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Two counties in California and an environmental group have partnered together to file an appeal against Southern California’s biggest water supplier, blocking its purchase of the Delta farm islands.

Contra Costa and San Joaquin counties, along with Restore the Delta group, have sued Metropolitan Water District in an attempt to stop its plan to buy the islands, which comprise 20,000 acres of wetlands. The group said the plan is an attempt at a water grab to move Delta water to Southern California.

Judge Michael Kenny of the Sacramento Superior Court today ruled that the Delta Plan is “invalid” after a successful legal challenge by multiple Delta parties who argued that the controversial plan is not protective of the water quality or the fish species that depend on fresh water flows for their survival.

The Court, in its tentative ruling vacating the plan, said the Delta Stewardship Council must redo the Delta Plan to include a number of quantitative measures of performance, including reduced reliance on the Delta for future water needs by exporters.

Necessity is the mother of invention and California’s ongoing drought is teaching us that water suppliers can be very creative when they need to be.

Sometimes that is a good thing, particularly when we see water utilities meeting and exceeding Governor Brown’s call for 25 percent water conservation. In other cases, pursuing new, “drought-proof” water supplies can have unintended consequences. Drought-proof supplies, while helping respond to climate change, often require more energy than conventional drinking water sources.

The Sierra snowpack, which is responsible for more than 60 percent of California’s water, won’t likely make it back to its pre-drought levels until 2019, scientists said in a study published this week, dashing the hopes of those who believed one extremely wet El Niño year could alleviate the state’s water crisis.

In the study, published Tuesday in a journal of the American Geophysical Union, scientists from UCLA concluded that there is a more than 70 percent chance that the Sierra snowpack will take three years to make it back to average levels, after reaching a historic low in March 2015.

A lethal combination of drought, heat and voracious bark beetles has killed 26 million trees in the Sierra Nevada over the last eight months — an alarming finding for a state already raging with wildfires fueled by desiccated landscapes.

The dire estimate offered Wednesday by federal officials brings the loss of trees since 2010 to at least 66 million, a number that is expected to increase considerably throughout the year, despite an average winter of rain and snow that brought some relief to urban Californians.