Download: Estuary News, October 2013 PDF
The primary water use goal of the 1993 CCMP was to “develop and implement aggressive water management measures to increase freshwater availability to the estuary.” Given that one of the actions to meet that goal was water recycling, it is ironic that one of the best models of recycling in the Bay Area at the time had been designed to cut back on freshwater flows to the estuary.
The City of Santa Clara had started a program in 1989 to recycle treated wastewater after biologists discovered that freshwater coming into the bay from their treatment plant was converting salt marshes to brackish marshes. These habitat changes didn’t help the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse or California clapper rail.
The Regional Water Quality Control Board placed a limit on the amount of water they could discharge, says Steve Ritchie of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, and “as a result they started to develop a fairly aggressive recycled water program, and that was a big step forward.”
Their project came online just as California had entered the worst multi-year drought in the state’s recorded history. “The 1988-92 drought reinforced the reality that California has a Mediterranean climate and that water supplies can be very limited,” says Peter Brostrom with the California Department of Water Resources. “Limited water supplies and battles over water go back to the gold mining days, but big dams and other water projects allowed the general public to forget about water for awhile.” The 1988-92 drought brought back that reality, he says, and the year we came out of that drought was the first of what was to become a 20-year effort to reduce water use in the state.
Reclaimed water has been used in California on a small scale for more than a century. A major factor limiting reuse is the cost of distribution, says Ritchie. “At the same time, it seems a pity to take very pure water from the Sierra Nevada, use it once, and throw it away.”
Water agencies in the region have added significant recycling capacity over the last 20 years. A 1987 report issued by the Water Resources Control Board said there were 18 reclamation plants in the Bay Area that recycled and reused 13,016 acre-feet of water per year. Today, 30 systems recycle about 60,000 acre-feet a year.
“Public opinion of recycled water has gotten better,” says Ritchie. “No matter what the commodity is, it’s second nature to recycle things now.”
The San Francisco Estuary Partnership’s 2011 State of San Francisco Bay report sought to tease out more detailed information on how recycled water might be putting a dent in demand for fresh Sierra snowmelt or groundwater. The report suggested that more than 35,000 acre-feet of recycled water is being used in the Bay Area to irrigate landscaping and cool and clean industries and oil refineries, freeing up an equivalent amount of potable, stream or groundwater. The report also found that between 2001 and 2010, total recycled water use in the Bay Area increased by more than 50 percent.
Recycled water use has greater possibilities. Ritchie believes that we will likely be drinking recycled water in the future. “It’s not going to happen tomorrow, but there’s more research going on now than has occurred any time in my career,” says Ritchie, who has worked for water agencies for nearly 30 years.
The CCMP also identified urban and agricultural conservation as an action needed to increase freshwater availability to the estuary. And nothing inspires real behavioral change like a drought. By 1993, water agencies were forced to implement conservation measures, and the state put a number of measures into place to encourage more conservation, such as low-flow toilet standards. A number of water districts followed suit, particularly those in Southern California.
Though the City of Los Angeles has a million more people than it did 20 years ago, it is using the same amount of water. “That’s a huge improvement in efficiency,” says Brostrom.
Western water consultant Barry Nelson also praises the work being done in Southern California. “Los Angeles recently launched the biggest groundwater clean up ever attempted, Orange County has built the largest water recycling facility in the world, and Santa Monica is planning to eliminate the use of imported water by 2020.” Similarly, the City of Los Angeles’ latest goal is to buy half as much imported water by 2035. To get that done, the city is utilizing water conservation, groundwater clean-up, storm water capture, and wastewater recycling, “the exact tools that environmentalists have been recommending for years,” says Nelson.
The cities to the south aren’t the only ones that can point to progress. Until a few years ago, Fresno and Sacramento were the largest cities in the state lacking water meters. “Just by selling water meters, and by telling folks they are going to get billed based on the amount of water they used, water use in Fresno has fallen from 320 gallons per capita per day to 250 gallons per day,” says Nelson. Other water agencies are doing innovative work with metering, conjunctive use, and partnering with other agencies, such as the Sonoma County Water Agency and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.
Peter Brostrom says it looks like the state as a whole is on track to reach its goal of reducing water use by 20 percent in 2020, though the official report won’t be out until June 2014. “The question is, as the economy bounces back, will water use go back up with it?”
There have been changes on the agricultural front, too. Brostrom, a former farmer, says that many farmers have shifted towards drip irrigation, and have seen that better water management results in better yields. “Statewide there’s an estimate that we’re over-drafting groundwater aquifers by a million acre-feet annually,” says Brostrom. Farmers are feeling the same pressure as everyone else.
“There’s no doubt that agriculture is still fighting hard to get more water out of the Delta,” says Nelson. “But if you look at what’s happening on the ground, the change is interesting. Farmers in the Westlands Water District are growing on less land than they were 20 years ago, moving to more high value crops, and investing in drip irrigation and other conservation practices. As a result, they are making more money with less water. Westlands and environmentalists still often disagree, but the farmers have shown an incredible ability to adapt.”
A revised CCMP in 2007 recognized that many challenges remain but it also recognized some successes. The CCMP pushed for integrating management across the region, for example, and Ritchie, who chairs the coordinating committee of the Bay Area Integrated Regional Water Management Plan, says they are close to finalizing an update of the plan. “It forces us to think across issue areas. It gets people out of the silos they sit in.”
On a more local level, many office parks and shopping centers have replaced water and chemical-intensive lawns with drought-friendly native plants, and are using recycled water to irrigate. For its part, the Partnership has been championing green infrastructure and low impact development.
When the people interviewed for this story were asked if we were on track to meet the water use goal of the CCMP, the majority said they felt optimistic about the work being done and the direction we’re headed. Leo Winternitz, the senior policy advisor for water programs at the Nature Conservancy, felt otherwise.
“The answer is no,” he says. The point of increasing freshwater availability to the estuary is to attain an even greater goal, he says, which is to restore ecological processes.
“We have a very, very changed system,” he says. There’s been a 50 percent decline in Delta outflow because of exports and upstream development; the whole system has become less variable, which favors invasive, not native, species; and fish have been in decline since the 1970s (see p. 4).
“It wasn’t good in 1993. How bad is it now? Well, it’s worse,” he says.
“Developing water recycling and water use conservation efficiency measures, while necessary and important, don’t necessarily—and have not— increased fresh water availability, because demand for water in this state is higher than available water supplies,” he says. The water we save is going towards other demands, like more people, or new ones, like fracking.
Clearly we need to both live more within our water means, or make more water. But ocean or bay water desalination have not fared that well, according to Rich Mills with the California Department of Water Resources. Winternitz sees a future with greater emphasis placed on a market approach guided by regulatory mechanisms.
Trade in this area may already be starting. “One of things happening in the Central Valley is a much larger water market than 20 years ago, farmers buying water from other farmers,” says Nelson.
With the Bay Area population still expanding, and continuing uncertainty about the replumbing of the Delta waterworks, not to mention shifts in water availability due to climate change, there are more reasons than ever to practice wise water use. “We’ve got limits in the Bay-Delta system,” says Nelson, “and those limits are pushing everyone in the system to adapt.”
Projects Implementing Water Use Goals 1993-2013: unknown
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.