With the future of water supplies endangered from climate change and continued population growth, region leaders have launched a search for common ground and real solutions.

King County Executive Ron Sims kicked off the "Carpe Diem - the Western Water and Climate Change Project," a one-year effort by the leadership nonprofit group, Exloco, to develop comprehensive strategies for addressing the looming threat of shrinking water supplies and growing demand.

"Because of climate change, King County's snowpack - which serves as a main water supply reservoir - has been and will continue to diminish," Sims told the group, noting that roughly two-thirds of all drinking water in King County comes from such sources.

"Because of climate change, flows in our streams - which support our already endangered fish and wildlife - will become smaller and hotter, particularly at critical times of the year," he said.

"Meanwhile, rainfall will likely become more intense and heavy, stressing the capacity of our stormwater management systems already struggling to meet water quality standards."

"Finding the common ground, exploring new ways of addressing these pending issues and exchanging information with experts from across the West is what (the project) is all about," Sims said.

Participants explored three questions:

Can key stakeholders from across the West - public agencies, environmental interests, policy makers, social justice interests, private sector find common ground?

Can some, or all, of those key stakeholders agree to joint agendas to implement solutions?

If there were agreement that common agendas could be developed and implemented, what would we need to know and do?

Kimery Wiltshire, director of Exloco's Carpe Diem - Western Water and Climate Change project, said today's gathering helped the project start off in the right direction.

Wiltshire noted that work on adapting to a warmer world is in its initial stages in many regions in the West, and new policy and management systems are being developed and proposed. However, none of the work has addressed the critical factor of the West's interlocking water systems, laws and policies.

"Without this West-wide framework, regional initiatives cannot meet both climate change and water supply reliability challenges in the long term," she said.

Project leaders will meet three additional times over the next year for updates on the project's progress and develop a set of long-term strategies for possible implementation by the stakeholders.

"There is no more critical single consequence of climate change than its impact on water supplies, and in no part of the United States is this impact likely to be more pronounced than in the Western United States," said Denis Hayes, president of The Bullitt Foundation.

"We need to get out ahead of this problem now, and the Carpe Diem Western Water and Climate Change project is the ideal vehicle," he said.