(March 11, 2011) For the first time in 40 years, independent experts have collaborated to produce a long-term view of the water challenges facing California.
The state’s water management system is deteriorating and only a broad, integrative approach will reverse the decline, experts from the University of California (UC), Davis, the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), UC Riverside, UC Hastings College of the Law, and Stanford University concluded in a book published last month.
Assessment
In Managing California’s Water: From Conflict to Reconciliation, these experts urge a more comprehensive approach to meeting the growing demand for reliable water supply, healthy ecosystems and flood protection.
“Our water policies were made for historical problems and have not kept up with changes in our society and economy, or tremendous declines in native fish species. We continue to fall behind,” said co-author Jay Lund, a UC Davis professor of environmental engineering, director of the UCD Center for Watershed Sciences and an adjunct fellow at PPIC.
Nearly 80 percent of the state’s native fish species are endangered or extinct, and efforts to stop the declines are threatening water-supply reliability and flood management.
Furthermore, a major weakness identified in the report is the fragmentation of the state’s water system. Hundreds of local and regional agencies separately manage water supply, quality, floods and habitat.
Recommendations
Instead of fragmenting the water system, the experts suggest creating regional stewardship authorities to coordinate functions, avoid confusion and missed opportunities.
Concerning species conservation efforts, the book’s authors provide several strategies to improve entire ecosystems. Rather than focusing on a single species at a time, the experts suggest removing or pushing back levees to promote seasonal flooding, reducing contaminants, limiting introduction of invasive species, improving environmental performance of some dams and removing others altogether.
Another key recommendation is to incorporate a wider range of tools to manage water supply, quality and flooding, beyond the current system of levees, dams, conveyance facilities and treatment plants.
Additional tools include:
- Urban conservation. Reducing water use to about 15 gallons per person a day (30 percent below 2000 levels) would significantly reduce urban demand for exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
- Groundwater banking. Expanding underground storage can be much more cost-effective than building new surface storage. Groundwater banking can stretch available water supplies and replace storage lost due to a shrinking Sierra Nevada snowpack.
- Water transfers. Buying and selling water is an equitable way to accommodate changing demands and compensate water-rights holders, the experts argue.
- Pollution management. Runoff from farms, construction sites, urban streets and gardens is not well managed. Cap-and-trade programs could lower the costs of implementing standards for pollutant discharges.
- Flood management. Flood risks are high and growing, and investment has been inadequate to maintain flood-protection infrastructure. Land-use planning should focus on limiting new development in flood-prone areas, improving building codes and expanding flood insurance requirements. Higher fees for properties benefiting from flood protection would bolster the state’s underfunded system.
A PDF file of the book and related resources are available at the UC Davis Watershed website.
Staff Contact: Valerie Nera