The nation’s largest economy and most populous state crafts emergency responses in real time.

Can modern society reshape its civic institutions, infrastructure, and practices to thrive in an era of water scarcity?

California’s four-year drought — and a fickle El Nino —  is a 21st-century test for the state’s 39 million residents, its economy, and its environment. The hottest, driest period in state history is forcing regulators, water managers, farmers, city officials, and ordinary people to take unprecedented measures to ensure an adequate water supply for all.

Our call on Tuesday, August 11th began a three-part exploration of the issues raised by California’s water crises and to place them in a global context.

Discussion Leaders

Nadine Bailey, Chief Operations Officer, Family Water Alliance

Steve Gregory, Environment Editor, KPCC

Kevin Klowden, Managing Director, Milken Institute’s California Center

Felicia Marcus, Chair, California State Water Resources Control Board

Robert Wilkinson, Director, Water Policy Program, University of California, Santa Barbara


California Drought Signals Fundamental Shift to New Water Conditions

Climate change models have long predicted a drying West. In California, the future has arrived.

By Codi Kozacek
Circle of Blue

Dismal snowpack, dry wells, and cracked riverbeds form what could be a regular picture of California’s water reality in the 21st century, according to state water experts who spoke Tuesday at a virtual town hall, hosted by Circle of Blue and Maestro Conference. In a departure from the skepticism that grips much of the rest of the United States, the nation’s most populous state is not debating the veracity of climate change and its consequences. Instead, California is leveraging a potent combination of political will and public support to adapt to the new conditions.

California is enduring the fourth year of a severe and historic droughtWater reserves in major reservoirs lie at record low levels, and some rural communities have run out of water completely. But the state’s leaders—learning from places like Australia—acknowledged the urgency of the situation and realized that droughts of this scale are likely more often in the future.

 “California has gone through numerous droughts in the past, and even in some of the more severe ones, like in the 1970s, there have been attitude changes that last as long as the drought. But generally things have reverted back to normal afterward,” said Kevin Klowden, managing director of the Milken Institute’s California Center in Santa Monica, at the Catalyst: California town hall. “What you’re seeing now is a profound change in which the communities are fundamentally realizing — on the state and the urban level — that water is not just going to be free and widely available.”

California’s response to the drought unfolded in three stages, according to Felicia Marcus, chair of California’s State Water Resources Control Board, who was a presenter in the town hall. First, she said, was to address water conservation by calling for voluntary water-use reductions. When that failed to achieve results, the state enacted mandatory water restrictions for urban water agencies. The state then focused on accelerating water-recycling projects by providing low-cost financing. Finally, managers have turned their attention to reforming the state’s water-rights system, which is currently based on the 19th-century principle of “first-in-time, first-in-right,” meaning those with the oldest water rights take precedence.

“The goals that have guided our response since the beginning of the drought declaration, which was an early drought declaration, were to act earlier than hope might suggest,” Marcus said to the 130 people from around the world who participated in the town hall. “We learned from the Australians that hope is definitely not a strategy, as they kept thinking they were in a three-year drought cycle for about six years, then they hit their three worst years yet and had to throw billions of dollars at everything all at once, including a whole fleet of [desalination] facilities that are sitting shuttered, have never been operated, and [that] they’re still paying for. Our goals were to listen to the Australians and do the cheaper thing first — and above all, to prepare for the worst, though you hope for the best.

 “And finally, to try to find a way to accelerate those actions that we know we have to do anyway in the face of climate change, where all the predictions say we’re going to lose our snowpack as the temperature rises and more precipitation falls as rain rather than snow. We know we’re going to have more people. We also know that food security is going to be an increasing issue around the globe and around the nation, and California is one of the only places with a Mediterranean climate that can reliably grow the level of fruits and vegetables that we can grow.”

Nonetheless, California still faces substantial challenges. Chief among them is the protection of its forested watersheds, which have been ravaged by fires and years of mismanagement, according to Nadine Bailey, chief operations officer of the Maxwell-based Family Water Alliance. Fires are currently burning across northern California, making watersheds vulnerable to erosion — especially if an El Nino weather pattern brings heavy rainstorms, as was widely publicized yesterday in news channels around the country and the world.

 “That wood that’s burning is our watershed. It’s the place that holds our water during summer and in the winter,” Bailey said at the town hall. “We really need to think about forest management as we talk about water. We need to stop drawing circles around things in an old paradigm to save them and look at an integrative environmental policy that takes people into account and looks down the road 50 to 100 years with our environmental policy to fix some of the mistakes that we’ve made in the last 20 years.”

Another persistent challenge is improving the tools to manage and trade water rights, as well as how to price water in a way that reflects its true costs while maintaining affordability for the most vulnerable communities, according to Robert Wilkinson, the director of the Water Policy Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“There are definite questions about social equity and how to provide basic amounts of water at a low cost,” he said.


Transcripts



Speakers


Steve Gregory is KPCC’s Environment and Science Editor. He joined KPCC’s editorial ranks in 2013. Prior to that, he was an editor at Marketplace for eight years. There, Steve oversaw coverage of Washington and the 2012 presidential race. He also produced a series of on-location interviews between host Kai Ryssdal and CEOs such as Eric Schmidt, Elon Musk, Meg Whitman, and Bob Iger as well as a special series on climate change.


Kevin Klowden is managing director of the Milken Institute’s California Center and a managing economist at the Institute. He specializes in the study of demographic and spatial factors (the distribution of resources, business locations, and movement of labor) and how these are influenced by public policy and in turn affect regional economies. His key areas of focus include technology-based development, infrastructure, the global economy, media and entertainment.


Felicia Marcus was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown to the State Water Resources Control Board for the State of California in 2012, and designated by the Governor as Chair in April of 2013. The Board implements both federal and state laws regarding drinking water and water quality, and it implements the state’s water rights laws. The Board sets statewide water quality, drinking water, and water rights policy, hears appeals of local regional board water quality decisions, decides water rights disputes, and provides financial assistance to communities to upgrade water infrastructure.


Dr. Robert C. Wilkinson is Adjunct Professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, and Senior Lecturer Emeritus in the Environmental Studies Program, at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  Dr. Wilkinson’s teaching, research, and consulting focus is on water and energy policy, climate change, and environmental policy issues.  Dr. Wilkinson is also a Senior Fellow with the Rocky Mountain Institute and the California Council on Science and Technology.  He co-chairs the U.S. Sustainable Water Resources Roundtable and has served as an advisor to the State of Victoria, Australia, the Water and Energy Team for the California Climate Action Team, the California State Water Plan, and agencies including the California Energy Commission, the California State Water Resources Control Board, the California Department of Water Resources, and others on water, energy, and climate issues.