for the range...
This article explores the challenges facing citizen science as a means of joining the efforts of scientists and flood-risk affected stakeholders in motivating citizen involvement in identifying and mitigating flood risks. While citizen science harbors many advantages, including a penchant for collaborative research and the ability to motivate those...
Abstract The Urban Water Atlas for Europe constitutes an original overview of Urban Water Management in Europe, explaining and illustrating water in an unprecedented way and reflecting how water, the essence of life, flows through the arteries of our cities. Leading experts in water sciences and technologies, together with climate change researcher...
Many cities rely on not just traditional delivery systems for potable water, but also standard economic models for valuing those systems. Both must be questioned to ensure future water security in drought-challenged urban regions.
Flood hazard mapping in the United States (US) is deeply tied to the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). Consequently, publicly available flood maps provide essential information for insurance purposes, but they do not necessarily provide relevant information for non-insurance aspects of flood risk management (FRM) such as public education and...
Understanding the impact of digital, interactive flood hazard maps and flood control systems on public flood risk perception could enhance risk communication and management. This study analyzed a survey of residents living near California’s Newport Bay Estuary and found that self-rated nonspatial perceptions of dread or concern over future flood im...
Flood hazard mapping in the United States (US) is deeply tied to the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). Consequently, publicly available flood maps provide essential information for insurance purposes, but do not necessarily provide relevant information for non-insurance aspects of flood risk management (FRM) such as public education and emer...
How do we manage water in cities? Where does our drinking water come from? Where does our waste water go? How much water do we consume? Is our life-style affecting our water? This first overview of Urban Water Management in Europe explains and illustrates water in an unprecedented way, reflecting how water flows through the arteries of our cities....
Scaling-up solutions require learning and adapting lessons between locations and at different scales. To accomplish this, common metrics are vital to building a shared language. For California, this has meant careful financial, cradle-to-grave life-cycle assessment methods leading to carbon accounting in many avenues of government (via the Low Carb...
Cities in drought prone regions of the world such as South East Australia are faced with escalating water scarcity and security challenges. Here we use 72 years of urban water consumption data from Melbourne, Australia, a city that recently overcame a 12 year "Millennium" drought, to evaluate 1) the relative importance of climatic and anthropogenic...
While advances in computing have enabled the development of more precise and accurate flood models, there is growing interest in the role of crowdsourced local knowledge in flood modeling and flood hazard assessment. In an effort to incorporate the "wisdom of the crowd" in the identification and mitigation of flood hazard, this public participation...
This chapter explores the relevance of polycentric governance – an approach whereby multiple, physically adjacent jurisdictions negotiate rules and policies to solve common problems – for managing converging knowledge, technologies, and society (CKTS). We trace the concept’s origins, its advantages and challenges, and how the latter might be surmou...
Mean sea level has risen tenfold in recent decades compared to the most recent millennia, posing a serious threat for population and assets in flood-prone coastal zones over the next century. An increase in the frequency of nuisance (minor) flooding has also been reported due to the reduced gap between high tidal datums and flood stage, and the rat...
Catchment urbanization perturbs the water and sediment budgets of streams, degrades stream health and function, and causes a constellation of flow, water quality and ecological symptoms collectively known as the urban stream syndrome. Low-impact development (LID) technologies address the hydrologic symptoms of the urban stream syndrome by mimicking...
California's current extreme drought must be a lesson for managing water in a warmer, more densely populated world, say Amir AghaKouchak and colleagues.
Water shortages brought on by the Millennium Drought in Southeast Australia forced greater Melbourne, a city of 4.3 million people, to find innovative ways of increasing water supply and decreasing water demand. This article explores how water managers in Melbourne reacted to the crisis and evaluates the short-and long-term impacts of their decisio...
This article explores governance issues in developing innovative pollutant offset programs by focusing on a case study being piloted at the Gisborne Recycled Water Plant in Jackson Creek, a rural subcatchment of the Maribyrnong River north of Melbourne, Australia. The article offers preliminary lessons from the ongoing design and anticipated challe...
Much scholarship has been devoted to the substantive, normative, and instrumental arguments in favor of a participatory approach to decision making and the management of environmental risks. However, there is considerable less research aimed at bridging the theories of ideal citizen participation with its technical implementation in the field.
Wi...
The technical potential and effectiveness of different water supply options for securing water availability in a large-scale, interconnected water supply system under historical and climate-change augmented inflow and demand conditions were compared. Part 1 of the study focused on determining the scale of the options required to secure water availa...
Most of California is suffering from an extreme drought, and storage levels in the major reservoirs are well below historic levels. For the past several months, an unusually stubborn ridge of high pressure off the West Coast of the United States has been blocking normal winter storms and the rain
Globally, three interrelated critical problems face society in the twenty-first century: population growth, shortages of vital requirements for human prosperity (water, food, energy, critical materials, full employment, health, hygiene, security, peace), and climate change. There are competing trends in terms of rising use of resources at the same...
Systematic convergence in knowledge and technology promises to increase the rate of scientific breakthroughs, lead to the establishment of new S&T domains and support growing expectations for human progress, including improved productivity, education, and quality of life. A virtual spiral of creativity and innovation will have a significant effect...
