The Foundation’s Bay-Delta Tour
in May has already sold out but you can still join the
waitlist. Don’t miss out on the remaining opportunities
this spring and summer to visit important regions in the
state’s water story firsthand and engage directly with
water experts in California and from across the world.
Our Central Valley Tour, April
24-26, is nearing capacity! Only a few seats
remain on the bus for the tour that travels the length of
the San Joaquin Valley to explore the challenges of sustaining
one of the nation’s most productive agricultural regions.
Participants will visit farms and some of the state’s major
infrastructure, such as Friant Dam and San Luis Reservoir, as
well as the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge, a major
wintering ground and migratory stopover point for large
concentrations of waterfowl and shorebirds. Register here before
tickets are gone!
California’s water resources look promising thanks to a string
of cold, wet storms since January, but the state’s leaders are
eyeing how significant the payout from those storms will be for
future years. State officials and experts from the University
of California, Berkeley’s Central Sierra Snow Laboratory say
the Golden State’s water and snow outlook is looking good this
spring, despite a dry start to the water year. The milestone
snowpack survey of the year, conducted Tuesday at Phillips
Station in El Dorado County, found a snowpack measuring 64
inches and a snow water equivalent — water contained in the
snowpack — of 27.5 inches. … All state watersheds
have significantly improved in water storage since Feb. 20,
with all sitting at 90% or higher. The State Water Project also
increased its forecast allocation of water supplies to 30%.
Journalist and author Stephen Robert Miller grew up in Tucson.
And now, he’s written a book taking a different look at his
childhood home. In “Over the Seawall,” Miller investigates how
lofty attempts to control nature and protect ourselves from
climate change often backfire — and how vulnerable people are
the most affected by it. It’s about unintended consequences and
good — and sometimes bad — intentions. And, in Arizona, it’s
about water – and our often futile attempts to get more of it
in our ever-growing metropolises. … I focused a lot on
agriculture and, obviously, you know, as everyone kind of does
and you start writing about climate change and especially
Arizona, because ag uses so much of the water, right about
three-quarters of the whole system.
The Biden-Harris administration is redoubling its efforts to
improve cybersecurity for the nation’s water systems. In March,
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the White
House issued a dire warning to state governors alerting them of
the need to protect water and wastewater systems from ongoing
cybersecurity threats and requested that the states provide
plans to decrease the risk of attacks on water and wastewater
systems in their state. … While the letter focused on
the national need for investment in water infrastructure,
California’s water systems are in particularly dire need for
upgrades. The EPA has previously estimated that California
needs about $51 billion in improvements to its water
infrastructure.
With California snowpack and reservoirs at above-average levels
following two wet winters, Gov. Gavin Newsom stood on a snowy
field near Lake Tahoe on Tuesday and urged the state to do much
more to make its water supplies resilient to the extreme
droughts and flooding that come with climate change. … The
governor presented a new water plan that lays out priorities
for changing how the state captures, stores and moves water,
including efforts to replenish groundwater, recycle wastewater
and restore the natural ecosystems of watersheds. Newsom said
his administration is focusing on infrastructure projects such
as building the Sites Reservoir — the first new major reservoir
in decades — and he vowed to move ahead with the proposed Delta
Conveyance Project.
Fog is central to life in California. … But climate
change is going to disrupt this quintessentially Californian
weather experience. We asked Todd Dawson, a scientist who has
long studied the relationship between fog and redwoods, to
divine the future of fog for us. Why does fog occur in
California, and why is it so important to the state’s
ecosystems? … Fog also provides an enormous, critical
water subsidy that sustains many coastal systems. Our coastal
fog has a high water content, so when it strikes surfaces such
as redwoods and grasses, it drips into the ecosystem. It
represents anywhere from 30–40% of all the water coastal
redwoods get each year.
