Over 50 percent of US dams were built before 1970. As they age, their safety liabilities increase and effectiveness decreases. A new federal financing program could help with dam rehabilitation—but maximizing the program’s potential calls for congressional action, argue Nicholas Institute expert Martin Doyle and coauthor John Ryan in a commentary at The Hill.

For decades, the Clean Water Act – passed this week in 1972 – has limited pollution in America’s waterways and set water quality standards across the country. Its passage required the work of activists paired with bipartisan support.

States collectively have not committed $9.6 billion in available funding to invest in water, wastewater, and stormwater infrastructure, according to a new report from the Environmental Policy Innovation Center (EPIC) and the Water Policy Program at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.

A NOAA-led report released earlier this week finds seas could rise by up to a foot nationally by 2050 — triggering a “profound” increase in coastal flooding even in the absence of stronger storms and extreme rainfall. Martin Doyle spoke to Greenwire about the vision needed at the federal level to match the scale of the challenge.

The Duke-based Internet of Water will serve as the model for a national pilot program to improve how water data is shared.

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 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.