Water Talk
Water Talk is a national podcast about all things Water hosted by Drs. Mallika Nocco (University of Wisconsin–Madison Extension), Faith Kearns (Arizona State University), and Sam Sandoval (University of California, Davis; University of California Agriculture & Natural Resources)
Water Talk
Ep 71: Water Footprint of AI Data Centers
A conversation with Professor Melissa Scanlan (UW–Milwaukee Center for Water Policy and School of Freshwater Sciences) about data center water use, growth, and policy considerations. Released September 26, 2025.
Well, we want to get into this episode today. Welcome back to Water Talk. We are talking about data centers and their water use. And now it's time for our primer. So, Faith, what do you want to tell us that we should kind of think about with these data centers?
Faith Kearns:Yeah, well, I think, you know, data centers are in the news all day, every day at this point. And so we just kind of really wanted to delve into the topic because water use is actually one of the biggest challenges and one of the biggest concerns that people have when a data center comes knocking on their sort of community door. And so, you know, it was really interesting just to talk about how much water these systems can use.
Mallika Nocco:So it's kind of interesting with these data centers. I think we can think of them as like you'll hear our guests today say they're hyper developing across the United States. And I thought that was an interesting term. And the reason is because we have this growing consumption of artificial intelligence. And, you know, I've never even really thought about my use of AI as consumption before, which is, you know, something that anytime you, we're using these AI tools, they're requiring a lot of computational power. And the data centers are like housing all these servers, and they they have a water requirement both for energy and then also to keep them cool. To me and maybe to you, the cooling part kind of makes sense. It's you know, often water that's being piped through the buildings to keep all these servers cool. And if you just you know think about how warm your laptop can get, and now think about a building full of servers running our AI. That's what we're talking about here. But I do think that the water relationship with the fossil fuel consumption is a little trickier. Faith, you want to talk about that a little bit?
Faith Kearns:Sure. I mean, I think it it basically comes down to, you know, people often refer to it as the water energy nexus and just the fact that it actually takes quite a bit of water often to either produce or process various types of fossil fuels. And so whenever we think about energy, there is a companionate water use that happens with that. So not only, like you said, are these are these data centers directly using water for various purposes, but it's also built into sort of how they are powered at this point. And the other part that we talked about briefly that I don't see getting as much attention is on the wastewater side, where all of this water that's used in the data center process then also ends up being various levels of quality and it needs to be treated just like any water coming out of your home. And so there's also an energy cost at the back end involved in treating the wastewater that's produced. So lots of water, different water usage. We're probably not even talking about all of them.
Mallika Nocco:Absolutely. And I'm just kind of thinking about this. It's almost like the very beginning or the maybe the second phase of when agricultural irrigation just became a thing. We didn't even know what we should be concerned about, right? Like, so I'm kind of thinking about that this in the same way. And that's why we thought it would be, you know, wonderful to talk to a law professor and water policy expert about this. So we decided to talk to Professor Melissa Scanlan, who is the director of the Center for Water Policy at the University of Wisconsin School of Freshwater Sciences. And this is after we read a piece that she had written in The Conversation with a policy fellow, Peyton McAuley, and it just spoke to us, and we we felt like this is the right person that we need to talk to. Without further ado, here is Professor Melissa Scanlon on Water Talk.
Mallika Nocco:In today's episode, we are talking about data centers and water use with Professor Melissa Scanlon, endowed chair in water policy, as well as a professor and the director of the Center of Water Policy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences. Previously, she was a visiting professor at Boston College Law School and a professor at Vermont Law School. She served as the Associate Dean of the Environmental Law Program and Director of the Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law School and directed the Colloquium on Environmental Scholarship, a robust international forum for scholars to give and receive feedback on works in progress. Professor Scanlan has written and edited books, book chapters, and law review articles on a wide variety of water and new economy law topics. State Supreme Court opinions have cited her law review articles, and conservation groups have republished them in shorter forms. Before she became a law professor, Professor Scanlan represented nonprofit community groups and tribal government clients in high-impact lawsuits and shaped public policy in areas ranging from the Great Lakes Compact, which we've talked about, and water supply issues, to enforcement and implementation of the Clean Water Act and the public trust doctrine. Melissa, we are so excited to have you on Water Talk. So we are gonna do kind of a little silly game before we get going. And it's gonna be kind of a rapid fire of some topics related to water. And you tell me which is your favorite of two choices. So the first is ocean or lake. Lake. That was fast. Milwaukee, it makes sense. Sparkling or still? Still. Rain or snow?
