One of the most consequential environmental laws in state history turned 10 years old last month. You’d be forgiven if you didn’t notice. The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act remains, like the declining resource it aims to protect, largely invisible to most Californians. Despite this, the first decade of SGMA (“sigma” to those who know it well) has laid the foundation, still somewhat creaky in places, for nothing less than the transformation of our rural landscape and economy. If we allow it to, this law could nurture a genuinely resilient landscape capable of thriving in an era of climate whiplash. On paper, this is a law solely about managing a finite, limited and largely unseen resource. In implementation, it needs to be about revitalizing the very visible land and communities at the heart of the state.
—Written by Ann Hayden, vice president for climate resilient water systems at the Environmental Defense Fund