Minnesota agencies planning ahead for changes to state’s water supply

How will Minnesota’s waters change by 2100? And what impact will the changes have on the state’s economy? Minnesota Management and Budget’s long-range planning team is creating a 75-year forecasting project to find out. 

Major factors impacting the state’s water include climate change, water-intensive industry development like data centers and agriculture, population growth and land use change — issues experts call “drivers of change” that need to be considered as state legislators make key water decisions. 

“I wouldn’t say that we’ve ranked them in terms of ‘this is the most important driver to the least important driver,’” said Bonnie Keeler, director of the University of Minnesota’s Water Resources Center. “These drivers are all actually quite important, and they all are interacting with each other to shape water now and in the future.” 

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The Center is providing the Management and Budget office with research briefs on all of these drivers to help them understand the certainty around issues like climate change, which experts predict will increase Minnesota’s average annual temperature by 3.8 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit by the middle of the century. Average annual precipitation is estimated to increase by up to 1.2 inches by mid-century. 

These factors could cause wetter springs, drier summers and shorter snow seasons, which have myriad effects on water like toxic algal blooms, which occur more frequently with hotter temperatures. These blooms introduce bacteria into the water that can harm plants, animals and humans, and can pollute nearby drinking water sources. 

The long range-planning project, tentatively called the 2100 Water Futures Project, is meant to prepare Minnesota for these realities. “Water is probably our most valued asset,” Keeler said. “It’s so essential for Minnesotans, for our tourism, recreation, for our sense of place, for our cultural identity, our economy… it makes a lot of sense to take a long-term perspective.”

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The project will take two years to complete and is one of six projects Management and Budget’s long-range planning team is working on. Other projects are focused on substance use disorder metrics, healthy aging, artificial intelligence and economic competitiveness. 

“We are shaping this [water] project in close partnership with state agencies to help the state navigate uncertainty and better understand what the end of the century might look like,” said Helen Schnoes, Minnesota Management and Budget’s water project program manager. 

Still in the early stages, the agency plans to pilot some of its methods and collect feedback this October at the University of Minnesota’s Water Resources Conference, open to students and water scientists. 

Management and Budget said they also want to include the general public, but are still figuring out how to build on community spaces that already exist.

“We’re all an expert in water in one way or another in this state, and we want to really honor the cultural values and the personal connection we have with water as part of moving into this long-term, future-looking space,” Schnoes said. 

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