Thirteen early to mid-career water professionals from across
the West have been chosen to participate in the Water Education
Foundation’s 2024 Colorado River
Water Leaders cohort. Like our California Water
Leaders program, the Colorado River Water
Leaders cohort includes engineers, lawyers, resource
specialists, scientists and others working for
public, private and nongovernmental organizations
from across the river’s basin in the United States and
Mexico. The 2024 cohort roster can be found
here. The Water Leader programs, led by
Foundation Executive Director Jenn Bowles, deepen
knowledge of water issues, enhance individual leadership skills
and prepare participants to take an active, cooperative
approach to decision-making about water resource issues.
Leading experts and top policymakers serve as mentors to
cohort members.
Attorney General Kris Mayes told La Paz County residents she’s
considering a lawsuit to stop corporate farms from overpumping
groundwater there and in Cochise County. Her investigators are
seeking examples of harm such as dry wells, cracked foundations
and dust on which to build a possible case using the state’s
nuisance laws, she said Thursday.
An elected member of a Ventura County water board has pleaded
guilty to a felony charge of stealing water for his Oxnard
farm. Daniel Naumann, 66, admitted to one count of grand theft
of water, Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko said
in a Friday news release. As part of his plea agreement,
five other felony charges will be dropped, the Ventura
County Star reports. Naumann,
a Camarillo resident who is owner and operator of
Naumann Family Farms, was an elected board member of the United
Water Conservation District and an alternate board member of
the Fox Canyon Groundwater Management Agency. … Despite
those roles, Naumann took nearly $30,000 in water between 2019
and 2021 using “diversion bypasses [that] were installed on two
commercial water pumps that irrigated Naumann’s crops,” the
release stated.
On the heels of two wet winters, it’s easy to forget how close
some parts of California came to running out of water a few
short years ago. But this climate amnesia will not help us
prepare for the next inevitable drought. … the water board is
about to trample the hard-won work that’s been done so far by
allowing water utilities until 2035 or later to
implement meaningful reductions. … Because the water
board’s latest plan for implementing efficiency standards has
such an extended timeline, water will inevitably become even
more expensive, including for low-income households and
communities. -Written by Robert Hertzberg, a former speaker of
the Assembly and former majority leader of the state Senate;
and Assembly member Laura Friedman
(D-Glendale), running to replace Adam Schiff in the U.S.
House of Representatives.
Gov. Jared Polis and Dan Gibbs, Executive Director,
Colorado Department of Natural Resources announced Jason
Ullmann as the next Colorado State Engineer and Director of the
Division of Water Resources (DWR). … Jason brings over 20
years of experience in water resources engineering, 14 years of
which have been at DWR, most recently as the Deputy State
Engineer. Before his time with DWR, he gained valuable
experience in water resources management as a City Engineer for
the City of Montrose and as a consulting engineer for various
ditch and reservoir companies throughout Colorado.
Karrigan Börk, UC Davis professor of law and Associate Director
at the Center for Watershed Sciences, has been awarded the
prestigious $10,000 Morrison Prize for his paper on water
rights. The Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State
University recognizes Börk’s paper as “the most impactful
sustainability-related legal academic paper published in North
America” for 2023. Börk’s winning paper, “Water Exaction
Rights,” published in the Harvard Environmental Law Review,
proposes a solution to address current and future water crises
in the US: an exactions framework.
Does the public sector need the private sector’s help to
address the freshwater crisis? That’s the controversial thesis
of Stanford law and environmental social sciences professor
Barton “Buzz” Thompson’s provocatively titled new book: Liquid
Asset: How Business and Government Can Partner to Solve the
Freshwater Crisis. (Buzz is also a member of the PPIC Water
Policy Center’s research network.) We sat down with him to hear
more. … The private sector is already involved in water in
many ways, some more controversial than others. … We
think of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) as a
public program, and it is. The legislature passed the law, and
public agencies are implementing it. But if you look carefully,
you’ll see private handprints all over SGMA’s success.
California farmers could save massive amounts of water if they
planted less thirsty — but also less lucrative — crops such as
grains and hay instead of almonds and alfalfa, according to new
research by scientists who used remote sensing and artificial
intelligence. Such a seismic shift in the nation’s most
productive agricultural state could cut consumption by roughly
93%, researchers with UC Santa Barbara and the NASA Jet
Propulsion Laboratory reported Monday. But Anna Boser, the
study’s lead author, acknowledged that replacing all of
California’s water-intensive crops with the least-intensive
ones is an unrealistic economic scenario. … In a
less-extreme scenario, Boser and her colleagues reported that
fallowing 5% of fields with the most water-intensive crops
could cut water consumption by more than 9%, according to
the study, published in the journal Nature Communications.
