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Ahead of the election of a new governor in California, a coalition of environmental advocacy organizations is sounding the alarm about the future of water in the Golden State. Without major changes to how water is sourced, conserved, and distributed, municipalities will struggle under the weight of ecological decline to provide the necessary resource to millions of households, according to the group’s new report, titled “A Water Renaissance for California.” 

The report released on May 20 by the coalition, which includes organizations from northern and southern parts of the state, details how a shift toward local water sourcing and away from the current model of transporting water hundreds of miles from its source can mitigate impacts of climate change, restore imperiled waterways, and help secure cities against a near-guaranteed future where water availability is less predictable. 

For over a century, California’s water policy preferenced large-scale infrastructure projects to pull water from one place and move it to another. One of the first such instances was the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913 in order to move water 233 miles from Inyo County to LA. Project scale rapidly increased, and by the middle of the 20th century, the Lake Oroville dam would be built in order to carry water 444 miles from Butte County in Northern California to LA through a series of pipes, aqueducts, and pumps. 

“The old way of doing things, like building dams, building tunnels, diverting more water … shouldn’t be used in the 21st century,” said Gary Mulcahy, who has served for 25 years as the tribal government liaison for the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, which co-authored the report. 

“When you send millions of acres of water down past the lungs of California—the Delta—you imperil the whole state,” Mulcahy, an enrolled member of the tribe, added. 

Both federal and state policies have treated water as an inanimate resource that can be moved without consequence. Advocates behind the report say that this could not be further from the truth. They argue that the mere creation of the first dam along the Sacramento River permanently displaced Wintu peoples from their homelands and prevented them from practicing their culture, the impact of which remains today. 

In the five decades since Lake Oroville first pumped snowmelt from the Sierras down to the deserts of Southern California, the state has experienced the worst droughts on record and a near total collapse of riverine systems and native species endemic to these tributaries. Meanwhile, the ground in the Central Valley has literally sunk into itself through a process called subsidence, which occurs when aquifers are overdrafted when farmers are unable to pump water from rivers. Despite a 2012 state acknowledgement that water is a human right, some of the poorest California residents living in rural areas lack access to clean, safe water.

The incoming crisis is not only the result of what happens when a government tries to engineer the environment, advocates argue, but also demonstrates how that engineering fails against the ballooning consequences of climate change. As the Colorado River runs dry and the Eastern Sierras see less snowpack due to warmer winters, going forward, it simply won’t be possible to move water from hundreds of miles away, advocates warn. 

“Recycled water is far more drought-proof than imported water from hundreds of miles away, particularly as we’re going to lose our snow pack,” said Felicia Marcus, the former chair of the California State Water Resources Control Board. 

Marcus, who is now the Landreth visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Water in the West Program,. told Prism that much of what’s proposed in the report is already at play; the coalition is calling for an expansion of these efforts. Cities and counties, especially those with more junior water rights in the southern part of the state, can expand local water sourcing through a combination of strategies, including wastewater recycling, stormwater management, ecosystem revitalization, and levee maintenance. 

Los Angeles County aims to source 80% of its water locally by 2045. That might seem like a lot for a region that uses 1.2 billion gallons a day, but a fully operational wastewater recycling project could generate 330 million gallons per day, said Bruce Reznik, the executive director of LA Waterkeeper, which co-authored the report. Orange County already recycles all of its wastewater, producing 130 million gallons of locally sourced water. 

Sourcing water locally has the added benefit of reducing risk of impacts from earthquakes as well as addressing ecosystem depletion closer to home, Reznik added. 

“It’s amazing how long we’ve been living on borrowed time,” Reznik said.

Not only is it possible to source water locally and buffer the consequences of climate change, advocates say, but also it’s much cheaper than the proposed alternative, the massive Delta Conveyance Project backed by outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom. The Delta project would pump water through a tunnel from the Sacramento River, 45 miles to the Bethany Reservoir on the California Aqueduct. While the Delta project would cost anywhere from $60 billion to 100 billion, the coalition estimated that its proposed four-part shift in water reclamation would cost $44 billion and generate up to four times as much water.

“The aspirations to do exactly what these guys are asking are there,” Marcus said. “The question is, will the state support it to the level that it ought to be supported?” 

The shift in thinking that’s required to change the status quo might be harder to come by, Marcus added. 

Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor