(Above): Drought in California – Low level of Lake Isabella in Kern County. (Shutterstock)

California’s snowpack is now at 39 percent of its average, signaling a deepening of the drought, which is already the worst in the western United States in 1,200 years. An exceptional panel of six experts – James Nachbaur, Director, Office of Research, Planning and Assistance at the state Water Resources Control Board; Karina Herrera, environmental scientist at WCRBl; Dr. Josue Medellin-Azuara, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, UC Merced; Dr. Rajendra Shende, Chairman of TERRE Policy Center and former director of the United Nations Environment Program, was coordinating lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007; Sean de Guzman, PE, MS, Manager of the Snow Surveys and Water Supply Forecasting Unit at the California Department of Water Resources; and Heather Cooley, Director of Research at the Pacific Institute – spoke at a briefing by Ethnic Media Services, held April 22, to help us understand the global national and statewide implications of drought and to discuss conservation and innovation in water management.

They discussed the impact of climate change on the drought, conservation efforts undertaken by the state, the $1 billion hit to California’s agricultural industry, and how other countries are managing their own water crises.

(Above, l-r): James Nachbaur, Director, Office of Research, Planning and Assistance at the state Water Resources Control Board; Karina Herrera, environmental scientist at at WCRBl; Dr. Josue Medellin-Azuara, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, UC Merced; Dr. Rajendra Shende, Chairman of TERRE Policy Center and former director of the United Nations Environment Program, was coordinating lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007; Sean de Guzman, PE, MS, Manager of the Snow Surveys and Water Supply Forecasting Unit at the California Department of Water Resources; and Heather Cooley, Director of Research t the Pacific Institute. (Siliconeer/EMS)
(Above, l-r): James Nachbaur, Director, Office of Research, Planning and Assistance at the state Water Resources Control Board; Karina Herrera, environmental scientist at WCRBl; Dr. Josue Medellin-Azuara, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, UC Merced; Dr. Rajendra Shende, Chairman of TERRE Policy Center and former director of the United Nations Environment Program, was coordinating lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007; Sean de Guzman, PE, MS, Manager of the Snow Surveys and Water Supply Forecasting Unit at the California Department of Water Resources; and Heather Cooley, Director of Research t the Pacific Institute. (Siliconeer/EMS)

Dr Rajendra Shende: Lessons for California from Asia and Middle-East on Water Recycling

Dr Rajendra Shende joined in from India to just discuss the global impact of the drought and what countries, especially India, are doing to mitigate their own crises.

“We always see what world can get a lesson from California as it doubts but there are examples where we can have a lessons for California from the other countries,” began Dr Shende.

“The problem which we are thinking is coming is now becoming a common place. Four billion people almost 65 to 70 percent of the world population are experiencing severe water scarcity for at least one month each year.

“Over 2 billion people live in the countries where the water supply is inadequate and half of the world’s population could be living in areas facing water scarcity by as early as four to five years from now, that’s why the United Nations has what is called as ‘sustainable development goals’ which encompass all these challenges.

“The Middle East and North Africa are the most water stressed region on the earth. At the same time, there are other regions or other countries like India, some part of China, and even some part of Europe, they are undergoing water-stressed areas.

“Some specific examples in the Middle East region where the countries are recycling the water more and more. An example would be Oman, which is recycling about 78 of its water. California’s recycling of water is about 10 to 15 percent. In Dubai, about 80 percent of the wastewater is collected. That doesn’t mean that it is reused but at least collected and about 44 percent on an average is reused.

Dr Shende’s suggestions for California: Water-smart Culture

The credibility of individuals to pay the income tax or to get a loan should be decided based on how much water that person is conserving or recycling, and with smart technology from Silicon Valley, it should not be difficult to track the water footprint of individuals.

Heather Cooley: Climate Change Impact on California

 “Our mission is to create and advance solutions to the world’s most pressing water challenges. In addition to that, we announced in 2020 an organizational goal to catalyze the transformation to water resilience in the face of climate change, and so a lot of our work is now nested under this concept of water resilience and climate change.

Cooley talked about the drought in California.

“California is currently in the third year of a severe drought. Our major reservoirs are around 40 percent of their capacity, and a big issue is that our snowpack was much lower than is typical and is melting very quickly.