The first publication by the newly renamed California Nature
Art Museum in Solvang (formerly the Wildling Museum of Art &
Nature) builds quite nicely on the institution’s vision to “be
recognized as an exceptional and innovative leader in inspiring
our communities and visitors to value wilderness and other
natural areas through the lenses of a diversity of artists.”
Featuring text and stunning photography by George Rose,
California’s Changing Landscape: The Way of Water is an
expansive large-format documentation of California’s vast
terrain, complicated weather, and extensive biodiversity —
particularly as they relate to water and, as naturally follows,
climate change.
Efficiently managing agricultural irrigation is vital for food
security today and into the future under climate change. Yet,
evaluating agriculture’s hydrological impacts and strategies to
reduce them remains challenging due to a lack of field-scale
data on crop water consumption. Here, we develop a method to
fill this gap using remote sensing and machine learning, and
leverage it to assess water saving strategies in California’s
Central Valley. We find that switching to lower water intensity
crops can reduce consumption by up to 93%, but this requires
adopting uncommon crop types. … These results reveal diverse
approaches for achieving sustainable water use, emphasizing the
potential of sub-field scale crop water consumption maps to
guide water management in California and beyond.
The Water Education Foundation is
mourning the loss of its Board
President Mike Chrisman, the former California Natural
Resources Secretary whose family ties to the Foundation go back
to its founding in 1977.
Mr. Chrisman, of Visalia, died from complications of cancer
Tuesday, Oct. 11. He was 78.
“We are devastated to learn about Mike’s passing,” said Jenn
Bowles, the Foundation’s executive director. “He was a
wonderfully supportive board president who cared deeply about our
mission and was constantly offering to help. Among other things,
he served as a mentor to up-and-coming professionals in our
Water Leaders
program.”
With 25 years of experience working
on the Colorado River, Chuck Cullom is used to responding to
myriad challenges that arise on the vital lifeline that seven
states, more than two dozen tribes and the country of Mexico
depend on for water. But this summer problems on the
drought-stressed river are piling up at a dizzying pace:
Reservoirs plummeting to record low levels, whether Hoover Dam
and Glen Canyon Dam can continue to release water and produce
hydropower, unprecedented water cuts and predatory smallmouth
bass threatening native fish species in the Grand Canyon.
“Holy buckets, Batman!,” said Cullom, executive director of the
Upper Colorado River Commission. “I mean, it’s just on and on and
on.”
As water interests in the Colorado
River Basin prepare to negotiate a new set of operating
guidelines for the drought-stressed river, Amelia Flores wants
her Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT) to be involved in the
discussion. And she wants CRIT seated at the negotiating table
with something invaluable to offer on a river facing steep cuts
in use: its surplus water.
CRIT, whose reservation lands in California and Arizona are
bisected by the Colorado River, has some of the most senior water
rights on the river. But a federal law enacted in the late 1700s,
decades before any southwestern state was established, prevents
most tribes from sending any of its water off its reservation.
The restrictions mean CRIT, which holds the rights to nearly a
quarter of the entire state of Arizona’s yearly allotment of
river water, is missing out on financial gain and the chance to
help its river partners.
Martha Guzman recalls those awful
days working on water and other issues as a deputy legislative
secretary for then-Gov. Jerry Brown. California was mired in a
recession and the state’s finances were deep in the red. Parks
were cut, schools were cut, programs were cut to try to balance a
troubled state budget in what she remembers as “that terrible
time.”
She now finds herself in a strikingly different position: As
administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s
Region 9, she has a mandate to address water challenges across
California, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii and $1 billion to help pay
for it. It is the kind of funding, she said, that is usually
spread out over a decade. Guzman called it the “absolutely
greatest opportunity.”