Breaking Western Water Taboos

Peter Gleick on Sustainable Groundwater Management

The recent severe drought in the western United States and California in particular has shined a spotlight on a range of water-management practices that are outdated, unsustainable, or inappropriate for a modern, functional 21st century water system. Unless these bad practices are fixed, no amount of rain will be enough to set things right. Yet a discussion of many of these bad practices has been taboo for fear of igniting even more water conflict. Well, water conflict is here and no strategy that can fix our problems should be off the table.

We have to move away from business-as-usual approaches. This includes ending opaque sweetheart agreements between government agencies and well-connected, wealthy water users. The recent appalling deal between the Westlands Water District and the federal government is an example of the kind of secret, backroom arrangements that are already the cause of so much of today's troubles. If these agreements are in the public interest, negotiate them in the open, subject them to public scrutiny, and implement them in a transparent way.

For public agencies, the drought has highlighted how unprepared the region is for growing pressures from population growth and from climate change, which has already been implicated in worsening the severity of the drought. Among the most egregious of our old management practices is the failure to monitor and measure all water uses, price water properly, and enforce water rights laws and allocations.

Equally disastrous has been systematic massive overdraft of groundwater. As studies have repeatedly shown, California overpumps more than 500 billion gallons (1.5 million acre-feet) of groundwater in normal years and this has tripled or quadrupled during the drought. And while modest new groundwater management legislation has been put in place, it perpetuates this imbalance for decades to come.

Also taboo has been any serious discussion of land-use planning, the role of population growth, and reining in poor development practices in new construction. The days when developers could build anything, anywhere, without regard to water availability or efficiency of use, should be over. It is no longer enough to simply assume unlimited water will be available.

The collapse of vital ecosystems and fisheries populations also shows how unsuccessful past efforts have been to restore even a modicum of ecological health. For example, the Delta Smelt, just one of several major indicator species of ecological health in the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta, is on the verge of extinction. Ninety-five percent of the entire 2014 generation of threatened winter-run Chinook salmon died when temperatures in the Sacramento River exceeded lethal levels. The chances are high and growing that within a decade the Salton Sea in southern California will be an ecological disaster of staggering proportions, yet there has been little public discussion of these threats.

The private sector, too, has been struggling to figure out its role in the context of severe shortages. As the drought worsened, bottled water companies like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Nestlé found themselves under the microscope of public opinion for taking public water resources, bottling them for substantial profit, and then failing to adequately respond to public concerns about their local impacts, lack of transparency of data sharing, and their role in helping the state share the burdens imposed by the drought.

Companies with a big water footprint can, and should, actively engage in water policy discussions to help craft practical solutions to these problems. At a time when new strategies and ideas are being developed for seriously improving corporate operational practices around resource management, disclosure, and the human right to water, the private sector must step up its game in real, transparent, and comprehensive ways. Until then, they shouldn't be surprised if they continue to be a target for a worried and anxious public.

Similarly, agricultural and livestock sectors of the United States are in the midst of a fundamental transition, whether they know it or not. The recent media focus on the amount of water that goes to grow almonds or cows is an example of both real public concern and the difficulties farmers will continue to face in explaining and justifying their water use. California farm revenues and employment have grown to record high levels, despite the recent drought, in part because of the unsustainable groundwater overdraft practices described above, and in part because of innovation and deployment of better water-use technologies and a shift away from low-valued water-intensive crops to crops that produce more dollar and food per drop of water. Some of this is good news, but ultimately there is also going to have to be a reckoning about how much land farmers can irrigate in the west in the face of a changing climate and deteriorating ecosystem health. The answer, even with improved technology and management, is almost certainly less than is irrigated today. Yet almost no one is willing to discuss this.

The good news is that there are still vast untapped opportunities for improving water-use efficiency, increasing stormwater capture, widening use of high-quality recycled water, saving ecosystems, and recharging overdrafted aquifers. But to do so requires that we can challenge long-held beliefs, assumptions, and taboos and that we replace our 19th century water institutions and 20th century decaying infrastructure with 21st century solutions. Anything less condemns us to perpetual water conflict rather than moving us along a path to a sustainable water future.

Source: Huffington Post

Read More Related Content On This Topic - Click Here

Media

Taxonomy

• Policy
• Drought
• Water Policy