Evolving energy-water infrastructure strengthens drought resilience in the U.S. Northeast and Midwest

Strategies to strengthen regional water security will be essential for navigating a critical 21st-century environmental challenge: securing freshwater supplies against growing demands and increasingly severe climate extremes. This paper assesses the evolution of water security in the historically water-rich U.S. Northeast (NE) and Midwest (MW) to quantify their resilience to severe drought now and in the future. We develop a counterfactual framework that projects sectoral water demands based on socio-economic drivers and deconstructs the benefits of supply- and demand-side adaptations at the regional scale. During the half-century between the historic NE/MW 1960s drought and the 2012-2013 North American drought, rapid socio-economic growth held the potential to push water systems to a breaking point, rendering them unequipped to manage the impact of such severe droughts. However, this study reveals that both regions built resilience through long-term adaptations that averted potential water crises, mitigating otherwise severe summertime water stress (withdrawal-to-available supply) by factors of 2.8 (MW) and 5.6 (NE). While supply-side strategies through reservoir construction and coastal power development played a role, the driving factor has been water demand management, accounting for 83% to 92% of summertime water stress mitigations across the two regions and drought scenarios. These gains were rooted in economic and political incentives to adopt advanced thermoelectric cooling technologies and efficient industrial technologies, together with the regions’ shift from a manufacturing to service economy. Thus, our projections of increased water demand by the mid-21st century highlight a critical reality: future drought resilience will require continued investments in demand-side efficiency gains, such as water-efficient electricity production systems, to keep pace with expected socio-economic trends.