“We’re now entering sort of our dry season which will extend until about October of this year, and the drought is not limited to California. A large part of the United States are facing drought and it’s an issue that all regions of the world face to varying degrees.

“Climate Change has worsened severe drought in the west, a new study was just released in February of this year that shows that the past 22 years, the period going back to 2000 has been the driest for the southwestern U.S. has been the driest in the past 1,200 years. This study also highlights the fact that this drought has been made worse by anthropogenic climate change. We know that droughts are longer they’re more severe and they are more widespread due to Climate Change and we are already seeing that here in the western U.S. Unfortunately, our water systems and our planning do not yet account for this and that is creating a major challenge for us.

“California has made real and laudable progress in reducing water use and developing local water supplies. Since about the year 2000 we’ve seen a decline in water use both for agriculture and in our urban areas and that’s due to shifts in our economy and improvements in water use efficiency.

“We’ve also seen an increase in recycled water usage a three-fold increase since about 1970.

“We’re recycling about 25 percent of the wastewater that we generate so we’ve made improvements, but we still have ways to go.

“The Pacific Institute recently released a new study that quantified the potential for urban water efficiency, water reuse and storm water capture. While there is tremendous progress, more is needed.

“In the face of Climate Change, the opportunities around efficiency by adopting existing technologies and practices reduce urban water use in California by 30 percent to as much as 48 percent. That could nearly triple our water reuse generation.

“We are capturing some of the storm water but there are significant opportunities to capture more storm water,” ended Cooley.

James Nachbaur and Karina Herrera: Water Board Activities

“California has a long history of withdrawal and there’s a pattern in the states that major conservation legislation follows major droughts. During the last drought, the 2017 drought, California set mandatory reductions targets for the first time in the state’s history and after the drought ended the legislature passed Senate Bill 606 and Assembly Bill 1668 directing suppliers, farmers, and state agencies to make conservation a California way of life.

“We have executive orders and a drought state of emergency proclamation. It includes actions such as voluntarily asking people to reduce water use by fifty percent through actions such as reducing your landscape irrigation; running dishwashers and washing machines when full; and with the latest executive order 722, the Water Board was directed to adopt an emergency  regulation.

“The State Water Board is currently working on that and it will soon cover urban water supply and demand assessments, level two shortage response actions, and defining and banning the irrigation of non-functional turf in the commercial and industrial sector.

“However, as a long-term response to drought, making conservation as a California way of life to protect beneficial uses, save energy, and reduce carbon emissions. The conservation initiative will allow regions to grow without increasing demand and it’s also one of the cheapest ways to bolster water supplies.

“It’s important to note that equity needs to be kept at the forefront of conservation. The majority of California’s water suppliers are charging less per unit as customers are using more so water conservation is affected by how water rates are structured.

“To adapt to Climate Change and the resulting longer and more intense droughts in California, the bill’s amended existing law to provide expanded and new authorities and requirements to enable permanent changes and actions for those purposes, to improve the state’s water future for generations to come.

“Since the bill’s passed the Department of Water Resources and the State Water Board have been closely coordinating to carry out the actions. The department was directed to conduct studies and provide recommendations which we’re expecting this spring and the state water board was then directed to adopt new efficiency standards by the summer of 2022. Using these efficiency standards, each urban retail water supplier will begin calculating what’s called an urban water use objective based on the water needed for the efficient use in their service area.

Past critiques on conservation efforts in California have been that they’re a one-size-fits-all, that they don’t consider unique local conditions, or past investments, as well as that more could be done to drive conservation more meaningfully and more equitably, and so this new framework is intended to be more tailored and very supplier specific.

“A broad overview of what the objective would be – urban retail water suppliers will calculate their objective based on efficiency standards on the efficient indoor residential water use, residential outdoor water use, outdoor water use for commercial industrial and institutional landscapes, with dedicated meters as well as reasonable amounts of system water loss along with other unique local conditions such as that include variances and then a bonus incentive or credit for portable water reuse, so suppliers will be meeting their overall water use objective, not individual standards and how they get to that overall objective will sort of be a ‘choose your own adventure.’

“Starting in 2024, the suppliers will start calculating their own objective and potentially be looking at how best to increase water conservation and efficiency efforts within their service areas. It could include connecting with urban farms and partnering with their work around compost education, making sure that nurseries have low water-using drought-tolerant native plants, and having customers be aware of that information easily, partnering with local tree organizations or conservation cores on the ground water conservation efforts making sure that affordable housing development projects are mindful of how they’re designing their outdoor spaces and what efficiency and appliance upgrades they’re including and then making that water energy nexus and making sure that climate resilience projects are also supporting water conservation,” ended Nachbaur and Herrera.

Sean de Guzman: Importance of California Snowpack

“California snowpack is important to the state of California because it provides roughly about 30 percent of our water every year. With majority of our state population living in Southern California and the majority of the precipitation and rainfall falling precipitation and snowfall falling in Northern California that really sets up basically a water challenge of how to transport all this water and all the water that’s falling in Northern California.

“Five of the smallest snowpacks have happened in the last 15 years with this current year 2022 coming in as the fifth smallest snowpack on record, and we are seeing that decline in snowpack over the last 70 plus years.

“Some of the impacts in terms of Climate Change for our snowpack obviously are with a warming climate we’re going to get more rainfall in locations where we would expect to see snowfall. There would be an increase in winter flood frequencies,” said Guzman.

Dr. Josue Medellin-Azuara: $1 billion hit to the California Agricultural economy in 2021 & Future Possibilities

“We are in a whiplash weather in California where we have very dry periods followed by very wet years. Some of the incidents that happened in 2017 just after the 2012-2014 drought and we can see from the last half of our last century that we have been having about roughly half of the years are wet half of the years are dry.

“However, there is an increase in the temperature with respect to the historical average shown in the record so managing forex streams for warmer streams became the new normal and this is something we have to deal with not only for agriculture but for cities and environmental systems.

What was different in this ongoing drought?

“Though we are looking at the 2021 drought, but really this is the third year of route of drought. “The drought is different as those areas that traditionally hold more water and are able to provide water for cities and in agriculture, through to a vast network of aqueducts and pumping stations reservoirs, were dry this year compared to the last.

“The deficit in precipitation in the last round whereas in this drought, these areas moved north causing some stress in the system also the. With the higher evaporative demand, we need to apply more water to crops in order to make them viable, and that is a result of very dry soil conditions and also a very thirsty atmosphere after a couple of years on the drought with warmer temperatures.”

“Last year, we had a shortage of about 5.5 million acre foot of water that we were able to replace with an increased ground water pumping to make a net cutback of a 1.4 million acre foot of water. That is about six percent of net shortage.

“Considering a drought of this magnitude, that is a relatively modest cut back in water use in agriculture. Thanks again to the waiver that we have in groundwater in our system and that resulted in about 400,000 acres of idle land and causes about 1.1 billion dollars in gross revenue losses due to drought. Increasing pumping costs and roughly 45,000 jobs in the in the state when we take into account the multiplier effects of that.

“In the regional economies, these impacts climbed to 1.7 billion dollars and 14,365 jobs or so. In the state, many of these jobs belong to the lowest income groups.

“Future droughts are not going away. They are recurring events and extreme climate is something we’re going to see more frequently and more intensively in the future, so surface water coolbacks due to drought and to groundwater regulation will continue to limit supplies of water for agriculture. It also increases the irrigation requirements due to the dryness in the atmosphere, in the soil, the preceding conditions from a previous drought will filter this gap between the water that is available and the water that is needed to grow crops, and that gap is often neglected.

“What droughts also bring are some opportunities to improve and one of the things we got from last round was ground water regulation. How to manage the resource sustainably over sometimes horizon to cope with future droughts.

“Changing crops, using deficit irrigation, and idling land, can help to cope with future droughts. Use of natural infrastructure such as a managed attack with a recharge just use this space that is in the aquifers of the central valley to cope with future droughts and lastly is building a system-wide flexibility being able to do low environmental impact exchanges of water between users in regions to cope and reduce the economic cost of drought.

“Land repurposing, areas that have no secure water sources and that are unable to keep agriculture viable due to soil salinization and other conditions can be transformed into a habitat or managed with a recharge project or a solar panel solar panel facilities to fulfill commitments to lower emissions and at the same time to maintain economic vitality in the regions,” concluded Dr. Medellin-Azuara.