Category: Drought

California’s hundreds of local public water agencies are responsible for about 90 percent of the water delivered across the state. We asked Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA) and vice-chair of the PPIC Water Policy Center’s advisory council, to weigh in on three big-ticket water management issues ACWA’s members are facing.

PPIC: Last week, the State Water Board voted to give control over water conservation standards to local agencies. Why is this change important?

Tim Quinn: Essentially, the board decentralized decisions about drought management so that local water agencies can tailor their plans to local conditions. ACWA strongly believes that this was a move in the right direction. The initial drought emergency conservation regulations did not account for local factors like climate and, more importantly, the extent to which local agencies have invested in drought-resilient local supplies. By allowing local public agencies to account for these factors, we will have more effective and lower-cost drought protection while maximizing incentives for further investments in drought resiliency. The new approach in no way means less conservation. In fact, ACWA strongly believes in raising the bar on water-use efficiency and conservation in our long-term water management plans. The board’s action appropriately recognizes that, at least for the time being, emergency conditions no longer exist. Now we need to pivot to the adoption of long-term conservation plans in which, as the California Water Action Plan puts it, “conservation is a way of life.”

PPIC: What do you think about the governor’s “twin tunnels” approach to addressing the issues facing the Delta?

TQ: I’ll be blunt: we have an outdated and ineffective system for conveying water through the Delta. The system’s intakes are in the wrong part of the Delta, which maximizes conflicts between species protection and water supply and does not work for either purpose. Unless we’re prepared to abandon this system, we need to fix it. I think abandoning it would not be good for California.

My organization believes that we need a comprehensive statewide program that includes a physical fix in the Delta to make our water supply less vulnerable. Fixing the system would help improve the Delta’s ability to cope with climate change and sea-level rise, minimize conflict between water supply and fisheries, improve water quality for 25 million Californians, and make the system better able to withstand earthquakes and floods.

I spent a couple of decades of my career up to my eyeballs in the Delta, trying to figure out how to get the water we need with the intakes in the wrong place. It seems California simply has a very difficult time having an adult conversation about the Delta. Despite the obvious difficulties, if the Brown administration can move forward with its Delta strategy, we should all be ready to provide support for it as part of a common-sense statewide water action plan.

PPIC: What are the most urgent water needs the state should invest in?

TQ: There are six critical areas we need to fund: water conservation and local resource development, storage—both above and below ground, Delta conveyance, implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, provision of safe drinking water to disadvantaged communities, and investment in habitat and watersheds. These are the essential bricks in the wall of a sustainable water system for California, and they’re all important. They also lend themselves to different funding strategies; some are adequately funded and some not. The biggest shortfalls in funding probably arise for the last two categories. Some have suggested a public goods charge on water to fund these activities, which the water industry would oppose. Others point to the general fund as the logical source of funding for public benefits. It seems to me that the important thing is to come to some agreement on funding so that a comprehensive water plan can move forward.

Read California’s Water briefing kit for more information on key water management challenges
(April 2015)
Read “Stressful Times for a Drought-Stricken Delta” (PPIC blog, October 5, 2016)
Visit the PPIC Water Policy Center’s water supply resource page

A longer version of this piece was recently published by “Water Deeply.”

Could desalination provide a reliable supply of water for California? A number of policy makers have been raising this question in response to water-supply challenges brought on by the drought. Around the globe, some similarly dry places are getting a significant share of their water through desalination.

Officials in some cities (especially in Southern California) certainly think so, and are taking steps to develop seawater desalination plants. The state’s water bond allocates $725 million to help local water agencies build water recycling and desalination plants. Recent proposals that prioritize desalination include Senator Dianne Feinstein’s proposed water bill, which would provide $100 million in funds for desalination projects; Assembly Bill 1925 by assemblywoman Ling Ling Chang, which would establish annual goals for producing potable water through desalination; and the Obama’s administration proposed budget for 2017, which would launch an Energy-Water Desalination Hub, and provide funding for other desalination initiatives.

California has more than 60 years’ experience with desalination, and yet the process remains a minimal part of the state’s water system, for a number of reasons. Here are some key facts to know about desalination in California today.

