Bio for Ralph Marra

Ralph Marra is the founder and senior principal at Southwest Water Resources Consulting, LLC.

Ralph Marra is the founder and Senior Principal at Southwest Water Resources Consulting, LLC. His primary interest is in promoting the use of Scenario Planning in organizations and communities operating in highly dynamic planning environments, designing and facilitating Scenario Planning workshops, developing scenario-based strategic plans, and in training aspiring professionals so that they can apply the method in their own organizations to address their strategic planning needs.

Ralph retired from the City of Tucson Water Department in 2011 where he served for many of his 25 years as the City of Tucson’s Chief Hydrologist and as the Utility’s Water-Resources Management Administrator. During his tenure, he helped facilitate the Utility’s transition from aquifer depletion to sustainable water-resources management. He promoted integrated resource-management strategies for all available types of water including aquifer banking of surplus supplies, hydrologically-sustainable groundwater development, and reclaimed-water recycling to buttress critical supplies vulnerable to shortage. Ralph applied Scenario Planning to address many of the key uncertainties in the Utility’s planning environment to develop actionable strategies that could deliver tangible results and achieve objectives. He also actively engaged in inter-agency coordination to address the multi-layered complexities of regional planning issues.

While in his leadership position at Tucson Water, Ralph spearheaded a team of technical professionals who were among the first to use Scenario Planning as the primary means for developing an Integrative Resources Plan for a large municipal water utility. Successive applications of Scenario Planning proved successful both in dissolving bureaucratic barriers within the organization and in engaging public opinion leaders and political decision makers resulting in a responsive, highly-robust water plan for the rapidly growing community.

During his 32-year tenure both as a water professional and as a strategic-planning consultant, Ralph has experienced first hand how Scenario Planning can serve as an effective planning vehicle for a wide range of planning organizations looking to address future challenges and leverage potential opportunities. In recent years, he has worked with water professionals, economists, transportation planners and engineers, climatologists, forest managers, environmentalists and conservationists, urban land-use planners, public-outreach professionals, and educators looking to apply the insights of their various perspectives in an inclusive, integrated manner.

Ralph’s professional imperative is to share his knowledge and experience in applying Scenario Planning so that a new generation of professionals will have the skills and tools needed to address the uncertainties and planning challenges that lie ahead.