Category: Water Supply

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

In nature, water and land are intimately entwined. But in the human landscape, we’ve created divides. Communities across the state separate water and land use, and this can lead to inconsistency, inefficiency, and conflict. The Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR) recently convened a series of workshops in rural California on aligning land and water planning for long-term sustainability. Debbie Franco is OPR’s community and rural affairs advisor and local drought liaison, and a member of the PPIC Water Policy Center’s advisory council. We talked to her about this ongoing process.

PPIC: What was the purpose of these workshops, and what common themes did you hear?

Debbie Franco: We’re seeking ways to ensure that water and land use decisions are informed by each other and ultimately are driving toward the same goal. As a first step, we organized six regional workshops in rural parts of the state to talk to folks working in water and land-use planning, with the goal of better understanding how locals see optimum alignment, where there are gaps or barriers, and opportunities to close the gaps and overcome the barriers. We logged more than a hundred ideas, and now we’re working to figure out what actions would move us toward more resilient water and land systems.

Themes that emerged included:

• The need for strong political leadership, supported by mechanisms to help leaders balance competing priorities and to achieve equity across our various water divides;
• Institutional drivers that lead to good choices for water and land management—such as eliminating the pressure small local governments feel to embrace development as a way to fund community services;
• The value of using common data and metrics across land use and water planning, and focusing on measurable outcomes.

PPIC: What are the most pressing issues you heard about?

DF: The biggest idea that came up over and over was the need to have watershed-scale water accounting. The idea needs a lot more discussion and research, but basically, such a process might for example document how much water everyone gets, what water rights pertain, and where you have lands with high potential for stormwater capture or groundwater recharge. You might end up with a watershed map showing lands with high potential for storing water, where everyone benefits from ensuring they are used for that purpose. Sharing such information with land use authorities could lead to better analysis of land options for new developments. We heard from participants that California’s “show me the water” requirements and environmental review process under CEQA (the California Environmental Quality Act) happen too late, when proposed developments are far along in the planning process. If developers got water information to inform site selection, it could make it easier for them and result in water benefits, too. Some jurisdictions are already taking this approach.

Several regions discussed the potential for marijuana to be legalized, and the crop possibly shifting from the forests to conventional farmlands. There’s a huge opportunity to be forward-thinking on solving water issues that might arise from this shift.

Every workshop included a discussion about how under-resourced local government planning is. There are so many barriers—no dedicated funding source for this kind of planning, out-of-date general plans, plans trapped in litigation for years. We need sufficient resources for local governments to do good planning.

More on this topic: “Video: Water and Growth in the West” (PPIC Blog, February 18, 2016)
Read the California Water Action Plan, which was a motivation for these meetings
Visit the PPIC Water Policy Center

When water supplies are tight—as during the latest drought—discussions often turn to the question of whether state and local governments should be limiting growth. How western states are managing this issue—and areas where improvement is needed—was the topic of my presentation at a recent conference on sustaining western water. The event, which also featured presentations from three members of the PPIC Water Policy Center’s research network, was sponsored by the Renewable Natural Resources Foundation.

Most western states have laws to ensure adequate water supply for new developments. These laws generally require that developers—or the city and county governments that approve new construction on their behalf—ensure the availability of long-term supplies before the projects can go forward. In rural areas, the concern is often to prevent individual consumers from being sold a “dry lot,” lacking basic services. In larger communities, the concern is more often about making sure that new projects don’t reduce the reliability of community-wide supplies, ultimately requiring costly new investments for existing residents. California’s law falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. We require new developments of 500 or more units to demonstrate at least 20 years of water supply availability. (Arizona’s law requires 100 years of supply in major metropolitan areas; Colorado usually leaves this decision up to local utilities.)

Our research has found that these laws are working fairly well in cities and suburbs, where utilities can provide good oversight and draw on multiple tools to ensure water availability. For instance, in California, utilities generally require supplies well beyond the 20-year requirement of state law. Investments in conservation, recycled wastewater, new storage, and water trading have all enabled communities to accommodate growth.

Things are more likely to fall through the cracks in smaller rural communities. As California has seen during the latest drought, some well-dependent rural homes are facing water supply shortages; many also have inadequate sanitation and other services.

Western states also need to devote more attention to agricultural land use. On average, farms use 85 percent of total business and residential water use in the West, so farming needs to be part of any equation addressing water scarcity. Pressing issues right now include making sure there’s enough water to support long term investments in tree and vine crops, which now account for more than 40 percent of crop acreage in the water-scarce San Joaquin Valley. And as we move to implement the new Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, there’s great interest in making sure that communities manage both urban and farm development in ways that protect lands with high potential for groundwater recharge. This means not paving over these lands in cities and managing farmlands so that these fields can be flooded during winter and early spring.

Watch these video presentations from other PPIC Water Policy Center researchers who spoke at the conference:

About the PPIC Water Policy Center

Water trading is an important tool for managing water scarcity. It enables water right-holders to voluntarily shift water—permanently or temporarily—to those who need it, making better use of existing supplies. Despite potential benefits, the approval process for trading water in California continues to be lengthy, cumbersome, and lacking in transparency. This is an especially big concern during droughts, when speed is important.