Earth-scale convergence systems comprise dynamic, complex, and interrelated environmental Earth-scale systems, energy production and consumption systems, and man-made technological systems such as telecommunications and various metropolitan and agricultural infrastructure systems. This chapter views Earth-scale systems from five viewpoints: knowled...
Australia's Millennium Drought transformed how Melbourne, a city of 4 million people, secures and uses its water resources. By thriving in the face of drought, Melbourne's example provides valuable lessons for other major metropolitan areas around the world-in particular, those located in the southwest region of the U.S.-that face long-term reducti...
I. Values, political theory, and environmental policies
II. Ethics and U.S. water policy
III. Law, engineering, and the absence of environmental principles in water policy
IV. The great plains garrison diversion project and the search for an environmental ethic
V. The pathology of structural reform in water policy: ethics and bureaucracies
VI. The...
Adaptation is the pursuit of active, deliberate measures to enhance humankind’s capacity to manage water supply and attenuate demand in the face of climate uncertainty. This article contends that worsening constraints upon freshwater due to climate variability demand concerted, imaginative, science-based solutions. These solutions must join creativ...
Knowledge networks are a recent innovation in global environmental governance. They provide a means for local and regional initiatives aimed at averting, mitigating, or adapting to climate change and other trans-boundary problems to join together in a system that: permits sharing of experiences, diffuses policy innovation across national borders, a...
The energy crisis of 1973-1974 was a pivotal event in 20th-century American history. In the wake of the Vietnam war, it exposed the nation's economic vulnerability to foreign powers and precipitated an awareness of limits to the exploitation of natural resources. Further, it forced Americans and the American government in particular to think about...
Humans create vast quantities of wastewater through inefficiencies and poor management of water systems. The wasting of water
poses sustainability challenges, depletes energy reserves, and undermines human water security and ecosystem health. Here
we review emerging approaches for reusing wastewater and minimizing its generation. These complementar...
'A fresh and up-to-date discussion of Russia's manifold environmental crises, using the results of an elite survey and a framework based on the civil society literature. I believe this is the best treatment of its subject that is presently available and, given Russia's enormous territorial extent, it is a study that has important implications for e...
Innovations to manage freshwater resources and avert shortages - including conservation through use of reclaimed wastewater, desalination, and demand-side management measures such as increasing block rate structures offer practical, effective remedies for meeting future water demands. We examine the challenges confronting adoption of these innovati...
Geopolitics scholars became increasingly concerned with how these resource assets are governed and controlled, often contending that the efficacy of resource governance has important implications for both economic efficiency (development) and social equity (justice) – as well as national security. Finally, this newer conception of geopolitics led e...
This essay introduces the major themes of the symposium by first exploring the importance of equity as a sensitizing principle that compels policy scholars and the public to become aware of the consequences of our actions on the environment, natural resources, and the people dependent upon them. After conceding that equity remains a largely unreali...
In recent years the United Nations Environment Program, UN Conference on Environment and Development, and other international organizations have acknowledged the importance of civil society for engaging stakeholders in environmental change-especially at the local community level-and in promoting democracy. In Russia, efforts by nongovernmental orga...
Moving from climate science to adaptive action is an immense challenge, especially in highly institution-alized sectors such as water resources. Knowledge networks are valuable strategies to put climate information to use. They overcome barriers to information adoption such as stovepipes, pipelines, and restricted decision space, and they can be re...
1] Southern California's water history is an epic story with larger-than-life characters and ambitions and abundant hubris. Students of water policy might reasonably ask: Does this story, while unique to greater Los Angeles, hold lessons for other metropolises experiencing water conflict caused by explosive growth? We examine this question by consi...
This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the
full-text PDF file.
This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.
Faced with mounting pressures from a changing climate, an increasing population, a
transitory populace, and varying access to available natural resources, decision makers,
scientists, and resource managers have an immediate need to understand, obtain, and
better integrate climate forecasts and observational data in near- and long-term planning.
Red...
Adaptive management advocates contend that resource decisions should be made and modified as a function of what scientists and resource managers learn about natural systems. Decisions should be modest in scope, scientifically sound, and reversible. Implementing adaptive practices requires that stakeholders adopt resource management arrangements tha...
The study of public administration has a decidedly secular character, a result of an intentional effort to seek legitimacy through professionalization that can be traced back to the Progressive Era. But is this secular orientation wholly descriptive of the practice of public administration? To address this question, the authors examine the religios...
The shortage of fresh water is likely to be one of the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century. A UNESCO report predicts that as many as 7 billion people will face shortages of drinking water by 2050. Here, David Lewis Feldman examines river-basin management cases around the world to show how fresh water can be managed to sustain economic...
There is increasing public debate over how to meet future water supply needs in historically water-abundant areas such as the American southeast. Citizens, policymakers, and others are struggling to find ways to meet these needs and to design political strategies for implementing them. This article examines water supply problems facing many communi...
The U.S. government has been engaged in water supply planning for domestic, agricultural, commercial, and industrial needs from its inception. Planning was initially undertaken for inland navigation and flood control. Later, primacy was given to irrigation, municipal needs, and hydroelectricity. The Army Corps of Engineers, the largest and most imp...
