By Amelia Martinez, Civil Engineering Major, Mentor Diane Agnew. The City of Albuquerque and Bernalillo County are in an arid region, and as climate change progresses and the population grows, water scarcity is a real threat. To ensure that the greater Albuquerque area and surrounding Bernalillo County has long-term access to adequate drinking water, the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility and Authority (ABCWUA) modeled multiple climate change and population growth scenarios through the next century and used this to create Portfolio One: a list of nine strategies with fourteen projects combining infrastructure, policy, and customer conservation to ensure that no matter the change in water availability or demand, the ABCWUA will be able to meet the water needs of Albuquerque and Bernalillo County. This project is a short video game created on MIT’s Scratch program, which aims to teach middle-school aged kids about the nine different strategies employed in Portfolio One by creating nine minigames about different projects the ABCWUA is pursuing to meet their goals. This will help educate students on how their community gets its water and how the ABCWUA plans to continue providing water even through changing environmental conditions.
