During a panel discussion at the Public Policy Institute of California Water Policy Center, experts discussed the need for policy to catch up to how quickly climate change affects water systems.
Alvar Escriva-Bou, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at California-Davis and an adjunct fellow at PPIC, said he’d like to see the state slightly scale down water use to build up climate resilience. He suggested a few examples, including incentives for farmers to switch to crops that use less water or adopting alternative land uses such as solar farms.
Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources, said the threat of worse floods keeps her up at night, especially after a flood disaster in Valencia, Spain, last week.
“Unfortunately, I think, to wake us up as Californians, we're going to have something that is more catastrophic than we are comfortable with, or would like to admit, before we do something significant to get us on the right track,” Nemeth said.
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She hopes that California will move toward water planning at the watershed scale and that artificial intelligence can streamline environmental permitting and make information quickly available to the public. She also believes there is a need to establish a flexible water market with a transparent, publicly open transfer of water to “any four corners of the state.”
Phoenix Armenta, senior manager for climate equity and community engagement at the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, told the panelists that she would prioritize engagement with communities in the onset of floods.
Armenta’s organization works with local governments to get community members and local governments to design a "hyperlocal" plan for flooding events in a way that works best for that particular community, which she said has led to better results.
Willie Whittlesey, general manager of the Yuba Water Agency, agreed with Nemeth, saying that flooding events are going to happen regardless of season. He shared how his agency developed its emergency action plan through a major atmospheric river simulation in May.
“I thought to myself, that could never happen,” Whittlesey said. “Our floods, our atmospheric rivers, are in January, February. … I was about to jump in, go, ‘Guys, is this really a plausible thing?’ And I just sat back and [went], ‘Catch yourself. Anything is possible’.”
He hopes for more coalition building around flood plain management and wants more levees in place. He also suggests using rice fields to get biological material into rivers to feed salmon.