Melissa Scanlan:Snow.
Mallika Nocco:Salty or fresh? Fresh. Hot or cold? Definitely cold. Bath or shower?
Melissa Scanlan:Shower.
Mallika Nocco:All right, all right. That was fun. That's the first time we did that. So could have guessed some of them based on your location.
Melissa Scanlan:Yeah. That's fun.
Faith Kearns:And Melissa, do you have a favorite body of water?
Melissa Scanlan:The one that I'm swimming in.
Faith Kearns:I like that one. Because we're swimming. Yeah. That's a woman after my own part. That's probably what I would say too.
Mallika Nocco:So to get things going, we have a lot of early career listeners who are kind of thinking about who they want to be and what they want to do. And we were wondering if you could please tell us about a pivotal moment in your career that just kind of led you down the professional path you were on.
Melissa Scanlan:That's an interesting question. Thanks. I think when you first get out of school, whether it's high school or college, you really don't know much about what's out there in terms of opportunities. And my first job out of college was to work as a legal assistant at a law firm that represented classes of people, meaning big groups of people who had been injured in some way. I didn't know anything about the legal profession. No one in my family had ever gone to law school. I didn't know if I could stomach being around lawyers. So really, this was just dipping my toe in the water of what it was like to work in the law. And I think I was just very much influenced by an early experience in that job where I was sent to a southern state to meet with individuals who had either experienced cancer in their lives or someone in their family had died of cancer. And it was extremely difficult. I was going into people's homes, and the source of the problem that the lawyers were developing in this case had to do with oil pollution of water, of people's drinking water. Wow. And bathing, you know, the domestic water that comes out of their taps. So it was very intense to document uh what was happening in this community that was pretty isolated and politically powerless. And one of the pivotal moments for me was going into someone's home, and as a gesture of hospitality, they offered me a glass of water. And it had an oil sheen on the top of it.
Mallika Nocco:Oh my goodness, did you drink it? What did you do?
Melissa Scanlan:No, I didn't drink it. I said, are you drinking this water? Yes, we are. We also bathe our children in it. You know, it's very alarming. So it really showed me how disempowered individuals can be. And even in the face of something as obvious as having a sheen of oil on your water, just trusting that if it was bad for you, the government would tell you. So that level of kind of blind trust was a wake-up call for me as a young person in my early 20s. And also seeing that really the lawyers who were representing these people were the only counterforce to what was happening. And so that made me a lot more interested in becoming a lawyer, becoming a public interest lawyer, and is really changed the trajectory of my career because then I went to law school.
Mallika Nocco:That is so powerful. And I mean, just this idea too of just that trust in your government and like who's there for us when that trust fails is a pretty powerful concept to experience when you're so young.
Faith Kearns:That makes a good transition, I guess, into our topic today in terms of thinking about data centers. So, you know, this topic that's coming up over and over again in in lots of communities across the country and I would guess around the world. And I am wondering if we could just kind of start with what a data center is and talking a little bit about why they consume or need so much water.
Melissa Scanlan:Yeah. So there are different scales of data centers. These are the places where basically warehouses filled with servers and routers, and they started popping up when people were doing cloud computing and streaming videos and audio, and they were pretty small scale related to those uses. But why we keep hearing about data centers now is because of AI. So an AI use of data center space is much more intensive, and that is what's driving the explosion of data centers and the hyperscaling up of the size and resource demands of these centers. What do they use water for? So why are AI-driven data centers so darn thirsty? Is the question, right?
Melissa Scanlan:They use water directly to cool the servers and the routers, and they use water indirectly to power their operations. So there's two big ways that water gets used and consumed when we're operating AI-initiated data centers. So the servers and routers inside the data centers generate a lot of heat. Cooling requires energy and water, and there are technology choices that the creators of these centers have to make. There's the technology about what kind of electricity is going to power the center, which will have a different water demand based on the type of electricity. And then there's decisions about how they're going to keep all this hot equipment cool. Think about your laptop or your phone and the heat that it generates just in that small device. And then you scale that up to huge warehouse full of routers and servers, and the cooling needs are pretty tremendous.
