When contaminants are coming from so many sources – whether it’s farm fields or urban areas or eroding creek banks, not to mention drains and discharge pipes – balancing actions to curb them can be a daunting task for water quality watchdogs. To this end, however, the two regional water boards charged with protecting Central Valley waterways and San Francisco Bay from contamination have effectively wielded the “TMDL.” This Clean Water Act tool allows the boards to set a total maximum daily load of a contaminant for an impaired water body, and to work with diverse sources to reduce the load collectively. Such efforts often inspire new regulations, and a suite of related outreach and prevention programs. In this afternoon session, speakers described their experiences managing two priority contaminants – pesticides from agricultural irrigation upstream and urban creeks downstream, and sediment in the Napa River watershed.
To be more specific, the Board set water quality objectives of 0.10 ug/L for diazinon and 0.015 ug/L for chlorpyrifos, and reached out to the Central Valley’s 35,000 farmers to meet them. “We monitored, we assessed, we made regulations. But just having a regulation doesn’t mean it gets implemented,” said Karkoski. “It’s not enough to create incentives, we also need new tools to get things done.”
Using the tools available, the Board encouraged agricultural coalitions to take a variety of pollution prevention steps related to pesticides and erosion. These included switching from furrow or flood irrigation to drip irrigation and micro-sprinklers; building sedimentation ponds; and doing a better job of managing tailwater return systems. The Board also worked with the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR), which in turn created some new dormant spray regulations. Among other things, these required anyone spraying fruit trees during the dormant cool season to maintain100-foot buffer zones from waterways, and prohibited spraying during a storm. More importantly, if alternative pesticides are used, they can’t cause a water quality problem, explained Karkoski.
Since 2004, there are far fewer exceedances of water quality objectives for the two pesticides, thanks to the program. But pyrethroids, their main replacement, now exceed objectives for water 40-50 percent of the time, and can be just as toxic to some aquatic organisms. “You can spend a lot of time in the weeds monitoring, but what we really need is to spend more time anticipating,” said Karkoski. “If you stop paying attention, problems are probably going to reoccur. We need to deal with not only particular contaminants, but also with pollutant pathways, and figure out how to sustain positive results.”
Manufacturers agreed with U.S. EPA to end sales of all urban products in 2004, and diazinon use plummeted in Sacramento and the Bay Area. “Diazinon in our creeks dropped to zero three years after the ban,” said Moran. Various pyrethroids replaced diazinon as the active ingredient in many urban pesticide products. “Unfortunately we just traded one type of toxicity for another.” Indeed, Bay Area use of pyrethroids tripled in four years, and toxicity climbed again.
The San Francisco Water Board, with Moran’s help, was ahead of the game. In crafting its 2005 TMDL for diazinon, it recognized that there was a general problem with pesticides and built in a more big picture approach. “This was not a traditional TMDL. This TMDL addresses future pesticide related toxicity, and promotes integrated pest management,” said Moran.
“It’s not about lawn and garden pesticides, it’s about pesticides used around buildings, much of which are sprayed in urban areas on impervious surfaces, ” said Moran. And the main reason city dwellers are using pesticides is not to control fleas or mosquitos or termites, but to control something much more harmless: ants.
Concerned about the water quality impacts of all this spraying, the TMDL team suggested that DPR consider actions to reduce pyrethroids in runoff. At the time, product labels directed users to apply pesticides in a 10-foot wide spray zone around buildings to prevent ants. DPR determined to restrict the spray zone on pyrethroids to two feet, rather than 10, which is just as effective.
DPR also broadened its view on new product registration. “The big fix has been getting DPR to ask a question it never asked before: will this product cause water pollution?” said Moran. On the federal level, EPA has also improved its pesticide review process.
Indeed this “untraditional” pesticide TMDL has led to landmark changes, said Moran, including California regulations coupled with special restrictions placed on bifenthrin (the most environmentally persistent pyrethroid) that are together expected to reduce pyrethroid-caused toxicity by 80-90 percent.
“We built a team that coordinated water quality and pesticide regulation for the first time, and included wastewater and stormwater dischargers. All it takes is a good structure, a good plan, and education,” concluded Moran.
