On the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, we should celebrate its successes. San Francisco has stopped the dumping of raw sewage into the Bay. Rivers no longer catch on fire due to flammable contaminants. Wildlife has returned to once abandoned estuaries and wetlands. California has made great strides in protecting our waters for swimming, fishing, and other human activities — in affluent areas.
Almost 10% of the 8 billion people on earth are already undernourished with 3 billion lacking healthy diets, and the land and water resources farmers rely on stressed to “a breaking point.” And by 2050 there will be 2 billion more mouths to feed, warns a new report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
For now, farmers have been able to boost agricultural productivity by irrigating more land and applying heavier doses of fertilizer and pesticides. But the report says these practices are not sustainable: They have eroded and degraded soil while polluting and depleting water supplies and shrinking the world’s forests.
This past summer, as California faced a historic drought, reservoirs used by the small city of Healdsburg dropped to record lows.
“It puts us in a situation where we just simply don’t have enough water to go about our normal daily practices,” says Terry Crowley, the city’s utility director.
He says to conserve water, Healdsburg needed to slash consumption by 40%. City officials limited household use and banned watering ornamental lawns.
Perennial water shortages in California will likely only grow worse due to climate change. But emerging technologies offer hope—if Californians can stop taking water for granted, says David Feldman, UCI professor of urban planning & public policy and director of Water UCI.
Water shortages will become more severe as both droughts and floods become more intense, with less rain and snow falling during dry seasons and more falling during wet ones. Capturing the excess precipitation and saving it for dry periods will also only get more challenging.
The heavy rains of the past three months have been truly extraordinary. And while the rains have brought much-needed relief to Marin’s water supply crisis, they are a harbinger of the dangers we still face.
Consistent with the predicted effects of climate change, dramatic swings in rainfall – big storms and big droughts – will be the norm in California.
The Indian Wells Valley groundwater plan got a thumbs up from the state on Thursday but with a swarm of lawsuits surrounding the plan, it’s unclear what that approval will mean going forward.
One of those lawsuits seeks a “comprehensive adjudication” of water rights of the Indian Wells Valley basin, which could reconfigure who has rights to how much groundwater, a fundamental underpinning of the groundwater sustainability plan that was just approved.
An estimated 371,000 Californians — about 1% of the state’s residents — rely on drinking water that may contain high levels of toxic chemicals such as arsenic, nitrate or hexavalent chromium, according to a study from the University of California campuses in Berkeley and Los Angeles.
In a news release issued Tuesday by UC Berkeley, researchers said the results of the study likely understate the number of people impacted by unsafe drinking water, as the study included just the three chemicals.
I’ll keep this part pretty short and sweet: for the Water Year to date, most of California is in pretty good shape when it comes to precipitation. And that’s good news, given the historic severity of the regional drought as recently as late September.
The city of Phoenix this week outlined how it will voluntarily contribute water to a regional plan to shore up the country’s largest reservoir that delivers Colorado River water to three states and Mexico.
The river cannot provide seven Western states the water they were promised a century ago because of less snow, warmer temperatures and water lost to evaporation. Water managers repeatedly have had to pivot to develop plans to sustain it for the long-term.
Phoenix, the nation’s fifth-largest city, is among entities in the river’s lower basin that are part of the “500+ Plan” meant to delay further mandatory shortages. All pieces of the plan haven’t been finalized, but farmers and Native American tribes are expected to play a big role.
The Colorado River serves more than 40 million people in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, California, Wyoming, Utah and Mexico. Lake Mead and Lake Powell store the water and are used to gauge the river’s health.
When it comes to water conservation, California is burying its head in the winter snow.
Future generations will not look kindly at our leaders’ complete failure to strategically address the state’s water shortages, which will only get worse with climate change.
Two years of some of the worst drought conditions in state history haven’t slowed Big Ag’s demands for more water. Meanwhile, urban users aren’t coming close to meeting Gov. Gavin Newsom’s call to voluntarily cut their water use by 15% from 2020 levels.
