What if the future of water infrastructure isn’t just massive treatment plants and tunnels — but also thousands of small-scale systems spread across our communities?
That’s the vision driving Cynthia Koehler and the WaterNow Alliance. From green stormwater infrastructure and urban trees to water-efficient fixtures and turf replacement, these distributed strategies deliver the same functionality as centralized systems — but with greater resilience, flexibility, and affordability.
“Once you have a tunnel, that's it. It's always the same. If you supplement that in your community with green stormwater infrastructure, green roofs, bio swales, urban trees, you've got a lot more flexibility and you can target particular neighborhoods where you've got challenges,” Koehler explains.
WaterNow Alliance is focused on solving one of the biggest challenges in this shift — how to move public funding into private spaces to accelerate widespread adoption. By helping communities invest in distributed systems, they’re re-envisioning what water infrastructure looks like — and building resilience from the ground up.
Content from the U.S. Water Alliance 2025 One Water Summit.
The WaterNow Alliance is a partner at the Reservoir Center in Washington, D.C.
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