Melissa Scanlan:So inside the data centers, one choice would be air cooling. It doesn't use water at the site, but it uses an awful lot of energy to run fans and cool off the system. Another kind of typical choice is using an evaporative water cooling system that runs water through pipes, and it once that water gets warm, the heat rises and the water evaporates out of the top of the building, leaving through the top of the building. Those are a little bit less expensive from what I've heard to run, but they require regular refills of water. And then there's a closed loop, non-evaporative water system that also runs water through the system and it absorbs heat and gets cooled off by chillers. So each of these have impacts on resources, whether it's going to be the amount of energy that's needed to power it or the amount of water that's needed at the site itself. Some people might think, oh, air cooling, that's the way to go because there won't be water needed to cool the facility. Well, if that requires a lot more electricity, and that electricity is produced by fossil fuels, then you do have a lot of water involved in that system, not to mention the greenhouse gases that we really can't afford to keep releasing. So there are all these trade-offs with the technology choices. And it's not super visible to people who are, you know, driving by a huge warehouse. They wouldn't understand, they wouldn't have any reason to know that.
Faith Kearns:I know it's pretty common here in Arizona to use evaporative cooling because it's such a dry climate. Is that a big issue? Like it depends kind of where you are in a more humid or dry place in terms of whether air conditioning or evaporative cooling is utilized more, or does that kind of it's it's such a commercial use that it that doesn't the background ecosystem type or whatever climate type doesn't matter?
Melissa Scanlan:I think the climate does matter. I don't think there's a lot of public information to answer that question, Faith. So if you were involved in engineering as part of the team working with one of the large tech companies, you would know that and you'd have all that information, but that's not publicly available, which is part of the bigger issue.
Mallika Nocco:So as you mentioned, these data centers can use so much water. And I think the you'd recently written a piece in the conversation, and the number that you had quoted in that piece was 17 billion gallons nationally in 2023 from a Lawrence Berkeley National Lab report. That is just such a large number, I think, to most people to just wrap their heads around. And this idea that it is we're also kind of poised for this expansion is one of the reasons we got very interested in this topic. As you know, a water policy expert with this deep expertise in the Great Lakes, what are your concerns about these data centers becoming more prevalent around here in the Great Lakes states? And I'm just thinking, I know there's an ex a recent example in Port Washington, Wisconsin.
Melissa Scanlan:So the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, National Lab report that we were citing in that article was a report to Congress. And I think it's really a very important report because it aggregates the usage across the country, which is extremely difficult to get those numbers.
Melissa Scanlan:And so thanks for drawing attention to that 17 billion gallons. That's direct use for cooling. What is even more staggering from that report is 211 billion gallons are being indirectly consumed through the electricity to power the data centers. So when you look at the entire usage, this is these were estimated totals from 2023. But when you look at the entire usage between those two categories, 92.5% of the water being consumed is through the electricity choice. And only seven and seven and a half percent through the direct use of cooling. But even just focusing on that little sliver of direct use cooling, 17 billion gallons, is quite staggering.
Melissa Scanlan:And one of the issues with water law and policy or water issues is that it's highly site-specific. So it's useful to see these numbers in the you know, aggregate across the country, but it's really um most uh interesting and important to look at specific locations. And Faith, you mentioned you're in the Southwest. So specific locations in the Southwest are going to be resource constrained in a very different way than a specific location in Georgia or Virginia or Wisconsin, right? So you really need to know not only the the weather and climate of the area, but what's going on with the water resources, how is power generated there? Um and yeah, so that's kind of the big picture.
Melissa Scanlan:I think that we're seeing the early stages of development were in the Southwest, Pacific Northwest, and Virginia. Virginia is the epicenter of data centers, has the largest concentration of data centers of anywhere in the world. The Great Lakes are maybe the second phase of what has been happening first in those other locations. And in terms of being, you know, what are the concerns about data centers becoming more prevalent in the Great Lakes states? I would say number one is the unknown unknowns fueled by the lack of transparency. So even though we have these examples in other locations, there's so much that is hidden from view, and it's really difficult to get the data, which is what our research endeavor into this area has shown us over uh the past year.
Mallika Nocco:Yeah, and for our listeners, I've always thought the unknown unknown concept was really interesting. So, like the known unknowns are things that you, as policy expert, you know to be concerned about, right? So an unknown unknown, is it fair to say it's things that we should be worried about that we don't know to worry about?
