At the January meeting of the California Water Commission, Keali’i Bright, Assistant Director of the Department of Conservation’s Division of Land Resources, gave a presentation on the Department’s Multibenefit Land Repurposing Program.
Mr. Bright began by acknowledging that the Department of Conservation is not an expert on water or habitat, but the Department does have a long history of supporting practitioners and entities working within watersheds.
“We support them to develop strategies to address the bigger landscape challenges that they’re facing, from the top of the watershed down to the groundwater basins on the valley floor,” he said. “And with the drought and with groundwater levels being depleted, we’re really facing this moment where we’re going to exacerbate all of the pressures on our landowners, agricultural leaders, communities, and people who rely on these sources.”
Kamyar Guivetchi is the Manager of DWR’s Division of Planning, where he works with staff, numerous government agencies, California Native American tribes, other stakeholders, and the public to prepare the California Water plan updates. At the UC Davis Groundwater SAS Symposium, Mr. Guivetchi gave a keynote address focusing on the need to build watershed resilience by increasing integration among agencies with responsibilities for water resources. He also touched on the Newsom administration’s water initiatives, the update to the California Water Plan, and Flood-MAR.
Mr. Guivetchi began by noting that context is really important when discussing water in California. California is a big state with ten hydrologic regions, each the size of other states.
“If California were the size of Connecticut, we would have an entirely different way of thinking about water,” he said. “So the size and diversity of our hydrologic regions mean there are no cookie-cutter solutions. We really have to work at the watershed scale and customize what needs to be done.”
As implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) gets underway, questions are emerging about what it will mean for lands protected under the Williamson Act, California’s chief farmland preservation policy. For nearly 60 years, the Williamson Act has helped protect 16 million acres—roughly half of the state’s crop- and rangelands—from development.
But as SGMA’s limitations on groundwater extraction go into effect—and as warmer, more intense droughts begin to push land out of irrigation–the context within which the program operates is shifting. In July, we gathered a group of agriculture, solar, and county stakeholders to explore the interplay between the Williamson Act and SGMA in the San Joaquin Valley. Here is what we learned.
The San Joaquin Valley is California’s agricultural heartland and at the center of the state’s water challenges. As the region brings its groundwater basins into balance under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), over half a million acres of irrigated farmland may need to come out of production.
At a virtual event last week, PPIC researchers and a panel of local experts moderated by Ellen Hanak, director of the PPIC Water Policy Center, discussed how to manage this massive transition while reaping the greatest benefits from idled land and mitigating air quality concerns.
In January of 2022, the Department of Water Resources (DWR) released their assessments of the groundwater sustainability plans for the critically overdrafted groundwater basins, approving eight of them and determining twelve to be incomplete. Those basins have until July 31, 2022 to correct the deficiencies and resubmit their plans to DWR or face possible intervention by the State Water Resources Control Board.
At the May 10 meeting of the State Water Board, James Nachbaur and Anthony Wohletz from the State Water Board’s Office of Research, Planning, and Performance, and Paul Gosselin, Deputy Director of Sustainable Groundwater Management, updated the Board members on the status of SGMA implementation and the what the possible future role of State Water Board’s intervention would look like.
Many regions in California are embarking on a new era of water and land management strategies as local agencies implement sustainability initiatives and climate change intensifies droughts and water scarcity.
However, too often low-income rural communities have had little opportunity to influence land and water decisions that directly impact — and often harm — them, resulting in such outcomes as wells drying up and limited access to parks.
California’s new Multibenefit Land Repurposing Program aims to ensure these communities as well as small-scale farmers are more involved in land and water use planning by making their engagement a requirement for funding recipients.
On February 1st, 2022 Maven’s Notebook, the Groundwater Exchange, and the Local Government Commission hosted a webinar entitled: How do you run a Groundwater Sustainability Agency ?– A Review of Choices made by Critically Overdrafted Subbasins.
Laura Ramos and Sarge Green from Fresno State discussed the key findings and recommendations of the newly released SGMA Governance Strategies Summary Report. If you missed the webinar, check out the recording to learn about the methodology and resources shared, along with the question and answer session.
The San Joaquin Valley is facing a monumental shift in land use over the next two decades. Two important but seemingly unrelated laws are driving the change: the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which aims to bring groundwater basins into balance by the early 2040s, and SB 100, which intends to help California achieve 100% clean power statewide by 2045.
SGMA may require fallowing at least 500,000 acres of cropland in the San Joaquin Valley (10%) by 2040. A significant expansion of solar energy production to meet SB 100 goals, on the other hand, will demand a large amount of land. Promoting solar expansion on fallowed farmland in the San Joaquin Valley could support two major objectives at once: supporting the state’s clean energy goals while easing the economic pain of transitioning some land away from agriculture.
Can we look to the sky to address California’s water challenges? As California continues to grapple with frequent drought and overdrafted aquifers, satellite-based measurements offer a cost-effective way to generate high-resolution data on groundwater resources across a wide geographic area. In conjunction with other ground-based monitoring, data from satellites can help inform sustainable groundwater management.
In December, the California Council on Science and Technology brought three experts together to discuss the role of remote sensing technologies to provide information to support water management decisions.
Panel discussed groundwater applications of Open ET and InSAR to groundwater management in the San Joaquin Valley.
The view from Calcareous Vineyard in Paso Robles, Calif. on April 28th, 2015. Kelly M. Grow/ California Department of Water Resources
Upcoming workshops to gather public input on the new program
At the September meeting of the California Water Commission, Kealiʻi Bright, Assistant Director of the Division of Land Resource Protection at the California Department of Conservation (or DOC), gave a presentation on a new program being spun up to repurpose farmland being retired due to SGMA implementation.
Mr. Bright began by acknowledging that the Department of Conservation being at a Water Commission might be unusual because they are not a groundwater agency or any kind of water agency, but they are an agency with a suite of programs that invest in natural and working lands’ land use, they support conservation organizations that do work within natural and working lands, and they have different programs that fund permanent conservation in those lands.
“So while we aren’t a water agency with water expertise, what we do have is a pretty a pretty vast and strong network of conservation partners throughout the state,” he said. “We are really excited to help DWR, the Water Board, and all of you implement what is a little bit further beyond the horizon of groundwater sustainability efforts.”
At the January meeting of the California Water Commission, Keali’i Bright, Assistant Director of the Department of Conservation’s Division of Land Resources, gave a presentation on the Department’s Multibenefit Land Repurposing Program.
