[env-trinity] vcdstar.com: Report says California must make better use of current water resources By Timm Herdt

[Tom Stokely]

http://www.vcstar.com/news/2014/jun/10/report-california-must-make-better-use-of-water/

Report says California must make better use of current water resources
By Timm Herdt
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
As water policy experts around California confront the effects of a three-year drought, a report released Tuesday by two environmental groups asserts they must also confront a more permanent problem: Californians are already using more water than Mother Nature provides.
“We’ve hit the wall in California,” said Peter Gleick, president of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute. “We’re past the point of peak water. Even in a normal year or wet year, we’re overextended. We take too much water out of the system.”
The report produced by the institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council concludes that there is a 6 million acre-foot per year gap between the amount of water California uses and the amount that can safely be taken from rivers and pumped from aquifers.
The good news, the report concludes, is that there is more than enough water available to close that gap through increased agricultural and urban efficiency, water recycling, and harvesting rainwater that runs off urban streets and parking lots into drainage pipes that take it to the sea. Fully exploiting those four options, it says, could produce up to 14 million acre-feet per year, or enough water to meet the needs of every city in California.
“Our current approach to water use is unsustainable, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t enough water to meet our needs,” said Kate Poole, an NRDC senior attorney and co-author of the report.
The report comes at a time when the state Department of Water Resources is circulating a draft environmental impact report on a massive Bay Delta Conservation Plan, which includes construction of two tunnels to divert water from the Sacramento River; the Legislature is considering a water bond to place before voters in November that might include money for the construction of additional water storage facilities; and farming interests in Congress are calling for a relaxation of environmental regulations to allow additional water to be taken from the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers.
The authors assert that there may be smarter — and perhaps less costly — ways to address the state’s water needs without creating problems that could create long-term, adverse consequences.
“Rivers and groundwater basins — we need to take care of these resources if we want to rely upon them in the future,” said Poole.
UC Santa Barbara Professor Bob Wilkinson called the measures recommended in the report “cost-effective, readily available and off-the-shelf techniques.”
Wilkinson said that although California farmers “have made significant advances” in more efficiently using water for crop irrigation, there remains the potential for an additional 17 percent savings that would free from 5.6 million to 6.6 million acre-feet per year for other uses. Those savings could be accomplished, he asserted, without fallowing any cropland or changing the mix of crops being grown.
Improved urban efficiency, he said, could produce from 2.9 million to 5.2 million acre-feet per year through such measures as leak repair, more efficient toilets and washing machines, and greater use of what he called “climate-appropriate landscaping.”
Existing wastewater-reclamation projects produce about 670,000 acre-feet per year, and Wilkinson said he believes there is the potential for another 1.2 million to 1.8 million acre-feet per year.
The study also estimates that the capture of rainwater from urban roofs and paved surfaces in Southern California and the San Francisco Bay area could produce from 420,000 to 630,000 acre-feet per year.
Gleick said he hopes the report will give policymakers the opportunity to consider investments that may be smarter than falling back on traditional approaches to increasing water supplies through the construction of dams and other major infrastructure projects.
“We do not say that capturing all this will be easy or fast. We do say that these are the smartest and fastest things we can do,” he said. “We’ve identified opportunities that maybe we’re overlooking.”
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www2.dcn.org/pipermail/env-trinity/attachments/20140611/2fc08058/attachment.html>