“Collaboration is a much better way of working than litigation.” – Estevan López, Commissioner, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, during today’s festivities marking the tenth anniversary of the Multi-Species Conservation Program on the Lower Colorado River. Jerry Zimmerman, former executive director of the Colorado River Board of California, told a story this morning about how the …
Continue reading ‘Habitat conservation on the Lower Colorado’ »
I stumbled this evening across this 2009 piece by the Public Policy Institute of California which seems quite timely: The Myth The popular press often propagates the myth that California is running out of water. As a recent example: “Have you seen Lake Oroville lately? If so, you know California is running out of water” …
Continue reading ‘The problem with the “running out of water” rhetoric’ »
Yesterday’s executive order from California Gov. Jerry Brown (pdf here) illustrates a crucial issue about water governance, the issue of the scale at which we manage our water. The headline news from Brown’s announcement – “First Ever Statewide Mandatory Water Reductions.” But what does “mandatory” mean here? Here’s the explanation from Craig Miller, who’s covering California …
Continue reading ‘California drought: Jerry Brown doesn’t have a knob to turn’ »
Craig Miller at KQED has a useful roundup of what sort of shortfalls California water users might see this summer as a result of drought: Ag: “More than 400,000 acres of farmland were fallowed last year because of scarce water. Credible sources have estimated that figure could double this year.” That’s in the neighborhood of …
Continue reading ‘Where will California’s water shortfalls hit?’ »
California farmers by now have a pretty clear picture of what their water supply situation is going to be this year, whether it’s reservoir and irrigation system surface delivery, or groundwater pumping. The U.S. Department of Agriculture today released projected acreage for the state’s major field crops (pdf) that reflects farmers’ resulting choices: corn: 430,000 …
A year ago, I wrote a piece urging calm in the face of California’s extreme drought: The thing to remember – and this’ll help you get through the tough year ahead – is that drought is no one big thing. It’s a series of little things – one water user, one water system at a time. …
Continue reading ‘Keep breathing, California. You can do this.’ »
Matt Weiser, who has ably served so many of us as a guide to the complexities of California water, is leaving the Sacramento Bee.
Resilience is a system’s ability to absorb a shock and still retain its basic structure and function. Here, in one complicated table, is an example of the sort of institutional plumbing valves we need to build to increase resilience in the face of drought. It’s a table accounting for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern …
Continue reading ‘How Southern California quietly doubled its 2014 supply of Colorado River water’ »
The price California farmers can get for their almonds doubled between 2007 and last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Strong incentive to plant more trees, drought notwithstanding:
Doug Obegi lays out an interesting argument about the implications of drought for the “Bay Delta Conservation Plan”, the California plan to build great water-carrying tunnels beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for farms and cities to the south. On paper, the tunnels would be largely dry during drought years, to preserve salinity balance in the …
Continue reading ‘In drought, would peripheral tunnels doom the Sacramento delta?’ »