San Joaquin Valley needs to stop waiting to be rescued from droughts

The Bureau of Reclamation recently issued its update of water allocations for the Central Valley Project for agricultural, municipal and industrial users. These cuts reduced agricultural water deliveries from 5% to 0% and municipal and industrial water deliveries from 55% to 25%, essentially forcing these water users to shift to groundwater or to severely curtail their use.

The last time we had 0% delivered to farmers and only 25% delivered to municipal and industrial users was in 2015. Unlike in 2015, we are faced today with a trifecta of bad conditions: decreased snowpack water content, reduced groundwater availability and possibly another year of drought ahead of us. Of the three, the reduced availability of groundwater will be the most devastating.

California is a conjunctive-use state, meaning that our water plan has always been to use surface water when available and use groundwater when necessary due to lack of surface water. Groundwater was traditionally our trump card. But the drought of 2012-16 resulted in a historic drop in the groundwater table that prompted the state to regulate groundwater with the enactment of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). In short, the groundwater bank is almost empty for some and already empty for many, mostly private water well owners.

The urgent question before us is what can we do to manage the pain that is coming?

Thanks to the lessons learned during the previous drought, state agencies and stakeholders are already gearing up to provide relief to those who lose access to water. The key to their success will be making everyone aware of the available resources when they lose access to water because a well dried up or contaminant levels have exceeded safe drinking water standards.

Another answer is the conservation of water. The water use restrictions of the last drought, which were very effective in decreasing water use, will be reintroduced. Agricultural water use will continue to be reduced to conserve water through farmer investments and state grants.

The eight counties of the San Joaquin Valley must take their water future into their own hands and approach water resource management as a region, despite the differences represented amongst the counties. While climate, crops, farming practices and water conditions vary significantly from the north to the south ends of the Valley, we all share agriculture as a driving force for our economies. Competent and sustainable water management is crucial to sustain that economic base, which was worth $36.5 billion in 2019, according to the California Agricultural Statistics Review 2019-2020.

The San Joaquin Valley needs to take the opportunity that this drought presents, recognize its dependence on agriculture for its economic livelihood and move as a region to:

▪ Develop the storage (surface and groundwater) to store runoff when it is plentiful;

▪ Develop a robust interconnection of its conveyance systems to efficiently move water around the region;

▪ Develop an equitable water allocation system to protect agriculture’s, people’s and the environment’s access to water;

▪ Develop a water market system to allocate the use of surface and groundwater to the benefit the economy of the region

Ambitious? Yes. Unattainable? We can certainly hope not.

These conversations are already occurring through the Central Valley Community Foundation, Uncommon Dialogue, Water Blueprint for the Valley, in financial markets, and around academic circles.

The California Water Institute staff have been engaged in these activities for the past two years. We can take advantage of this drought to mobilize and incentivize the eight-county area to work together. The alternative is to wait until the next drought when Mother Nature will give us no choice but to work on it.

The people of the San Joaquin Valley need to stop waiting to be rescued during a drought. We need to build the coalitions and develop the planning required to create water resource infrastructure resilience now. The California Water Institute’s report on the San Joaquin Valley Water System Investment Program provides a framework to plan, finance and govern that resilient infrastructure.