Clean Air & Water:

Statewide Water Resources

CAROLINA'S HOPE

A statewide campaign to make water a key strategic issue for South Carolina’s future

Project Background

South Carolina is at a crossroads.  In a state where clean and abundant water has long been taken for granted, we are entering an age where interstate competition for water supplies, mandatory residential water conservation measures, and lack of assimilative capacity for new effluent discharges may increasingly be the rule rather than the exception.  While our state still enjoys a substantial competitive advantage over many other regions with regard to the quantity and quality of our water resources, we do not yet manage water as the valuable and limited resource that it is.  Unless we change course soon, that advantage will evaporate.

Fortunately, the state’s citizens are clearly receptive to a message about the importance of taking care of our water resources.  In 2007, the state’s leading conservation organizations sponsored series of focus groups to assess how important various conservation issues were to South Carolinians.  The issue that rose far above all the others was water.  Even for citizens who had little or no awareness or concern about conservation generally, clean and abundant water emerged as a top priority. 

The goal of this campaign, then, is to bridge the gap between our citizenry’s strong concern for water and our lack of public commitment to protecting it.  State and local government in South Carolina are remarkably disorganized and ineffective when it comes to management of our water resources, with lack of planning, weak and conflicting regulations, and insufficient funding the norm.  Our public servants need a strong directive from their constituents to make clean and abundant water a key issue for our state and to pass the legislation required for good water management to become the norm.  This campaign will give them that mandate and ensure that they make good on it. 

The campaign will be built around the concept of “Carolina’s H₂OPE:  our water, our heritage, our future.”  Our campaign’s purpose will be to provide cohesion and focus to existing public concern about water quality in South Carolina by helping our state’s citizens — and, in particular, community opinion leaders — move from general agreement about the importance of water to specific support for more effective and forward-thinking water management. 

For more information on this campaign and our efforts to improve our State’s management of water resources, please contact John Tynan or Heather Nix on our water staff.

South Carolina Clean Water Alliance