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In the more than four decades since I started at the L.A. Times, we’ve never had a reporter cover water with the depth and persistence of Ian James. California’s story is often the story of water — who’s got it, who doesn’t and who will find our next acre-foot. Ian is a former foreign correspondent who has written about everything from novel water solutions like reclaiming sewage, to the intersection of H2O with wildlife and farms. Essential Cal talked to Ian about his work.

For more than two decades, satellites have tracked the total amounts of water held in glaciers, ice sheets, lakes, rivers, soil and the world’s vast natural reservoirs underground — aquifers. An extensive global analysis of that data now reveals fresh water is rapidly disappearing beneath much of humanity’s feet, and large swaths of the Earth are drying out.

Scientists are seeing “mega-drying” regions that are immense and expanding — one stretching from the western United States through Mexico to Central America, and another from Morocco to France, across the entire Middle East to northern China.

For millennia, humans have sought to make seawater drinkable. Ancient mariners tried distillation by boiling the oceans in which they sailed, and in more recent times, engineers have experimented with filters and chemicals .

As the climate warms, populations surge and droughts intensify, there is a growing need to make the sea drinkable. Desalination technology is spreading fastest in the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia, where there is plenty of ocean but dwindling supplies of fresh water.

A simmering feud over management of one of North America’s longest rivers reached a boiling point when the U.S. Supreme Court sent western states and the federal government back to the negotiating table last year.

Now the battle over waters of the Rio Grande could be nearing resolution as New Mexico, Texas and Colorado announced fresh settlement proposals Friday designed to rein in groundwater pumping along the river in New Mexico and ensure enough river water reliably makes it to Texas.

California’s housing goals could be threatened by a lack of water. The state has a housing crisis, and to make any progress on building more housing, we need to concurrently make progress on water.

Here are four commonsense steps that Sacramento leaders can take to make ensure that water supply doesn’t become a barrier to our housing supply goals: