How Have California’s Water Issues Changed in the Past Thirty Years

Back in 1994, Ace of Base and Boys II Men were chart-topping artists, "The Lion King" was the year's most popular movie…and the Public Policy Institute of California drew its first breath. A lot has changed in California since then, so we sat down with key PPIC Water Policy Center staff to discuss what's changed-and what hasn't-in the California water world since the year the White House launched its first webpage.

How did PPIC work on water issues in the beginning?

Ellen Hanak: PPIC was founded at the end of a drought that spanned 1987-92. That drought was really formative for California's cities. There was trauma.

Jeffrey Mount: We were months away from water rationing in 1991, which is a nightmare for anyone in the water business.

EH: My first projects for PPIC dealt with water trading, urban water use, and a looming growth and infrastructure crisis. Then Delta issues cropped up because Jeff had just written a very influential piece with a researcher at UC Berkeley about the fragility of the Delta levees, which were facing growing threats from sea level rise and earthquakes. Given the Delta's importance for California's water supply-some 25 million people and 3 million acres of farmland depend on water that comes through the Delta-this got a lot of attention.

JM: That 2005 paper really lit the fuse on a bomb by daylighting this major infrastructure problem. This work led to two PPIC-sponsored books on envisioning and comparing futures for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

EH: In those books, our recommendations on alternative means of conveying water through the Delta received the most attention. In 1982, California voters had rejected a proposal to build a peripheral canal around the Delta to reduce the vulnerability of Delta freshwater exports to seawater intrusion; the question of conveyance was untouchable for a long time after that. We made it okay to talk about alternative conveyance from the perspective of not just water supply, but also the future of the Delta's ecosystem. It turns out that the way California moves water through the Delta is pretty disruptive to native species that depend on this ecosystem.

Brian Gray: PPIC's analysis gave the topic of alternative conveyance credibility, and it put the issue back into public debate.

JM: It became part of our DNA, that we could say the unsayable. If anyone else brought it up, they had a dog in the fight, but we didn't.

EH: There was something for everybody to love and everybody to hate in our publications, and it kind of worked because of that. Going forward, that became our winning formula. When you interview stakeholders now about our role in California water policy, they admit that they may not like what we're saying, but they recognize that we're not in one camp all the time. That allows them to hear what we have to say.

What big changes have occurred in California water in the last 30 years?

EH: Urban resilience has improved dramatically. We now have millions more people in the state, but we're using same amount of water in our cities and suburbs as in 1990. There's a lot more local infrastructure, and there are water-sharing arrangements. The urban sector has become much more sophisticated. This was largely a local-led revolution, but it was supported by billions of dollars of state cost-share money, because voters were very motivated to pass state bonds to help.

JM: The most transformative behavioral change is urban water use. But the most transformative legislation in the last 30 years is the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which is leading to major changes in how we manage groundwater-an essential resource.

Also, for the last 25 years, all Californians have seen changes in their climate. It's here, it's happening now, and we're no longer trying to convince anybody that it's a problem. Now we're just arguing about how we're going to deal with it. That represents a major societal shift here in California.

BG: Another significant change is the development of water markets. Thirty years ago, there was widespread skepticism of water transfers. Today, both the agricultural and urban sectors acknowledge the benefits that water markets provide-such as moving water to areas of acute shortage during drought, smoothing some transition costs of SGMA implementation, facilitating groundwater banking, and diversifying long-term water supply portfolios.

What California water issues haven't changed in the last 30 years?

JM: We're still fighting! (Laughter.) Although that's not entirely true anymore. There's a growing, radical middle-the edges have the same arguments, but constructive engagement is happening in the middle.

BG: Salmon remain in peril, perhaps more so than ever before, despite all our regulatory, restoration, and planning efforts. We need to rethink our recovery and ecosystem management strategies because what we are doing is not working.

As PPIC embarks on its next 30 years, what's next for the Water Policy Center?

Letitia Grenier: Californians need to be thinking about how we can become more resilient to climate change across all water sectors. It's essential to take a look at the newest projections for future storms, heat, and drought that will deeply impact our water supply, flooding, forest headwaters, and freshwater ecosystems and figure out how much time is needed for planning. In cases where it's going to take a lot of time to build new infrastructure, let's look ahead and integrate climate change timelines with decisions and funding. Our goal at the PPIC Water Policy Center is to help sectors be ready as change happens. There may be uncertainty about how extreme the change will be, but we can still be ready.

EH: That makes me think about one challenge we've written about a lot: how to improve the process when it comes to implementing things. The permitting and regulatory process around restoration or any major infrastructure investments-it's just too hard. Permitting should not take decades.

LG: We have ideas for how to improve permitting, with some proven successes. Programmatic permits across a large area, regulatory coordination, and watershed-scale planning can help. That's what's needed, but it's hard to do.

BG: I also think there's growing consensus on the need to adopt some form of real-time monitoring and reporting of water use. Without this, it will become increasingly difficult to enforce water rights priorities during droughts, protect transferred water from unlawful diversions, and ensure that water released for environmental uses remains instream to fulfill those purposes.

EH: When we were writing our 2011 book, Managing California's Water, we were trying to get a sense of the total volume of surface water rights in the state, and we got a pie chart showing more than ten times the amount of all surface and groundwater actually used each year-that's what the State Water Board had. There have definitely been improvements in both surface and groundwater use reporting since that time, but there are still important gaps. The data revolution still needs to happen.

JM: If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.

Final thoughts?

JM: I was so pleased with our myth-busting. "We need more dams!" "We're running out of water!" "Water is being wasted to the sea!" We'd explain why these statements were wrong. Water myths generally start with a kernel of truth, but they morph into silver bullet solutions that ignore the nuances and trade-offs of water management. We've done a good job over the years of doing those things and Letitia, I hope you keep taking on public myths and busting them.

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