A new report from the National Research Council underscores desalination’s viability as a potential method for boosting the nation’s water supply but says more research is needed to bring the costs down and to better understand the technology’s environmental impacts.

“Uncertainties about desalination’s environmental impacts are currently a significant barrier to its wider use, and research into these effects—and ways to lessen them—should be a top priority,” says Amy Zander, chairwoman of the committee that wrote the report, released on April 24, and a professor at Clarkson University, Potsdam, N.Y.

But recent improvements in technology have lowered desalination’s costs and energy requirements, which used to be prohibitively high. This could make desalination a more attractive option for communities struggling with water shortages, Zander notes. “Desalination is ready to become a larger part of the water portfolio,” she says.

Some of the chief environmental concerns center around the long-term effects of disposing of the salt concentrate that remains after desalination into rivers or seawater, a common practice, as well as potentially large amounts of greenhouse-gas emissions generated by desalination plants.

The researchers call for a more coordinated research effort through the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy at the current funding levels for existing research and development programs, approximately $25 million. Currently, federal research has been inhibited by a lack of a strategic direction, and individual research projects have depended heavily on congressional earmarks, which declined by nearly 60% between 2006 and 2007, the authors of the report say.