Education also featured strongly in the Napa County Resource Conservation District’s efforts to curb sediment pollution to the Napa River, according to the third speaker Leigh Sharp. Expansion of vineyard development from the valley floor to the hillsides was common in the late 1980s and increased erosion. In the early 90s, facing declines in salmon and steelhead and a threat to aquatic habitat, the regional water board listed the Napa River and its tributaries as water quality impaired for excessive sedimentation. The problem even made the news when sediment from a newly developing vineyard slid into St. Helena’s drinking water supply. “You can’t use the same erosion control practices on hillsides as you do in the flatlands,” said Sharp.
Next, the local community got to work and passed a hillside ordinance that requires any property developed on an over five percent slope to have: an engineered erosion control plan; appropriate winter cover crops; and setbacks from forests and creeks, among other things. As a result, Sharp calls Napa “the most regulated agricultural community in the state, perhaps the nation, with over 14,000 acres of hillside vineyard under erosion control plans.” In the early 2000s, the water board launched their TMDL process and began studying the multitude of factors that limit salmon and steelhead production in the Napa River watershed.
At the same time, the community continued to voluntarily form watershed management groups, implement fish-friendly farming practices, and develop a program called “Napa Green.” According to Sharp, “They wanted certainty and some control of their own destiny, they wanted to get ahead of more regulation.”
As a result, according to Sharp, “in many aspects, the community is now exceeding the requirements of the sediment TMDL.” Local interests are restoring thirteen miles of predominantly privately-owned Napa River frontage through public-private partnerships, removal of fish migration barriers, developing sustainability plans through a variety of third-party programs, and implementing priority erosion control projects in tributary watersheds that support threatened steelhead. More than 80 miles of habitat have been made more accessible to fish in just four years. “There have been a lot of bottom-up creative approaches because the community recognizes that sediment isn’t the only problem. Many vineyard owners voluntarily rededicate portions of their land to the river to reclaim,” said Sharp.
Results from five years of out-migrant fisheries monitoring demonstrate that steelhead in the Napa River are now relatively large and smolt production fairly consistent. These are good signs for the Napa River watershed, but there is more to do, said Sharp. Napa County, US EPA, and other partners are investing in development of a TMDL accounting system, for example, the success of which will depend upon cooperation from stakeholders, regulatory agencies, funders, and policy makers. “I don’t think you can write a regulation that would spawn this level of effort. The greatest benefits of the TMDL were the conversations and the relationships that happened – the mixing zone between information and action.”
Central Valley Irrigated Lands Program
Central Valley Board TMDLs
Urban Creeks Pesticide TMDL
Napa Watersheds
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By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto
Nothing could be stranger than sitting in the dark with thousands of suits and heels, watching a parade of promises to decarbonize from companies and countries large and small, reeling from the beauties of big screen rainforests and indigenous necklaces, and getting all choked up.
It was day two of the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco when I felt it.
At first I wondered if I was simply starstruck. Most of us labor away trying to fix one small corner of the planet or another without seeing the likes of Harrison Ford, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, Van Jones, Jerry Brown – or the ministers or mayors of dozens of cities and countries – in person, on stage and at times angry enough to spit. And between these luminaries a steady stream of CEOs, corporate sustainability officers, and pension fund managers promising percentages of renewables and profits in their portfolios dedicated to the climate cause by 2020-2050.
I tried to give every speaker my full attention: the young man of Vuntut Gwichin heritage from the edge of the Yukon’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge who pleaded with us not to enter his sacred lands with our drills and dependencies; all the women – swathed in bright patterns and head-scarfs – who kept punching their hearts. “My uncle in Uganda would take 129 years to emit the same amount of carbon as an American would in one year,” said Oxfam’s Winnie Byanyima.
“Our janitors are shutting off the lights you leave on,” said Aida Cardenas, speaking about the frontline workers she trains, mostly immigrants, who are excited to be part of climate change solutions in their new country.
The men on the stage, strutting about in feathers and pinstripes, spoke of hopes and dreams, money and power. “The notion that you can either do good or do well is a myth we have to collectively bust,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy whose state is investing heavily in offshore wind farms.
“Climate change isn’t just about risks, it’s about opportunities,” said Blackrock sustainable investment manager Brian Deese.