In California, water trading takes the form of short-term leases, long-term leases, and permanent sales. The figure below shows statewide estimates of volumes of water traded in recent decades, including the first three years of the latest drought.

Since the onset of the latest drought, total volumes traded appear to have tapered off, despite strong demand. Farmers facing scarcity have been willing to pay record-high water prices for their high-value crops. Prior to this drought, an acre-foot of water typically sold for less than $500, and sometimes less than $100. In the spring of 2014, a Kern County water district auctioned 12,000 acre-feet of stored groundwater to local users and got bids for more than 60,000 acre-feet at a price of $650 per acre-foot or more. In the summer of 2015, some San Joaquin Valley farmers were reported to have leased water for as much as $2,000 per acre-foot—more than most cities pay for municipal supplies.

But the slow approval process, along with tight supply conditions, limited volumes available for sale. While senior water-rights holders normally have more reliable and ample water supplies, the past several years have been so dry that the state decided to cut their water allocations for the first time since 1977. The cuts rippled throughout the market. For instance, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California had planned to purchase around 100,000 acre-feet from Sacramento Valley rice growers, but that deal was contingent on the growers getting a full allocation. When the growers’ allocation was cut by half, the deal was significantly scaled back.

The drought has placed markets at the center of a conversation about ways to manage droughts and lessen the costs of scarcity. Many point to the example of Australia, which significantly expanded water rights trading in the midst of drought. Buyers and sellers register their shares with the help of brokers—often using online trading platforms—and trades are approved within a matter of hours or days, not the weeks and months that are the norm in California.

To reach Australia’s level of fast-paced trading, California would need to address many challenges. Clarifying and simplifying the review process for transfers is one priority. This will require improving information about water availability and how much can be safely traded without harming the environment or other legal water users. In addition, California will need to address infrastructure weaknesses that restrict moving water between buyers and sellers in some places.

Making these changes will require the cooperation of water users and state, federal, and local agencies. It won’t happen overnight, but we need to get started. Strengthening California’s water market will be key to effectively managing future droughts, a regular feature of our climate.

Chart source: Updated from E. Hanak and E. Stryjewski. California’s Water Market, By the Numbers: Update 2012 (PPIC, 2012).

Chart notes: The figure shows water traded between entities that are not members of the same water district or wholesale agency. It excludes volumes committed under long-term lease and permanent-sale contracts that were not physically transferred. Dry years are those classified as critical or dry for the Sacramento Valley

Nine months ago—serendipitously, just one day after Governor Brown announced a state of emergency in response to the drought—the PPIC Water Policy Center was launched with the goal of spurring water management innovations to support a healthy economy, environment, and society. Today, cities throughout the state remain focused on water conservation while simultaneously bracing for El Niño floods (it will take more than one wet year to recover from the drought).Through it all, our center—with its network of more than 40 researchers—has been contributing to important water policy debates with new research, publications, and public outreach.

In our first nine months, the Water Policy Center waded quickly into the depths of California’s most pressing water issues, starting with the ongoing drought. Our first major report, What If California’s Drought Continues?, documented the drought’s effects on different sectors and suggestions to improve drought response in the most urgent problem areas—particularly water for rural communities and the environment.

We also reviewed the performance of the state’s water market and water rights systems in response to drought. Allocating California’s Water: Directions for Reform describes ways to improve these systems’ efficiency and transparency, as well as their responsiveness to the environment and public health. We briefed the governor’s office, the State Water Board, California Environmental Protection Agency, and the legislature on the findings. The report generated a spirited conversation in the media and with decision makers about the need to reform water rights to improve water management across the state.

In addition to these major research efforts, we’ve been hard at work interpreting key water issues in “short form” as well. You can get quickly up to speed on key topics through our water blog (sign up for it here) and our growing library of fact sheets, which cover topics such as California’s water quality challenges and reforming groundwater management. Our briefing kit outlines nine pressing water issues facing the state. Our YouTube page hosts our videos on a range of key topics and events.

Another very important aspect of our work is public outreach. In its inaugural year, the Water Policy Center sponsored four regional outreach meetings in Fresno, Monterey, Los Angeles, and San Jose on locally important topics. We testified at hearings held by the state assembly and senate, and had numerous meetings with state, federal, and local water officials and key stakeholders. We gave many talks around the state and in other western states, including at a “Climate One” panel in San Francisco; a forum for environmental educators in San Diego; and meetings of Water Education for Latino Leaders, the Association of California Water Agencies, and the Western Growers Association, among others.

Looking ahead, we’re working on a number of exciting new projects, ranging from improving the federal response to western drought, to strengthening California’s water accounting and information systems, to applying lessons from Australia’s experience with environmental drought planning and management. We are beginning a three-year project funded by the US Environmental Protection Agency to examine the response by federal, state, and local institutions to drought, and develop recommendations to improve long-term drought management.

California’s water landscape is unpredictable and challenging—yet ripe for reforms that will help the state prepare for a changing climate and a growing population and economy. We’re already seeing progress on some of California’s toughest problems, from groundwater management to addressing water security in rural communities. We at the Water Policy Center are looking forward to tackling the state’s most pressing water challenges in the coming year—and to hearing your perspectives on these critical issues.