Utilities and their customers face growing challenges to the affordability of basic water services in communities across the country. Over the last year, the Nicholas Institute’s Water Policy Program has been exploring the causes and scale of these challenges and ways to potentially address them.

Decommissioning obsolete infrastructure presents an unusual opportunity to decrease long-term government spending, improve public safety and restore the environment, writes Martin Doyle in an op-ed for The Hill.

A historic freeze in February left at least 40,000 people in Jackson, Miss., without running water for weeks, displaying the fragility of the city's water system after decades of outmigration, deferred maintenance, and declining federal support. Martin Doyle was among several national policy experts who spoke to Mississippi Today about how other American cities have navigated large-scale water funding shortages and how Jackson could move forward.

In a new blog post for the Internet of Water, Lauren Patterson, Senior Policy Associate for the Water Policy Program, writes, "The transition from one year to the next is often a time of reflection. How much more so when the past year, the start of a new decade, has brought such radical disruption and change to our society.

In an episode of the waterloop podcast, Martin Doyle and Rebecca Lave discuss the difficulty and lack of success of stream mitigation banking and explain why they believe it needs to be reformed to achieve better environmental outcomes.

In "Streams of Revenue: The Restoration Economy and the Ecosystems It Creates,” Martin Doyle chronicles and analyzes the history, implementation and environmental outcomes of stream mitigation banking, one of many widely used market-based approaches to conservation.

One-third of the tens of thousands of mile-long river segments in the United States have noticeably shifted color in satellite images since 1984, according to a study in the journal Geographical Research Letters. Martin Doyle told the Associated Press that the study "shows how most every aspect of our planet is being affected by humans."

Microsoft has made a new commitment to replenish even more water than it uses for its global operations by 2030, making the company “water positive." Martin Doyle spoke to The Verge about how large data centers can put additional pressure on already water-stressed basins.

The Nicholas Institute is applying the expertise of its professionals to rapidly evolving environmental and energy issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Read four stories about how Nicholas Institute projects are meeting the moment.

Many of the reservoirs operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are decades old and subject to ever-changing environmental and social pressures that threaten their ability to function as intended. To better understand the state of these reservoirs, Martin Doyle and Lauren Patterson collaborated with the USACE to conduct a large-scale analysis.