Advice on Voluntary Settlements for California’s Bay-Delta Water Quality...
by Jeffrey Mount, PPIC Water Policy Center Recommendation The State Water Resources Control Board and the parties seeking to incorporate voluntary settlement agreements in the Bay-Delta Water Quality...
View ArticleDrought Water Right Curtailment – Analysis, Transparency, and Limits
By Jay Lund, Ben Lord, Andrew Tweet, Wesley Walker, Chad Whittington, Reed Thayer, Jeff Laird, Quinn Hart, Nicholas Santos, William Fleenor, Julia Pavicic, Lauren Adams, and Bradley Arnold Drought...
View ArticleAdvice on Voluntary Settlements for California’s Bay-Delta Water Quality...
by Jeffrey Mount, PPIC Water Policy Center* Recommendation By strategically linking freshwater flow releases with the management of tidal energy and investments in landscape changes in the Delta, it is...
View ArticleAdvice on Voluntary Settlements for California’s Bay-Delta Water Quality...
by Jeffrey Mount, PPIC Water Policy Center* Recommendation Improving Delta ecosystem functions under the State Water Board’s proposed Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan will require a complex series...
View ArticleBack to Dry – Get Organized and Prepared for Drought Again
by Jay Lund Despite this week’s rain and snow, California is back to dry conditions again after a very wet 2017. With about four weeks left in the normal wet season, the Sacramento Valley is at about...
View ArticleIs Ecosystem-Based Management Legal for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta?
by Brian Gray (PPIC Water Policy Center), William Stelle (former NOAA Fisheries West Coast Administrator), and Leon Szeptycki (Stanford University, Water in the West)* Introduction In a recent...
View ArticleCalifornia’s Water Data Problems are Symptoms of Inchoate Science and...
“The truth is lost when there is too much contention about it.” – Publius Syrus (43 BC) by Jay Lund In 2016, California’s legislature passed AB 1755, the Open and Transparent Water Data Act, requiring...
View ArticleGroundwater Recovery in California – Still Behind the Curve
by Thomas Harter and Bill Brewster California has a unique and highly variable climate in which drought reoccurs periodically. California began this century in a dry period from 1999 to 2005, and...
View ArticleReality Check of California Water Fix Model results in a Critical Flow Year
by William Fleenor In 2008 a group from the Center for Watershed Sciences (including this author), joined by an economist from the Public Policy Institute, published findings that suggested that an...
View ArticleModeling, Measuring, and Comparing Crop Evapotranspiration in the Delta
by Jesse Jankowski Crop evapotranspiration (ET) is the biggest managed loss of water in California, accounting for roughly 80% of human net water use, and includes crop water applications transpired...
View ArticleImproving Urban Water Conservation in California
by Erik Porse The relatively dry 2017-18 winter in California resurfaced recent memories of drought conservation mandates. From 2013-16, urban water utilities complied with voluntary, then mandatory,...
View ArticleSGMA struggles to overcome marginalization of disadvantaged communities
by Kristin Dobbin Small Disadvantaged Communities (DACs), or DACs with less than 10,000 people, have long been disproportionately affected by California’s water management woes such as groundwater...
View ArticleGroundwater exchange pools in Los Angeles: An innovative example of adaptive...
by Erik Porse, Kathryn Mika, Stephanie Pincetl, Mark Gold, and William Blomquist Across California, Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) are devising plans to reduce long-term overdraft. As part...
View ArticleScience, the Delta, and the future of San Joaquin salmon
by Peter B. Moyle I feel fortunate to be a biologist in an era and place, California, where science matters. Routine scientific studies rarely make headlines but they are relied on by decision makers...
View ArticleWater storage successes, failures, and challenges from Proposition 1
by Jay Lund The California Water Commission recently allocated $2.7 billion from Proposition 1 bonds for eight water storage projects. Proposition 1 was passed in 2014 to fund a range of projects,...
View ArticleThe Public Trust and SGMA
by Brian Gray In a recent decision in litigation over flows and salmon survival in the Scott River system, the California Court of Appeal has ruled that groundwater pumping that diminishes the volume...
View ArticleU.C. Davis Law’s Environmental Law Center Releases Proposition 3 White Paper
by Richard Frank This article originally appeared on Legal Planet on October 31, 2018 The U.C. Davis School of Law’s California Environmental Law & Policy Center has published a detailed analysis...
View ArticleGetting Strategic about Freshwater Biodiversity Conservation in California
by Jeanette Howard, Kurt Fesenmyer, Theodore Grantham, Joshua Viers, Peter Ode, Peter Moyle, Sarah Kupferberg, Joseph Furnish, Andrew Rehn, Joseph Slusark, Raphael Mazor, Nicholas Santos, Ryan Peek,...
View ArticleEastern San Joaquin Valley and other CA drinking water supplies at risk in...
by Amanda Fencl, Rich Pauloo, Alvar Escriva-Bou, Hervé Guillon During the 2012-2016 drought, the state received more than 2,500 domestic well failure reports, the majority of which were in the Central...
View ArticleThe folly of unimpaired flows for water quality management
by Ann Willis Unimpaired streamflow has long been the benchmark against which current stream flows are evaluated for environmental purposes. The underlying assumption is that if there is water in a...
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