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On this edition of Your Call’s One Planet Series, we’re
discussing the future of the Colorado River, one of the
country’s most important sources of fresh water. Forty million
people in seven states, 29 federally recognized tribes, and
northern Mexico depend on the Colorado River, but it’s drying
up fast. It could lose 50 percent of its flow by 2050 if
temperatures continue to rise. The River also irrigates 5.5
million agricultural acres of land, including 15% of American
agriculture and about 90% of the nation’s winter vegetables,
according to Utah Water Resources. How is climate change
affecting the flow of the Colorado River?
Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, introduced legislation on Monday to
expand provisions of his Water Shutoff Protection Act, ensuring
more low-income Californians have uninterrupted access to
essential drinking water, especially in times of skyrocketing
costs. … Sen. Dodd has a long history of water-related
legislation. In response to rising water rates, he authored the
Water Shutoff Protection Act of 2018, which extends due process
protections to people at risk of service discontinuance because
they are unable to pay their bills. Among other things, it
affords those served by water systems of 200 customers or more
a 60-day grace period to cover past debt and establishes a
system for making payments. The bill was signed into law by
Gov. Jerry Brown.
As drought dried up rivers and reservoirs across Europe this
year, grim warnings from the past surfaced from the depths.
Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine, read the inscription on a
“Hunger Stone” exposed on a bank of the River Elbe in the Czech
Republic: “If you see me, then weep.” Still, as bad as the
drought appeared on the surface, a new satellite analysis
estimating freshwater availability in Europe shows that “what’s
even worse is the groundwater story that people cannot see,”
says the hydrologist Jay Famiglietti, director of the Global
Institute for Water Security at Canada’s University of
Saskatchewan. Famiglietti and collaborators analyzed two
decades of data from the U.S./German satellite missions known
as GRACE to find the rate of change in freshwater stored on the
European continent.
California’s water supply crisis has hit a tipping point, with
impacts spreading far and wide, reaching local communities and
critical industries, putting us once again in jeopardy. This is
a pivotal moment in the state’s future – one in which bold
political leadership will emerge, or future generations will
suffer. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent announcement on his new
water supply plan, is encouraging that leadership is
materializing, but the proof is in the pudding. The new
plan, California’s Water Supply Strategy: Adapting to a
Hotter, Drier Future, underscores the significant challenges we
face as a result of a changing climate, the need to transform
the current water system, and the importance of significantly
investing in California water systems to secure the future of
California’s water supply and reliability. -Written by Gary Arant, General Manager at Valley
Center Municipal Water District; and Kimberly
Thorner, the General Manager at Olivenhain Municipal Water
District.
The Bureau of Reclamation is for the first time legally
signaling its intent to make major cutbacks in water deliveries
from Lake Powell to Lake Mead and the Lower River Basin to
protect the reservoirs that are on the edge of collapse. In
online presentations last week, the bureau said it’s working
through a formal process that could lead to cutting deliveries
from Powell by 2 million to 3 million acre-feet annually and
possibly more. That could happen if states in the Lower River
Basin — Arizona, California and Nevada — can’t reach agreement
by Jan. 31 on how to slice their take from the river, the
agency said. The bureau didn’t specify when cuts would begin or
how they would be divided among states, saying those questions
will be answered later. But “it means that we’re looking at
unprecedented reductions in supplies.”
There is less than a week left to
apply for our 2023 Water Leaders class
and be considered for the new cohort of California’s
preeminent water leadership program. Launched in 1997, the
Water Leaders program is aimed at providing a deeper
understanding of California water issues, building
leadership skills and preparing class members to take an
active, cooperative approach to decision-making about water
resources by studying a water-related topic in-depth
and crafting policy recommendations.
And, if you work for a member of the Association of California
Water Agencies, you can apply to have tuition and some
travel expenses covered under the
John P. Fraser Water Leaders Fellowship.
When drought strikes, California farmers often pump water from
underground aquifers to water their crops. But increasingly dry
conditions are straining that resource. … [David
Freyberg of Stanford University] says many people are looking
at ways to replenish the state’s dwindling groundwater
supplies. In California, a lot of water typically comes
from winter snow that falls high in the mountains.
During warmer months, that snow melts and trickles down to
farmland. But as the climate warms, more precipitation is
falling as rain instead of snow. So it rushes into rivers and
runs past many areas where it’s needed.
As the nation learned that the midterm election led to a change
in the balance of power in the next U.S. Congress, a delegation
of California Farm Bureau leaders met with representatives
during an advocacy trip to Washington, D.C., to discuss
pressing issues affecting agriculture. … Farm Bureau
executives, the organization’s Leadership Farm Bureau class and
county leaders were joined by the organization’s federal policy
team and met face to face with lawmakers Nov. 14-17 in the
nation’s capital. Discussions focused on issues including
California’s ongoing drought, water, labor and trade, as well
as the next federal farm bill.
The Colorado River Compact is 100 years old. A University of
Arizona conference and the upcoming Colorado River Water Users
Association will mark the anniversary. But there’s no reason to
celebrate. Twenty-two years into a drought and with reservoirs
at all-time lows, the federal government may soon intervene in
the states’ management of the river. The Compact has failed.
Don’t blame the river. We need a new system that manages with
the river and provides all users with fair shares. In 1922, the
seven Colorado Basin states used an optimistic estimate of the
river’s annual flow to allocate the waters. The states chose
the biggest estimate because that made it easy to agree.
Everyone could pretend the river could satisfy all anticipated
demands. That was the first mistake. -Written by Karl Flessa, an Arizona resident since
1977 and an emeritus professor of geosciences at the
University of Arizona.
Policy researchers are hopeful the agricultural industry in
California will continue to thrive with continued adaptation.
But conditions are shaping up for another dry year and the
Colorado River shortage is creating challenges that will
require more changes for growers and landowners.
This has been an unprecedented year for extreme heat events.
Californians experienced several heat waves throughout the
summer, all-time temperature records were broken across the
state, and the state’s power grid was pushed to its limit. Now
that winter is approaching, California has a good opportunity
to prepare for the extreme heat that will return next summer
and in future years. As climate change progresses, extreme heat
events will become more frequent, more severe, and longer in
duration. They will also pose major public health risks:
extreme heat can exacerbate problems like respiratory and
cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, and put sensitive
populations like the elderly, children, manual laborers, and
people experiencing homelessness at risk.
Hear what may be ahead for California’s water supply in 2023 as
well as the latest improvements to snowmelt runoff forecasts at
our Winter
Outlook Workshop next Thursday, Dec.
8 in Southern California. The one-day workshop in
Irvine will include insight into whether La Niña conditions
projected to persist into this winter really mean anything as a
predictor in the new reality of climate whiplash. You also
will learn about what is and isn’t known in forecasting winter
precipitation weeks to months ahead, the skill of present
forecasts and ongoing research to develop predictive
ability. This event is ideal for anyone involved in
managing, modeling or forecasting water resources or anyone
simply interested in hearing the latest science.
Over the last four decades, the area covered by lakes globally
has grown by close to 18,000 square miles, an expanse nearly
twice the size of Lake Erie. Scientists used satellite imagery
and artificial intelligence to map 3.4 million lakes around the
world between 1984 and 2019, finding that lake area grew as
reservoirs expanded and rising temperatures melted glaciers and
permafrost, particularly in Greenland, the Rocky Mountains, and
the Tibetan Plateau. Growth in these regions offset losses in
central Asia, northern China, southern Australia, and the more
arid parts of the U.S. West, where drought and water drawdowns
sapped lakes. The findings were published in Nature
Communications.
In a warming and drying California, water agencies across the
state are looking for new water sources and trying to better
utilize the ones they have. Pacifica has a potential source of
water not available to many communities: the drippy gray
moisture that blows ashore in the form of fog. Fog is composed
of tiny water droplets; together, a cubic mile of fog can carry
some 56,000 gallons of water. The North Coast County Water
District … installed experimental fog-catchers over the
summer at three district sites … The fog-catching
devices are simple: a 1-meter square of polyethylene mesh
stretched over a frame and installed facing into the prevailing
wind. When the fog blows in, the mesh collects droplets of
water like a giant spider web. The drops fall into a collecting
trough below and flow through a gauge that measures the amount
of water.
California’s Governor Newsom signed into law two bills
prohibiting PFAS in cosmetics (AB 2771) and in textiles (AB
1817), respectively. The bills define PFAS broadly as “a class
of fluorinated organic chemicals containing at least one fully
fluorinated carbon atom.” The cosmetics bill is specifically
limited to intentionally-added PFAS: “Beginning January 1,
2025, no person or entity shall manufacture, sell, deliver,
hold, or offer for sale in commerce any cosmetic product that
contains intentionally added perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl
substances (PFAS).” The textile bill, however, contains more
exceptions and complexity.
Four small Bay Area drinking water systems will receive
millions of dollars as part of California’s effort to protect
water deliveries as the drought drags into its fourth year. On
Tuesday, the California Department of Water Resources announced
$44 million in statewide Small Community Drought Relief Program
grants about $6.5 million of which is earmarked for four water
systems in Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma counties. The
program is aimed at small systems with fewer than 3,000 service
connections that are most likely to suffer from aging
infrastructure and often rely on a single source of water.
“Small communities are the most vulnerable to the impacts of
our new hotter, drier climate and lack the resources to
immediately deal with these challenges,” DWR Director Karla
Nemeth said in a news release.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is backing a new salary package
for the Department of Water and Power that includes a
significant hike in pay for hundreds of workers. The Los
Angeles City Council approved the labor deal Tuesday in a vote
of 11-0. Under the agreement with the International Brotherhood
of Electrical Workers Local 18, roughly 10,000 workers will
receive four “cost of living” pay increases totaling at least
10% and as much as 24% by October 2025, depending on inflation.
All workers will also get a one-time cash bonus of 3% of their
salary in December.
It’s not easy enforcing water regulations in the West. Just ask
the officials in California who have been trying for almost a
decade to penalize a man who took water from the river system
that feeds San Francisco and bottled it for sale to stores like
Starbucks. It sounds like a tall tale, but it’s
illustrative of just how hard it is to stop scofflaws from
using water the rest of the state needs during a water crisis.
In 2015, at the height of a severe drought, California’s state
water agency received a series of complaints about water theft
on a small tributary of the Tuolumne River, the source of the
Hetch Hetchy reservoir that supplies most of San Francisco’s
water. G. Scott Fahey, the owner of a water bottling
company called Sugar Pine Spring Water, was siphoning water
from the spring and loading it on trucks, the complainants
said.
The intersection of freshwater and climate is a frequently
ignored but critical element of the climate problem, according
to a new study from Sweden that explores the link and offers
solutions that will help lower emissions. Two years in
the making, the study, “The Essential Drop to Reach Net-Zero:
Unpacking Freshwater’s Role in Climate Change Mitigation,”
published by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, identifies
forests and freshwater wetlands as a crucial depository of
carbon. More than 30 percent of estimated global carbon
emissions are sequestered in wetlands. So the need to protect
and restore them is urgent.