But it wasn’t all these fine speeches that started the butterflies. Halfway through the second day of testimonials, it was a slight white-haired woman wrapped in an azure pashmina that pricked my tears. One minute she was on the silver screen with Alec Baldwin and the next she taking a seat on stage. She talked about trees. How trees can solve 30% of our carbon reduction problem. How we have to stop whacking them back in the Amazon and start planting them everywhere else. I couldn’t help thinking of Dr. Seuss and his truffala trees. Jane Goodall, over 80, is as fierce as my Lorax. Or my daughter’s Avatar.
Analyzing my take home feeling from the event I realized it wasn’t the usual fear – killer storms, tidal waves, no food for my kids to eat on a half-baked planet – nor a newfound sense of hope – I’ve always thought nature will get along just fine without us. What I felt was relief. People were actually doing something. Doing a lot. And there was so much more we could do.
As we all pumped fists in the dark, as the presentations went on and on and on because so many people and businesses and countries wanted to STEP UP, I realized how swayed I had let myself be by the doomsday news mill.
“We must be like the river, “ said a boy from Bangladesh named Risalat Khan, who had noticed our Sierra watersheds from the plane. “We must cut through the mountain of obstacles. Let’s be the river!”
Or as Harrison Ford less poetically put it: “Let’s turn off our phones and roll up our sleeves and kick this monster’s ass.”
by Isaac Pearlman
Since California’s last state-led climate change assessment in 2012, the Golden State has experienced a litany of natural disasters. This includes four years of severe drought from 2012 to 2016, an almost non-existent Sierra Nevada snowpack in 2014-2015 costing $2.1 billion in economic losses, widespread Bay Area flooding from winter 2017 storms, and extremely large and damaging wildfires culminating with this year’s Mendocino Complex fire achieving the dubious distinction of the largest in state history. California’s most recent climate assessment, released August 27th, predicts that for the state and the Bay Area, we can expect even more in the future.
The California state government first began assessing climate impacts formally in 2006, due to an executive order by Governor Schwarzenegger. California’s latest iteration and its fourth overall, includes a dizzying array of 44 technical reports; three topical studies on climate justice, tribal and indigenous communities, and the coast and ocean; as well as nine region-specific analyses.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.
For the first time, California’s latest assessment dives into climate consequences on a regional level. Academics representing nine California regions spearheaded research and summarized the best available science on the variable heat, rain, flooding and extreme event consequences for their areas. For example, the highest local rate of sea level rise in the state is at the rapidly subsiding Humboldt Bay. In San Diego county, the most biodiverse in all of California, preserving its many fragile and endangered species is an urgent priority. Francesca Hopkins from UC Riverside found that the highest rate of childhood asthma in the state isn’t an urban smog-filled city but in the Imperial Valley, where toxic dust from Salton Sea disaster chokes communities – and will only become worse as higher temperatures and less water due to climate change dry and brittle the area.
According to the Bay Area Regional Report, since 1950 the Bay Area has already increased in temperature by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit and local sea level is eight inches higher than it was one hundred years ago. Future climate will render the Bay Area less suitable for our evergreen redwood and fir forests, and more favorable for tolerant chaparral shrub land. The region’s seven million people and $750 billion economy (almost one-third of California’s total) is predicted to be increasingly beset by more “boom and bust” irregular wet and very dry years, punctuated by increasingly intense and damaging storms.
Unsurprisingly, according to the report the Bay Area’s intensifying housing and equity problems have a multiplier affect with climate change. As Bay Area housing spreads further north, south, and inland the result is higher transportation and energy needs for those with the fewest resources available to afford them; and acute disparity in climate vulnerability across Bay Area communities and populations.
“All Californians will likely endure more illness and be at greater risk of early death because of climate change,” bluntly states the statewide summary brochure for California’s climate assessment. “[However] vulnerable populations that already experience the greatest adverse health impacts will be disproportionately affected.”
“We’re much better at being reactive to a disaster than planning ahead,” said UC Berkeley professor and contributing author David Ackerly at a California Adaptation Forum panel in Sacramento on August 27th. “And it is vulnerable communities that suffer from those disasters. How much human suffering has to happen before it triggers the next round of activity?”
The assessment’s data is publicly available online at “Cal-adapt,” where Californians can explore projected impacts for their neighborhoods, towns, and regions.
