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California’s Santa Monica is home to more than three miles of beaches and fresh breeze from the Pacific, and is one of National Geographic’s top 10 beach cities in the world. Santa Monica Beachboasts more than 300 days of sunshine a year, but it has a striking shortage of a critical resource: drinking water. Now in its fifth year of drought, California has made water conservation a state policy and priority, and its governor is issuing executive orders to continue saving water, with droughts expected to be more frequent and persistent due to climate change.

In bone-dry California we are counting the days until October when the rainy season should begin. When wells run dry in the Central Valley, fires rage in Big Sur and pine forests in the Sierra Nevada die off, you can’t help but wonder where all the water has gone. But what if we asked a slightly different question: where should the water be?  To answer this it helps to know that soil hydrologists classify fresh water as either blue or green. According to Henry Lin, Professor of Hydropedology / Soil Hydrology at Penn State University,

California’s goal of ensuring universal access to safe drinking water, as mandated in the 2012 Human Right to Water Bill, will come a step closer to being met if Gov. Jerry Brown signs a new measure into law that halts the creation of new small, unsustainable ­– and in many cases dangerous – water districts in the state.

The bill, SB1263, passed through the state assembly and senate in August. It aims to guarantee the safety and reliability of drinking water statewide by encouraging new developments to tie into existing water districts rather than create their own.

Each spring, a group of UC Davis student scientists and their professors take a whitewater rafting trip through the Grand Canyon to study a river that sustains 40 million people. Capital Public Radio’s Amy Quinton traveled with them. I’m in a raft on the Colorado River, about to hit the fastest, steepest and most treacherous rapid in the Grand Canyon — Lava Falls. Here, the river drops 27 feet in a span of several hundred feet. The raft’s direction or momentum is not up to me. My fate is in someone else’s hands, someone far more experienced than me. Ann Willis, a researcher at the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, guides the boat with precision. “You hanging on?” Ann asks as we approach the monster and hear the screams from rafters in front of us.

Governor Jerry Brown says he will continue to push California’s climate change policies, no matter the results of November’s presidential election.

“I would do what I’m doing now,” he said, speaking in Sacramento at the Doubletree Hotel on the opening night of the Society of Environmental Journalists conference, an annual meeting attended by more than 300 journalists from around the country this year. Brown, who has made climate change a centerpiece of his final term as governor, touted the group of climate change bills signed over the last month, including SB32, which set a new climate change agenda for California.