Water transfers are the diversion, reallocation, or appropriation of surface or groundwater from one watershed, drainage basin, or aquifer to another. All transfers entail water exchange between catchments. They may also move water from one political jurisdiction to another, exacerbating their impacts and complicating efforts to resolve stakeholder...
Christian faith-based environmental reform efforts in Appalachia advance a framework for policy change based on the view that the roots of the contemporary environmental crisis are moral and spiritual in nature. We examine how this framework is advanced among twenty faith-based organizations in Appalachiaa region with a legacy of serious environme...
A network simplex algorithm is described for the minimum-cost network flow problem on a generalized network, with the additional constraint that there exist sets of arcs that must carry equal amounts of flow. This problem can be modeled as a linear programming ...
The Inter-Basin Water Transfer Act requires Tennessee's public water providers whose rights are secured by eminent domain to acquire a permit for surface or groundwater withdrawals that are diverted outside their basin of origin and may adversely affect surface water flow. It bolsters rights of riparian users, regulates water quantities diverted an...
This article contends that achieving trust and confidence in Internet systems is dependent on enhancing public perceptions that those who develop and manage Internet technologies are honest, capable, competent, and accountable. Drawing upon recent studies of the Internet and on decision-support technologies, first outlined are the principal dimensi...
More than three dozen states and communities in the United Stales have undertaken comparative risk projects to establish environmental priorities and, thus, to address their most important environmental problems. This trend has been supported by a growing consensus among subnational governments that they are increasingly encumbered with prescriptiv...
States and regions provide flexibility and innovation in managing climate change. This is exemplified by energy conservation, transportation, forestry, land use, regional planning, waste management policies and programmes to promote lifestyle changes. Problematically, however, sub-national government roles vary considerably among countries, dependi...
the University of Tennessee. In addition, we acknowledge with gratitude the numerous people who have contributed to this project by providing us with information on the efficacy of institutional controls or by taking time to participate in the empirical research component of this project.
A public attitudes survey was conducted in neighborhoods adjacent to a radioactively contaminated site whose remediation is now under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy's Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP). The survey's purpose was to ascertain levels of actual and desired public involvement in the remediation proce...
Effective management of global climate change and its impacts requires dedicated subnational (i.e., state-level) responses within countries. To ensure that state-level programs effectively advance the goals of sustainable development, they must be evaluated by three criteria: compliance with the goals of higher authorities, efficacy, and credibilit...
The energy crisis of 1973-1974 was a pivotal event in twentieth-century American history. Twenty years later, questions about the energy crisis persist. The authors locate the energy crisis in its historical context and find that, contrary to popular opinion, the Arab oil embargo was not responsible for the energy crisis
In the spring of 1994, 80 scholars and policymakers convened at a day-long symposium at the University of Tennessee to discuss the energy crisis` legacy. Titled, Twenty Years After the Energy Shock - How Far Have We Come? Where are we headed?, the symposium focused on four topics: Lessons learned from the 1970s energy shocks about the causes and co...
This article explores the evolution of government. Facilitated by advances in telecommunications and information technology, governments of the future may become specialized by function. One type of government will be non-spatial in essence and will be populated by people who share a strong affinity with each other, but not necessarily common spati...
Current federal hazardous and low-level radioactive waste management policies (under conjoint federalism) fail to balance national concerns for consistency with state concerns for equity, discretion, and adequate resources. Congress should expand conjoint federalism to permit states to charge differential fees on imported hazardous waste as it does...
Ensuring that treaties designed to manage global climate change are ‘implementable’ is an important negotiating challenge. Implementable agreements have a reasonable chance of being ratified by nation states that are the greatest contributors to the problem; are acceptable to parties with the resources to do something about it; and induce voluntary...
Efforts aimed at controlling pollution in regional seas and at minimizing ozone depletion were, at one time, viewed to be as complex as managing global climate change. Effective international cooperation is the result of an incremental and iterative learning process among scientists, environmental groups, and political leaders who hold divergent pe...
The Garrison Diversion Unit (GDU) was authorized by Congress in 1965. It is one of the largest and most expensive public works projects ever undertaken in the United States. When completed, it may become the last major federal irrigation scheme constructed in the west. Its principal purposes are: (1) to irrigate some 250,000 acres of arable land in...
Department of Energy national laboratories have long sought to expedite the transfer of commercially viable technologies to
the private sector through publications and reports, workshops, the licensing of inventions, and personnel exchanges and other
cooperative agreements between laboratories, industry, and universities. This article focuses on th...
Projects
Projects (8)
In this $1.9M grant from the UC Office of the President, we will investigate research and practice innovations needed to put the five southern UC campuses (UCI, UCLA, UCSD, UCR, and UCSB) on a path toward "water neutral", by which we mean that most or all stormwater runoff generated by the campuses will be captured and used for potable substitution, green infrastructure, and energy storage (more information at: https://news.uci.edu/research/ucis-stanley-grant-to-lead-1-9-million-uc-effort-to-become-stormwater-neutral/).