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As Climate Change Threatens California, Officials Seek ‘Sustainable Insurance’

/in , , /by /Los Angeles Timesby Joseph Serna

California regulators are teaming up with the United Nations to develop “sustainable insurance” guidelines that would help address climate-change-related disasters such as coastal flooding and larger wildfires — the first such partnership of its kind between the international organization and a U.S. state, officials announced Tuesday. After a roundtable discussion at UCLA with lawmakers, state Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara announced that his agency would work with officials from the U.N. Principles for Sustainable Insurance Initiative over the next year to develop a plan to confront California’s climate risks, which are manifold.

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New Environment Bill Outlines Measures To Enhance Water Resilience

/in , /by /Water & Wastewater Treatmentby Robin Hackett

In an update on progress towards the introduction of the Environment Bill – the first for 20 years – the Government has published firm positions, following a range of consultations, on issues ranging from trees to water to recycling, to boost the natural environment. Gove set out the Government’s ambitions for the full Environment Bill in an updated summer policy statement, including commitments to legislate on environmental governance, air, biodiversity, water, and waste and resource efficiency.

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OPINION: A Listening California Should Consult The Real Experts On Water

/in , , /by /The Sun by Wayne Western, JR.

The Natural Resources Agency, California EPA, and California Department of Food and Agriculture want the public’s input on how best to manage and deal with an uncertain water supply in the future.

It seems every new administration in Sacramento must deal with water issues in California that never seem to get fixed.

Under the last administration, water rationing, increasing flows to the ocean, higher rates to customers, multi-billion dollar bonds, increased regulations, and a declaration of the human right to water obviously didn’t do the trick.

 

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The Dam Truth: The 91,000 Dams In the US Earned A “D” For Safety

/in , /by /Mother Jones ( San Francisco )by Jacques Leslie

It is a telling illustration of the precarious state of United States dams that the near-collapse in February 2017 of Oroville Dam, the nation’s tallest, occurred in California, considered one of the nation’s leading states in dam safety management.

The Oroville incident forced the evacuation of nearly 190,000 people and cost the state $1.1 billion in repairs. It took its place as a seminal event in the history of US dam safety, ranking just below the failures in the 1970s of two dams—Teton Dam in Idaho and Kelly Barnes in Georgia—that killed 14 and 39 people, respectively, and ushered in the modern dam safety era.

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Massive SF Recycling Project To Save 30 million Gallons Of Drinking Water Per Year

/in , , /by /San Francisco Chronicleby Dominic Fracassa

Fifty feet below the platform of the Powell Street BART Station sits the starting point for one of the largest water recycling projects in San Francisco — one that’s transforming dirty groundwater into clean steam heat for hundreds of downtown buildings. In the process, it’s saving tens of millions of gallons of drinking water annually.

For decades, BART officials treated the naturally percolating groundwater that pools beneath the BART stop as a nuisance and a potential flooding risk. After seeping into an underground cistern, millions of gallons of water a month was pumped into the city’s sewer system.

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As Southwest Water Managers Grapple With Climate Change, Can A ‘Grand Bargain’ Work?

/in , , /by /KUNC (Greeley, Colo.)by Luke Runyon and Bret Jaspers

Climate change, growing urban populations and fragile rural economies are top of mind. Some within the basin see a window of opportunity to argue for big, bold actions to find balance in the watershed. Others say the best path forward is to take small, incremental steps toward lofty goals, a method Colorado River managers say has worked well for them for decades.

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OPINION: California’s Struggle For Water Certainty Continues

/in , /by /Ag Alert/California Farm Bureau Federationby Justin Fredrickson

A series of interconnected decisions this summer could affect water availability for years to come. As Farm Bureau has reported through the years, several fish species in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and its tributaries are protected as either “threatened” or “endangered” under both federal and state endangered species laws. As a result, projects and activities that could potentially affect these species require a permit. For many years, federal “biological opinions” for delta smelt and winter run chinook salmon have dictated restrictions on operations of the pumps, reservoirs and canals of the federal Central Valley Project and State Water Project—major water works that “move the rain” from Shasta clear to San Diego.

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The Crisis Lurking In Californians’ Taps: How 1,000 Water Systems May Be At Risk

/in , , /by /The New York Timesby Jose A. Del Real

It was bath time and Rosalba Moralez heard a cry. She rushed to the bathroom and found her 7-year-old daughter, Alexxa, being doused with brown, putrid water. “We kept running the tub, we turned on the sink, we flushed the toilet. All the water was coming out dirty,” Ms. Moralez said. For more than a year, discolored water has regularly gushed from faucets in the family’s bathroom and kitchen, as in hundreds of other households here in Willowbrook, Calif., an unincorporated community near Compton in South Los Angeles.

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The USDA Didn’t Publish Its Plan To Help Farmers Adapt To Climate Change. Here’s Where They Need It The Most.

/in , , /by /Mother Jones (San Francisco)by Tom Philpott

The Trump administration’s department of agriculture has apparently settled on its strategy for preparing the food system for an uncertain future: ignore climate change.  This wasn’t always the agency’s tactic. Back in 2017, as Politico’s Helena Bottemiller Evich recently reported, the USDA was set to release a big plan on how to “help the agriculture industry understand and adapt to climate change.” But “top officials chose not to release the report, and told staff it should be kept for internal use only,” Bottemiller Evich wrote. Weeks before, Bottemiller Evich reported about how the USDA’s top decision makers have systematically “refused to publicize” its own scientists’ research on the impact of climate change on farming.

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Green Water Could Help California’s Farming Woes

/in , /by /Physics World

More effective use of green water – rainfall stored in soil – could mitigate irrigation demand for some of California’s most important perennial crops. So say US researchers who simulated 13 years’ growth of alfalfa, grapes, almonds, pistachios and walnuts under different irrigation strategies.

Though the Midwest might be America’s breadbasket, in value terms the nation’s agricultural output is dominated by California, which has become a globally significant producer of fruit and nuts.

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