Melissa Scanlan:Yeah, so I would say that's the biggest thing. And then the second thing would be the stuff we do know about already, right? And this is a historic commitment of resources and energy, energy and water to a single industry and one that's brand new. That is something that we do know. We also know that 1% of the Great Lakes is renewed annually, so we need to work within that water budget. You look out at these vast inland seas and you think, wow, that's unlimited. Well, that's not true. It is limited, and there's a very narrow margin before you start depleting the waters. Climate change, we don't really have the runway to keep burning fossil fuels. And yet, that's what a lot of the added energy generation for the data centers is doing. Um, and people need to be aware of that. And then the water use for fossil fuel-based energy is tremendous, even more than the water needed for cooling, as we've mentioned. So if you're powering these centers with fossil fuels, you have got the double whammy of greenhouse gases and really high water use and higher high water consumption with that, with those energy choices.
Mallika Nocco:I think one thing that kind of clarify would be good, and that's this idea of consumptive water use. And we we talk about this, I'm in ag water, and so we think about that as when we irrigate our crops, this is the water that's lost to evapotranspiration, and it's going to be no longer available in that watershed. Is this kind of a similar concept for the data centers?
Melissa Scanlan:It's applied, I think, similarly across the board in different industries, that you've got the the amount of water that's withdrawn and then used in a certain process and not returned to the place of origin where it was withdrawn would be the water that's consumed.
Mallika Nocco:Okay, thank you. That's super helpful.
Melissa Scanlan:Yeah, so it's it's very similar. And I would just want to highlight that the Lawrence Berkeley lab numbers we were talking about are numbers related to consumption of water.
Mallika Nocco:Oh, wow. Okay. Makes that a little bit even more disturbing, I think.
Faith Kearns:Yeah, so it basically it seems like a huge part of wrestling with these data centers is even really this topic of like how to quantify their water use and probably even their energy use and all sorts of other things. And Mallika mentioned that you had written a piece in the conversation and it was published with a policy fellow that worked worked with you, Peyton Macaulay, and you were talking about how difficult it can be get these water numbers out of you know the corporations that are doing doing this work. And I guess we're seeing more and more, I think, communities kind of try to push back or organize against data centers. = I'm just wondering, you know, from the research that you all have been doing, what should communities be asking of these companies as a new site comes in? And I guess tangentially, I'm also just wondering if there is any large-scale process to kind of look at how many data centers do we actually need? Because it seems like it's it's getting sort of in this area of individual communities having to push back versus, you know, how many of these things are we building in the US and what are their capacities going to be and and all of that kind of stuff. So sort of a twofold question, but just to begin with, what would communities want to ask when a data center comes knocking on their door? A potential data center?
Melissa Scanlan:So you mentioned our the article in the conversation. We have a larger manuscript that will be published in a uh probably around the time that this podcast comes out. And I'll mention that at the end as well. But that documents how our research investigated the environmental footprint of data centers with a focus on water usage. And we go through our methods of trying to access public government, what should be public governmental records, and come up short in a lot of the databases that should have had information. And we document how difficult and piecemeal it is to try to come up with that aggregate number that Lawrence Berkeley Lab came up with. And then we also turn to the sustainability reports that the technology companies create and release. And we show the information that they are providing to illuminate the water usage, water consumption, and energy choices that are happening at these data centers. Part of the big issue is that the level of disclosure varies so dramatically between each company. And the reports are really not going to, they don't, the sustainability reports don't contain the details needed to fully assess the environmental impact of a data center. It undermines the ability of a host community to know what they're getting into if they're trying to rely on any kind of sustainability reports. So then you say, well, what about the information that's being provided to the local government when a facility comes into town or you know is exploring it?
Mallika Nocco:Yeah, and it seems like it's very much presented in this kind of classic jobs framework of that this is going to bring this many jobs, especially the you know, need or for in some of these communities or desire to have like technical, highly technical positions and things like that. So it seems like when they're pitching these data centers, the pitch is you know very much a classic jobs pitch.
Melissa Scanlan:It can be. And the reality is that the tech jobs aren't necessarily in that location. The jobs that are in that location are going to be construction of the facility at the beginning and security guards. So that's a whole nother issue about how how much the community is actually going to benefit in terms of the jobs, right? But the other point that I was uh trying to underscore here is that you would think that the most important place to get the information would be from the government that is considering hosting this new industry. And when we reached out to some of the government entities that were about to host data centers, we were told that the information was confidential and we were researchers.
Melissa Scanlan:I would say one of the big takeaways from our research is that confidentiality agreements or non-disclosure agreements really undermine the ability of the public to know what's going on before they sign on the dotted line, right? And so if you're a public official, do not sign a confidentiality agreement when you're considering this. Public disclosures are really important for the community to know what is happening before you commit resources. And I would say the public and government decision making. Makers need to know at a minimum what technology will be used for cooling, how much water is required for the system, where will the water be sourced? How will it impact the public supplies of water and what everyone else pays? How is it going to be powered? Where's the electricity coming from? What about the transmission lines? Who is paying for the upgrades to the transmission lines? So I think that there's a there are a whole lot of big questions that get very much obscured in this process.
Melissa Scanlan:And it brings me back to that original um experience I told you about with the oil on the drinking water. Right? So when you when you obscure information, it's very disempowering. And you cannot make good decisions if you're the receiving potential host community. And you're dealing with very experienced entities that are doing this all over the country and in other parts of the world. And you might be a mayor or a city council person or a community member, and you have never thought about these issues before. So there's a real imbalance of power between the negotiating entities and having information that's vital be hidden when there's an imbalance of power makes it even worse for the local community to make good decisions.
Mallika Nocco:Yeah, absolutely. And I'm just thinking, too, of these communities, and all of us are kind of operating in this environment of change. So I'm thinking about, you know, increasing heat, increasing heat waves, and just the increase of evaporative demand with a changing climate. That means I again to use my agriculture analogy, I'm always like, well, how is irrigation demand going to change for our crops? But this I think you could say the same thing in that as thirsty as a data center is in this moment, in 20 years, it stands to be thirstier, right?
Mallika Nocco:What are your hopes or concerns in this space for coming decades? How do we get this right? Like what what do we need to think about in that environment of a changing climate?
Melissa Scanlan:Um, so I think the the the point you just made that in 20 years there'll be the data centers will be thirstier. My hope is that that is untrue. In fact, it cannot be true because we don't have the water to do that. So the current business model does not seem viable. I'm just gonna say that. Uh what is its value proposition to the public?
Melissa Scanlan:If the amount of water and energy was clearly disclosed and the costs to ratepayers understood, would there be enough pressure from host communities and investors to find solutions? I think the obscuring of information maybe allows for people to be spending a bit like drunken sailors on these facilities.
Melissa Scanlan:We hear about this in the business news about concerns about this being a bubble. When you look at it from the amount of resources that's required to operate the centers the way they're currently designed, it really doesn't seem very realistic. And I've been hearing from engineers that there are promising other technologies that could be used, other ways to use AI that is aligned with sustainability goals of using less water and less energy. Um, so my hope is that the smart people who are involved in bringing us AI are able to figure out how to build the technology in a way that doesn't exhibit this kind of resource gluttony. And the ideas I'm starting to hear, I think are promising, but they're yet to be commercially demonstrated. So if we're going to embrace AI, we need solutions to the resource problem. And I my hope is that people will start realizing that and recognizing that this we can't continue with the model that is being presented to us.
Faith Kearns:Yeah, and as you're talking, I guess I have a question related to wastewater because we are talking primarily right now about you know water consumption. And I know there's a lot of conversations about recycling water, closed loops, all sorts of stuff within these systems. But I guess the the wastewater produced is also something that has to be dealt with, and I would imagine has various kinds of quality issues. And so I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit about like what happens on the other end with water that gets used in these systems and where it goes after that.
Melissa Scanlan:It's a great question because of course it's all part of the system. If they're tied into municipal water, they're going to have demands on the water utility to get drinking water, quality water coming to them. And then after it's used in the facility, it goes into the separate set of pipes that run to the public treatment works, the sewage system. And the wherever that's discharging is you know, that could be a lake, that could be a river, that could be someplace in a totally different watershed if you're in a in a state that allows that. So yeah, there the wastewater side is definitely part of the equation and part of what makes it even more complicated as a researcher, because you have to be able to put in data requests to each of these specific entities to find out what's going on because the information isn't requested, required to be disclosed at the outset. So um I think that understanding the wastewater side and the costs on the wastewater side of treating all that additional water is a really important question, Faith.
Faith Kearns:Yeah, and I think even just thinking about the energy it takes to treat wastewater, right? So we're just in this whole sort of like water energy usage and just very difficult to track. So I wish you good luck on this path. And I'm so thankful that you're sharing it with us because I feel like we really are just at the beginning in so many ways of trying to understand the impacts of these really big changes, both societally and then just on our ecosystems, on our communities.
