How California can solve its growing water crisis

With snowpack and storage at historic lows, California and 95% of the West are suffering the worst drought in modern history. Marin and Santa Clara counties have imposed mandatory cutbacks, and other counties are considering the same. However painful, it is time for California to move quickly. Here are the steps — starting with the least intrusive and least expensive — that state and local government need to take now to avoid the dystopia that Cape Town, South Africa, endured in 2018 when the faucets ran dry.

First, we should make conservation a way of life. Utilities must increase tried-andtrue mandatory 20% conservation and water recycling from 2019 usage. That means ordinances requiring separate potable and nonpotable plumbing and greywater systems to recycle wastewater for irrigation and cooling towers. It means restricting corporate ornamental lawns and increasing noncompliance penalties too. The good news is that the world’s two largest water companies, Parisbased newly merged Veolia/Suez and New York-based Xylem, are already leading the way by providing new leak-detection software that can dramatically reduce waste.

We also need to shift water retailers’ own incentives. While they will never say it publicly, water utilities do not like conservation, because selling less water means less revenue. Fixed costs remain the same, meaningless margin. The power sector has solved this by decoupling sales from profits. For them, more conservation equals more profit. California is a global leader in energy conservation and can do the same for water using low-cost loans and regulatory relief in return for reform.

California needs to increase its lead-inefficient crop management and escalate enforcement of 2014’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act as well. The state could take even more aggressive action by buying out water-inefficient farmland and converting it into wildlife conservation or renewable energy land. This would be especially valuable due to Article X in California’s Constitution, which gives the ag industry many of the most senior water rights.

Third, we need to increase California’s water storage capacity. California’s system was built over the last hundred years for 10 million people. Today, we have nearly 40 million people and yet less organic snowpack storage with rising temperatures. Smart implementation of the SGMA can use alreadybuilt natural cisterns: aquifers. Artificial structures can complement, such as Los Angeles’ new Headworks complex on the banks of the Los Angeles River — the largest underground water storage facility in the West. This was an important step forward for a part of the state with a fraction of our storage capacity — and we need more.

We need to also take a look at surface storage. The last surface storage bond — the $7.5 billion Proposition 1 — was a nearly unanimous, bipartisan vote by the Legislature and passed by the voters. However, no new surface storage has been built since the New Melones Dam in 1979 — mostly due to environmental litigation. One easy tit-for-tat would be to simplify CEQA for surface storage projects that use unionized contractors. Storage is not cheap, but it will be the next best solution after conservation.

Finally, as a last resort, desalinization should not be off the table. Turning saltwater into freshwater sounds like magic — and it is — but it requires a vast amount of energy (off-peak renewable could help), produces salt byproduct and disrupts ocean inflows/outflows. It may be our best alternative for certain regions of the state, such as Santa Barbara.

With temperatures rising and snowpacks melting, Californians need to act quickly to ensure we’re poised for the same level of growth in the 21st century that we enjoyed in the last. By using smart public policy, investments and new technologies, California can show we still have the entrepreneurial mindset that has made it the world’s innovation center. But that’s going to require the financial and political commitment to start building water-efficient buildings, water recycling, all-of-the-above storage, and in select cases desalinization. There is no time to waste and even less water.