Large-scale capital investments in traditional gray infrastructure for water supply, stormwater management, and flood protection are increasingly risky and difficult to justify.

On 11 April 2013, I presented a lunchtime keynote at SAWPA’s annual Santa Ana River Watershed 2013 conference in Costa Mesa, CA. It reflected on Integrated Resources Planning in Southern California, my experiences, and where we may be headed. Here’s the transcript of that keynote.

My colleague Vladimir Novotny has done a good job condensing the several thousand years of water infrastructure history into four distinct stages – or paradigms as he calls them.