Faith Kearns:And we always like to ask our guests at the end if there's anything more that you would like people to know about your work that maybe we didn't get a chance to cover. And, you know, just how how can we all support the work that you're doing, support your efforts?
Melissa Scanlan:Yeah, thanks for that. The Rutgers Computer and Technology Law Journal is publishing our data centers research. And that's where readers can take a deeper dive into water use of this industry and the need for greater transparency in government records, decisions, and sustainability reporting by the tech industry. I guess I'll close by saying we are an academic research center, the Center for Water Policy, producing analysis to protect, conserve, and restore fresh water. And we're funded by philanthropy that's aligned with our mission. So we start our day asking, what are we doing to protect water? And our research only has that as the agenda. Is you know, we don't have a client, we don't have conflicts of interest, we're just starting each research question saying, What are we doing to protect water?
Faith Kearns:Thank you so much. Thank you for sharing that, and thank you for sharing your research.
Mallika Nocco:And now it's time for our parting gift. Well, that was riveting, Faith, and also disturbing. So, but yeah, what were some of your key takeaways?
Faith Kearns:I'm sort of immersed in this issue a lot because here in Arizona, it's something that we are also dealing with. And so, you know, I think from this particular conversation, it was just interesting to hear the idea that there is sort of an asymmetrical power kind of dynamic happening where, you know, when a company comes into a specific location proposing a data center, they have a lot more information than the people who live in that place who maybe are encountering this issue for the first time or certainly can't encountering it maybe in their own community for the first time. And so, you know, I think the issue of how communities can, you know, talk with, participate in public processes around these things seems really important in terms of empowering people to participate in sort of civic processes uh related to whether these things come into their own communities or not.
Mallika Nocco:Yeah, absolutely. And I thought it was especially interesting that Professor Scanlan said that public officials should not sign confidentiality agreements about this. So we can all kind of try to understand what's going on. I honestly wouldn't have thought that they would be signing them. So it's that that was kind of fascinating and wild to me. I shouldn't be, you know, so naive and surprised about some of this stuff still, but I was.
Faith Kearns:Um yeah. Yeah, it's kind of interesting to think about how a public official has the ability to sign an NDA in this context, but I am sure that it is something that people are being asked to do. And I am curious about how much power they have to really say no.
Mallika Nocco:Right, right. And try to promote that transparency, especially. The last thing is kind of something I am considering just as a water scientist. I think in our those of us who, you know, study hydrology, uh, we have been thinking if you if you had asked me, you know, even just a month ago how I felt about AI, I think I would have said that I think of it as a great tool to help in this world of water resources research. And I never thought of it as this consumptive tool that I was using. And I definitely think that those of us who study water, I don't know. It's changing the way I think about AI in relation to water conservation research. So that that's another, and I'm not saying like let's not use it or anything like that. I'm just saying I think we should think critically about this as a community of scientists.
Faith Kearns:Yeah, for sure. And it is especially, I think, challenging for water people because you know it's literally the thing that you're often trying to say, let's conserve or let's protect or let's manage, and and then being encouraged to use AI tools when we know their water implications. It's a very confusing space to exist in at the moment, to say the least.
Mallika Nocco:Yeah. I mean, I have several projects in my lab right now where we are using AI and I hadn't considered the water consumption. Maybe, you know, I've read papers that are climate change related where they are also reporting the consumption of energy associated with the computer processing of the studies. So maybe this is the thing where we should start thinking about what we'd have to know to do it. So, like if we're if we're able to figure out what the water consumption associated with our studies are, I mean, maybe that's also something that we should think about reporting.
Faith Kearns:Yeah, I mean, as I said, I really feel like we just are at the tip of the iceberg with this stuff. And so it's good to have this initial conversation, and I'm sure we'll continue to have them.
Mallika Nocco:All right. Thanks, Faith. See you soon. See you soon.
Faith Kearns:Thank you for listening to the Water Talk Podcast. I am Faith Kearns and and I'm the director of research communications with the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative at the Arizona State University.
Sam Sandoval:My name is Samuel Sandoval. I'm a professor at UC Davies and a cooperative extension specialist in water resources management at the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Mallika Nocco:I am Mallika Nocco Assistant Professor and State Extension Specialist in Agricultural Water Management at the University of Wisconsin Madison. If you enjoy our show, please review, listen, like, and subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts. Please find transcripts and additional content at WaterTalkPodcast.com. Original music by Paloma Herrera Thomas.