1. It’s not just about the ocean: Although desalination often uses seawater, in California and other western states it has mostly been used to remove salts from brackish water (which is saltier than freshwater but less salty than seawater). The state’s existing plants can produce almost 140,000 acre-feet from brackish sources, but only 57,000 acre-feet from seawater. Brackish desalination is generally much cheaper, because there’s less salt to remove.
2. Seawater desalination will remain an expensive source of water: According to a recent report by the White House, current seawater desalination technologies will need to undergo a fourfold reduction in cost, a threefold decrease in electricity usage, and a twofold cut in carbon-dioxide emissions to compete with traditional water sources.
3. California’s water supply varies from year to year, while desalination is a fixed long-term investment: Customers in water districts using desalination will pay higher costs for desalted water even in wet years when cheaper sources are available.
4. California has relatively abundant supplies from other sources. Even during droughts, the state has a variety of water sources that can carry it through long dry periods, nearly all of which are significantly cheaper than seawater desalination.
5. Environmental impacts are a concern. The most significant effects are ocean water intake, and brine disposal (in ocean and brackish plants). Desalination’s high energy use compared with other water sources also raises concerns about greenhouse gas emissions.

A drought is a bad time to rush into investments in desalination to address water supply problems that can be solved more effectively in other ways. Many desalination plants prompted by droughts—including in Australia, Spain, and here at home in Santa Barbara—either never were used or closed within a few years of operation because their high-cost water could not be justified once rains returned. Desalination is clearly not a silver bullet for California, but it is one tool to consider for communities facing long-term water insecurity.

Read our policy brief “California’s Water: Storing Water” (from California’s Water briefing kit, April 2015)
Read our policy brief “California’s Water: Paying for Water” (from California’s Water briefing kit, April 2015)
Visit the PPIC Water Policy Center water supply page

More than two dozen federal departments and agencies engage in some facet of water resource management in the West. This complex institutional landscape is a big obstacle to effective management of western droughts.

The wildly differing jurisdictions of federal agencies across the West provide a striking illustration of this complex landscape. While these boundaries were created with the individual agencies’ missions and objectives in mind, the resulting jigsaw puzzle complicates efforts to address the varied objectives of sustainable water management.

During the latest drought, the federal government made noteworthy attempts to improve how agencies work together—for example, the White House established the National Drought Resilience Partnership, which aims to strengthen coordination of federal drought policies and programs in support of state, tribal, and community efforts. Yet the federal response to drought is fragmented, with imprecise definition of authorities and poorly aligned missions.

A major challenge to better coordination lies in the diverse, and occasionally conflicting, roles and responsibilities of different federal agencies. For example, in basins where farmers rely on the federal government for water supply but where there is also a need to protect the environment, the missions of the various federal agencies can be in direct conflict. This lack of clarity impedes federal efforts to help the West manage drought and adapt to a changing climate.

A recent report by the PPIC Water Policy Center, Improving the Federal Response to Western Drought, recommends that federal agencies better coordinate actions among themselves and with state and local partners. Coordination will work best when multi-agency efforts are aligned at the scale of large river basins and the watersheds within those basins. Federal drought response also needs to shift away from a centralized, Washington, DC-based approach to a more distributed authority, using interagency teams with basin-level expertise to address priority actions and help balance competing needs.

The federal government is an instrumental partner in western water management, but its complexity and disparate missions limit its ability to respond creatively to water scarcity. Taking steps now to make federal policies and practices more nimble will help the West better manage the inevitable droughts of the future.

California’s drought has caused significant damage to the most important agricultural region in the United States. Half a million acres had to be fallowed, causing the loss of thousands of jobs in rural communities. The proportion of farmland planted to permanent crops has risen, making it harder to use fallowing as a drought strategy. Much of the shortage in surface water has been alleviated by pumping groundwater. But going forward, this practice will be increasingly challenged by the considerable drop in the water table in some areas, and management practices that will be required by the new statewide groundwater law adopted in late 2014.

We interviewed Josué Medellín-Azuara—a researcher at the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences and a member of the PPIC Water Policy Center’s research network—about how the agricultural sector has been coping with drought, and practices and technologies that can help farmers weather future droughts. As Medellín-Azuara says, “There isn’t a simple solution to this problem—the strategy will be to implement a mix of the actions that are available to us.” This video is in Spanish only.

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Video: La adaptación a la sequía del sector agrícola de California

The latest drought has roiled the state’s agricultural heartland, causing job losses in rural communities, fallowed fields, and dropping groundwater levels. Increased groundwater pumping helped minimize economic losses for many farmers, but this could prove unsustainable in some areas during longer droughts.

We interviewed Richard Howitt—professor emeritus of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis, and a Steyer Fellow with the PPIC Water Policy Center—on what can be done to make California’s agricultural economy more resilient to future droughts.

Read our report What If California’s Drought Continues? (August 2015)
Read an interview with Howitt on Water Deeply (February 26, 2016)
Visit the PPIC Water Policy Center