An hour north of Sacramento, in a ghost town tucked into a remote mountain valley, California is poised to build a massive new reservoir – a water project of a size that hasn’t been undertaken since Jerry Brown’s first stint as governor in the 1970s. Sites Reservoir, all $4.4 billion of it, represents an about-face in a state where drought has become the norm and water users are told to scrimp and save. Promoters of Sites say the reservoir would significantly enhance water supplies for the rice farms of the Sacramento Valley as well as the cities of Southern California.

The seriousness of our environmental situation today calls for the implementation of new tools and technology, and more focus on outcomes instead of procedure. That’s the idea behind the work done today by the Freshwater Trust (TFT). The organization, headquartered in Portland, Oregon, works to restore the health of watersheds by using very precise environmental accounting. “We analyze data, model outcomes and develop rigorous systems and protocols to quantify the environmental benefits of every restoration action,” TFT explains on its website.

California’s iconic native salmon, which has been hard hit by historic drought and high temperatures, avoided a third disastrous year, federal officials said Thursday. The number of juvenile winter-run Chinook salmon spawning on the Sacramento River in Northern California and swimming out to sea has doubled from 2015, and it’s significantly up from the prior year, officials said. California has experienced five years of drought. The fishing industry and farmers in California’s fertile Central Valley are in a constant struggle over the same river water to sustain their livelihoods.

La Niña has arrived, bringing California the possibility of a relatively dry winter. With the state entering its fifth year of drought, the National Weather Service made it official Thursday, following weeks of speculation, declaring that the country will see a winter of La Niña. That’s a weather phenomenon associated with cooler-than-average temperatures in the surface of the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean near the equator. Jim Mathews, a weather service meteorologist in Sacramento, said the phenomenon is expected to bring somewhere between a normal or somewhat drier winter.

The joke on social media after Donald Trump’s victory early Wednesday was that the tears of liberal Californians would refill the state’s reservoirs and end the drought.

Since that doesn’t seem to have worked, it’s now a matter of waiting to see what policies the president-elect might push after Inauguration Day. And on that front, Delta advocates aren’t holding out much hope.