On Monday, January 12, the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) hosted an event in downtown Sacramento entitled Managing Drought, which brought together prominent leaders in the scientific, private sector, management, policy, and government arenas to discuss current and future droughts in California. It created an opportunity to reflect on what's happening, what's not happening, and what should happen when it comes to drought management in California today and in the future.

In the first keynote address, California State Climatologist Mike Anderson brought everyone in the room (and the webcast) up to speed on the California drought and climate change implications. Citing recent publications, Anderson emphasized that not only is California's precipitation highly variable from year to year but whether we're wet or dry depends upon just a few storm events.(1,2) With regard to the current drought, Anderson stressed that much is missed in just the basic statistics, reminding the audience that more demands and much warmer temperatures (as a result of climate change) exacerbate drought impacts.

Jane Doolan, a professor at the University of Canberra and a member of the National Water Commission in Australia, delivered the second keynote on Australia's millennium drought. She provided insights from a policy perspective on what did and did not work. The policy response to the drought, Doolan explained, was approached with the perspective that the changes were for long term viability, not simply a response to crisis – an issue that was echoed throughout the day. Australia employed several principles: policies should

• work under drier futures,
• improve efficiency and conservation,
• allow water right holders to mitigate risk,
• support water markets, and
• offer multi-benefit solutions.

Some key changes included adding to the water grid which made it easier to move water around and the establishment of an environmental water management portfolio with “clear and unambiguous water for the environment.” Doolan cautioned that with recent floods, people are now saying that many of the changes aren't needed, illustrating the importance of building policies for the long term.

To address legislative priorities, the first panel was moderated by water law expert Buzz Thompson of Stanford University and consisted of four legislators: Jean Fuller, Marc Levine, Anthony Rendon, and Lois Wolk. With regard to funding related to the 2014 Proposition 1 (water bond) and California Sustainable Groundwater Act, remarks centered on the importance of using the money strategically, treating it as a “down payment,” and using it to build infrastructure. Top oversight priorities for the legislators were water storage, tools for local entities, emerging technologies, and guidance on goals for local resilience under climate change. Given the focus on local communities, concern was raised over local entities being unable to raise rates (Proposition 218 requires a two thirds vote). The importance of getting allocated money out the door to local entities for groundwater studies and plans was emphasized multiple times. When asked the question of what one area the legislators would focus on for drought resilience, Levine discussed learning from countries such as Australia, Rendon stressed government and structure issues, Wolk spoke of the need for better science to determine targets, and Fuller discussed finding the reality of what was possible. Questions from the audience followed. One in particular rung true to which no one had a clear answer: How do we create a new vision on water in California like Australia seems to have done?

The next panel addressed urban and agricultural water scarcity, which was introduced by Jay Lund, a professor and director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences. His take-homes included a need for more tightly managed water given its scarcity, encouragement of water markets, reformed urban pricing structure, and a need for drills or “dry runs.” Representing a wholesaler water district, Susan Milligan of Calleguas Municipal Water District expressed the need for the state to help address issues they couldn't regulate alone. Joe Macllvaine of Paramount Farms explained that while most agree groundwater management needs to happen, it will cause economic upheaval that needs to be thought about carefully. One of several issues raised by Martha Guzman-Aceves of the Office of the Governor is that there are many sub-questions to be addressed when it comes to implementing water markets. Andrew Fahlund of the California Water Foundation emphasized goal setting and a willingness to test, try, fail, and try again.

This was followed by a panel on managing ecosystems during drought, which was introduced by Jeff Mount of PPIC and Professor Emeritus at UC Davis. Mount's three main points were: 1) investing in ecosystems when times are good, 2) creating a reliable funding source for the environment, and 3) drought planning. Highlights of this panel included an eloquent discussion of the incredible difficulty making choices during times of scarcity and their human toll by Chuck Bonhom, director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Sandi Matsumoto of The Nature Conservancy encouraged us to think about the when, where and how of providing habitat. Peter Moyle, Professor at UC Davis, urged the development of “clear and unambiguous rights for the environment” similar to those established in Australia. Tim Quinn, Executive Director of the Association of California Water Agencies, suggested we need to move to a system that is more flexible and includes multi-purpose strategies.

The last panel on allocating water through the state's water rights system was introduced by Brian Gray of the University of California, Hastings College of Law. He noted that the requirement that we tightly manage water in drought is hampered by a lack of detailed information. We need, he argued, to be more specific about how water is being used so that can be taken into account when curtailments need to happen. A number of key points were made by the panel. Felicia Marcus, Chair of the State Water Resources Control Board, followed on the issue of data needs by pointing out that it's not just availability for researchers and managers but also availability and transparency for everyone. She also stressed that many issues could be solved by better implementing the water rights priority already in place. Other key points included Davis Guy of the Northern California Water Association stressing the issue of protecting storage releases in times of drought, Jill Duerig of Alameda County Zone 7 Water Agency suggesting we improve how we allocate depending on water year, and Bill Croyle of the California Department of Water Resources stated that the emergency created by the drought opened the door to dialog and transparency.

I appreciated this opportunity to hear from a leader on water governance in Australia, California legislators, and other prominent figures in the California water world. Discussions addressed specific topics, but also got to upper level issues including the question of how to sustain momentum to produce lasting change. Though this question is not resolved, it seems to me that discussions such as these are central to promoting its resolution.

More information about the event and videos of the talks and panels can be found on the PPIC website.

Panel on allocating water during drought, with moderator Ellen Hanak from the PPIC. Public Policy Institute of California.

Notes:

1 Dettinger, M.D., Ralph, F.M., Das, T., Neiman, P.J., Cayan, D.R., 2011. Atmospheric Rivers, Floods and the Water Resources of California. Water, 3(2): 445-478.

2 Dettinger, M., Cayan, D.R., 2014. Drought and the California Delta—A Matter of Extremes. San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science, 12(2).

The caption on an old tourist sign in Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park: “Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.”

Image: Black Point, Exuma Islands, Bahamas. Photo: Lauren Foster

The full moon is high when my sister and I slip off our 44 foot sailboat to row ashore on Warderick Wells Cay in the Bahamas. Locals in the area assert that if you climb to the highest part of the island at night you can hear cries on the wind, though the varied history of piracy and shipwreck at this spot make the ghosts' identity a mystery.

In the early 18^th century it was a hideout for many of the more notorious pirates of the Caribbean and as I look to the south I can see three islands named after Mary Read, Anne Bonney, and Edward Teach (Blackbeard). This spot was an ideal hideout for these famous pirates because it has a protected, hidden harbor deep enough for 12 foot draft pirate ships; a clear view of merchant ships headed through a narrow channel for the Bahama banks from the North Atlantic; but, perhaps most importantly, it is one of the few islands in the area with a supply of fresh water (Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park).

Image: Bronze sculpture of Mary Read and Anne Bonney by Erik Christianson (http://www.erikchristianson.com/sisters-of-the-sea/). Anne and Mary are famous for standing their ground in an attack from Jamaican law enforcers while the rest of their crew fled belowdecks. Mary yelled to her comrades: “if there's a man among ye, ye'll come up and fight like the man ye are to be!” (Abott, 2011).

According to the United Nations, fresh water is designated as a ‘scarce' resource if a country has less than 1,000 m³/capita/year. At 66 m³/capita/year the Bahamas ranked number 177 out of 180 countries for water availability in 2002. The main sources of water in the Bahamas are fresh water lenses in Pleistocene and Holocene limestone aquifers (see Figure 1). Precipitation percolates slowly through the porous limestone, settling on top of the saline seawater because the fresh water is less dense. The rock acts as a freshwater reservoir, slowing the rate of flow and thus the rate of mixing between the fresh and salt water (Army Corps of Engineers, 2004).

Figure: Hydrogeology of a Bahamian fresh water lens. The shallow sea, called the Bahama Banks, is located on the west side of the Exuma Cays, while the deep sea is located on the east side facing Exuma sound and the North Atlantic. In the Exumas the maximum depth of freshwater lenses is 16m, though most are only a meter or two below the land surface. The specific capacity of these aquifers is quite small, making modern groundwater development impractical (Army Corps of Engineers, 2004).

The country depends on desalinization plants and bottled water in addition to their small natural supply of freshwater. Beyond that, however, conservation is a necessary part of sustainable water use. Residential consumption is estimated to be between 150-200 liters/person/day. This is a sharp contrast to the tourist consumption of 400-1,000 liters/person/day (Integrated Coastal Management Planning, 2012). This discrepancy demonstrates that tourists from mainland areas have a lot to learn about water conservation.

Image: Our Alden 44 sailboat, HoKa, and my home for two weeks this winter. Photo: Lauren Foster

Living on a 44' sailboat for two weeks in the Exuma Cays provided me with direct experience focusing on consuming a minimal amount of fresh water. Our boat holds about 500 liters of water. We refilled 270 liters halfway through the trip. That meant we were consuming no more than 15 liters/person/day in spite of having most modern conveniences like a shower, bathroom and kitchen sink, toilet, refrigerator, and freezer. We did not carry any bottled water. Here are some of the key practices we employed to conserve water without sacrificing comfort:

1. We took navy-style showers: turn the water on to get wet, turn it off to soap or shampoo, then turn it on to rinse.
2. While rinsing off in the shower could be a daily occurrence, showering with soap and shampoo was limited to every few days.
3. When washing dishes we would soak them first in, for example, the empty (but dirty) salad bowl or pot. After emptying the super dirty water, we would soap each dish without running water. Silverware would get rinsed in a clean water glass. I would rinse glasses using the same amount of water, pouring from one to the next until the water was too soapy. Plates I rinsed one at a time, but in a stack so each one partially cleaned the ones below.

None of these practices were uncomfortable, inconvenient, or even slower than the way I do things at home. I was able to brush my teeth each night with a sink, wash my hands often, and shower regularly. I intend to continue practicing these conservation techniques on the mainland because the truth is we need to conserve water in the Western United States too. In California residential use has dropped from 880 liters/person/day to 670 liters/person/day over the past 20 years (Mount 2014). Can you imagine the impact of each person consuming only 15 liters/person/day?

My awareness of the value of fresh water has been sharpened by my weeks on the boat, so as I climb Boo Boo Hill in the darkness I understand how access to fresh water was a key piece of Blackbeard's successful piracy in the Bahamas. It makes sense that Mary Read and Anne Bonney would choose this particular cay to wait for unknowing ships to come through. Though the night is still, as we near the crest of the hill we hear a sound like wind in a tight tunnel or a sharp intake of breath. Almost as if there were thirsty ghosts wandering the tides to find one sip of that precious, life-giving resource: fresh water.

References:

Abbott, Karen (2011). “If there's a man among ye: the tale of pirate queens Anne Bonny and Mary Read.” Smithsonian Magazine. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history.

Army Corps of Engineers (2004). “Water resources assessment of the Bahamas.” http://www.sam.usace.army.mil/Portals/46/docs/military/engineering/docs/WRA/Bahamas/BAHAMAS1WRA.pdf

Christianson, Erik. “Sisters of the sea.” Bronze sculpture. http://www.erikchristianson.com

Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park. http://www.exumapark.org/

Integrated Coastal Management Planning (2012). “Integrating watershed and coastal area management in the small island developing states of the Caribbean: Technical Report: National Report for the Bahamas.” http://iwlearn.net/iw-projects/1254/reports/bahamas-national-report.pdf

Mount, Jeffery; Freeman, Emma; Lund, Jay (2014). “Water Use in California.” Public Policy Institute of California. http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_show.asp?i=1108

We've had several weeks now to fully recover from the most recent American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, which takes place in San Francisco each December. The AGU Fall Meeting is the largest geoscience-centric conference in the world, bringing together nearly 20,000 attendees in 2014. This was my second time attending; the first time was several years ago when I was still a wee undergrad from UT Austin presenting the fruits of my Honors Thesis. It was during that 2011 AGU Fall Meeting that I stumbled upon the CCWAS booth, and having never heard of IGERT traineeships, was immediately intrigued by the opportunity.

Three years and three cohorts later, the CCWAS booth still had a strong presence in the exhibitor hall, but we also had an incredible showing in the form of oral, poster, and pop-up talk presentations. Here's a brief recap.

CCWAS Principal Investigators

Reed Maxwell gave an invited talk on hyperresolution integrated modeling of groundwater and surface water scaling over the continental US as part of an all-star session with other hydrology big hitters such as Dennis Lettenmaier, 

Bridget Scanlon, and Jay Famiglietti. Graham Fogg spoke about his work with the connected network paradigm, which is a potential solution to the observation bias in hydraulic conductivity measurements for regional groundwater flow and transport modeling.

2012 Cohort

Alison Whipple, who recently advanced to PhD candidacy, gave a poster on characterizing past and future flood regimes of the Cosumnes River. Her work moves beyond the traditional flood frequency methodology with novel statistical cluster analysis and ecologically relevant metrics. Posters also included Alan Rhoades with a poster on his work with variable resolution modeling of Sierra Nevada snowpack. He developed a 25-year ensemble climatology for the region within the Community Earth System model (a global climate model), which provided an exciting case study for the variable resolution approach.

2013 Cohort

Laura Condon gave an invited talk on the spatial patterns gleaned from her work on the high-resolution integrated hydrologic model of the Continental US. She found that topography as opposed to recharge controls the water table in the arid West at the regional scale, but that subsurface heterogeneity complicates those patterns at the local scale. James Gilbert gave a poster presentation on his modeling research, which focuses on the impacts of climate change on the San Joaquin basin—arguably ground zero for the clash between agricultural production and groundwater overdraft in California. Lauren Adams' poster had such a clever title that I dare not paraphrase it: “Better Redd than Dead: Optimizing Reservoir Operations for Wild Fish Survival During Drought.” Katie Markovich gave a poster presentation on her work using integrated hydrologic models to characterize the relative impacts of future climate scenarios on alpine hydrology, as well as the hydrogeologic controls on feedbacks to warming and drought. Jorge Guerra's poster focused on Tempest, a modeling framework he is developing that allows for investigation and intercomparison of high-order numerical methods, and improves atmospheric dynamics in the vertical direction where existing methods are deficient.

2014 Cohort

Stephen Maples used his work with the USGS Nevada Water Science Center for his poster, which identified plant-produced organic compounds as pathways and reservoirs for tritium transport in the Amargosa Desert. Alejo Kraus-Polk gave an engaging pop-up talk on reconciling human needs with hydroecological health of the San Joaquin River. The pop-up sessions are a new addition to the AGU Fall Meeting, where early career students can gain experience communicating their research in a creative yet concise format.

Ultimately, we socialized, we talked about research, we exchanged business cards, and we all had a great time. Looking forward to seeing what CCWAS brings next year!

A levee in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Ellen Roberts/UC Davis Stacy Roberts and Lauren Foster in Locke. Amanda Fencl/UC Davis. Franks Island, site of a levee break in the 1930's. Ellen Roberts/UC Davis

On Saturday, November 15th, several CCWAS students, along with students in Jay Lund's water management course and Rick Frank's environmental law class, took a tour of the Delta. From seven in the morning until five at night, we drove over bridges, on top of levies, and all around the islands that make up this hydrologic empire. Mountains and water, fog and sun, rural areas and urban-- it can all be found here. The last stop we made before returning to Davis was Locke, a former Chinese worker town where those who built the levees lived. Visiting the town reminded me of how the ecological richness of this estuary reflects and is responsible for the equally rich social history embedded in the landscape. As Rick Frank explained, in the comparatively “unenlightened” social world of the later nineteenth century, white men may have capitalized reclamation efforts and owned the land in the Delta, but it was Chinese gang laborers who actually completed the work. Thereafter and until the Great Depression of the 1930s, Delta farms produced high-value specialty crops such as asparagus, potatoes, and sugar beets, which were planted, pruned, picked, and canned by Chinese, then Japanese, and then Filipino workers. Each successive group of people came to fill the labor void left by restrictive immigration laws, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States. In addition, prevailing racial ideologies of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries viewed people coming from Asia as naturally suited for the “exacting” stoop labor required of “inferior” truck crops. Such work was too menial for white people and did not suit their bodies, went the thinking of the day. This should give us pause and force us to think about how the terms “nature” and “natural” were used and how those meanings have changed over time1. “Nature” meant something very different to nineteenth-century Americans than it does to us today. Not only were there “natural” racial hierarchies, but the non-human world was imbued with symbolism and meaning foreign to our own thinking. The businessmen and farmers who sought to “improve” the malarial wetlands in the Delta and Central Valley believed they were “finishing nature” and fulfilling God's plan on earth by bringing order to a chaotic landscape. Federal and state laws supported them. Their actions consisted of a subset of the human species altering a landscape to meet material wants and needs. Was their work unnatural?

On Saturday we saw a different arrangement of water, soils, plants, animals, and human settlement than existed one hundred, two hundred, or even two thousand years ago. Does that make it unnatural?

As we were leaving the Delta smelt research and breeding facility, Alejo and I visited with a law student who seemed discombobulated about everything we had just learned. The smelts' entire life cycle and breeding patterns are concocted and controlled by biological engineers. Researchers and resource managers do not want the hatchery fish released into the wild unless there is a severe drop in wild Delta smelt populations because uncertainty remains as to whether breeding between the two would produce adverse genetic effects. And yet, engineered Delta smelt are fish just like any other fish—they swim, eat, behave, and have fish genes just like any other fish. But are they natural?

Historians do not provide clean, neat answers to questions or problems that arise. In fact, our job is to complicate and add nuances to stories and ideas. The terms “nature” and “natural” are not static and unchanging; they, too, have a history and are culturally constructed. But I think we would do well to heed what eminent historian Richard White wrote in his introduction to The Organic Machine: “We might want to look for the natural in the dams and the unnatural in the salmon” and “find, paradoxically, along those blurred and dirty boundaries ways to better live with our dilemmas." ² 

Notes

¹ Matthew Morse Booker, Down By The Bay: San Francisco's History Between the Tides (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), 104-105; Cecilia M. Tsu, Garden of the World: Asian Immigrants and the Making of Agriculture in California's Santa Clara Valley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 28-30.

2 Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), xi.