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 California’s diversions of Colorado River Water in 2014, water that provided a buffer against California’s extraordinary drought, and it shows how Met essentially doubled the amount of water it was able to take from the Colorado River in 2014 to meet the needs of coastal cities:

The key point to understand is that under the basic Colorado River water allocation rules, Met is entitled to 550,000 acre feet of water per year in a “normal”, non-surplus year, but last year it took more than twice that: 1.18 million acre feet. It did that by invoking a long list of policy widgets that allowed it to either pay for conservation in other places, or to conserve water in previous years that was banked in Lake Mead for later use.

• 113,400 acre feet of water saved by lining canals in the Imperial and Coachella, the region’s two big ag water districts
• 100,000 af saved by fallowing land in Imperial
• 67,700 af saved by lining the All-American Canal
• 338,500 af that had been saved through conservation efforts and banked in Lake Mead

Each one of these widgets is the result of the unglamorous work of building personal and institutional relationships among water users and agencies, many of them across the difficult ag-urban interface. They were built over time, and are now available when they’re needed. They have added resilience to the system.

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 delta, including for those who get their water there. But the tunnels would make it physically possible, Obegi argues, to just suck up the entire Sacramento River in a dry year like this, if Californians were willing to write off the delta, removing the fresh water flow that keeps sea water at bay. It thus becomes a political question, and there is some precedent for the politics of water allowing the saltwater to intrude, he argues:

While the biological science shows how important delta outflow and other environmental protections are for the continued existence of native fish, wildlife and the people who make their homes and living on these natural resources, the political science in favor of increasing diversions and waiving these standards has often trumped the biological science.

Lea-Rachel Kosnick, in a paper a few years back, described the “tragedy of the anticommons”. In a classic “tragedy of the commons,” every pumper is sticking their straw into an aquifer and sucking it out, with no incentive to conserve because the other folks will just take the rest anyway. In the “anticommons” example, there are sane solutions out there, but too many people are positioned to block them.

The commons can lead to the “Tragedy of the Commons,” where uncoordinated utilization of a good can lead to its overuse, and symmetrically, the anticommons can lead to the “Tragedy of the Anticommons,” where poor collective management can lead to suboptimal use of the resource.

Pat Mulroy, former head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, pointedly raised this problem at the March 19 California Water Policy Forum:

We are very, very good at blocking. Anybody can stop anything. What we can’t do or can’t seem to do is find a structure within which to say yes. You will never have enough science, you will never have enough data, but at some point, something has to change.

Huge thanks to Chris Austin for posting the text of Mulroy’s remarks, which as usual are interesting throughout.