By Elke Weesjes
As California grapples with its fourth year of extreme drought and a full-blown water crisis, Gov. Jerry Brown has announced mandatory water restrictions for the first time in the state’s history.
In an executive order signed on April 1, Gov. Brown ordered the state water board to implement measures in cities and towns that cut usage by 25 percent.
Last year, Brown had asked residents to voluntarily cut water use by 20 percent but that effort consistently fell short, even as the drought worsened. February 2015 conservation statistics showed that water consumption was reduced by just 2.8 percent statewide.
To ensure compliance this time round, state officials said that they were prepared to enforce punitive measures, including fines for those water suppliers that failed to meet the reduction targets to be set by the state water board in the coming weeks.
"We're in a historic drought, and that demands unprecedented action," Brown said during a news conference at Phillips Station in the Sierra Nevada, where officials had gathered to measure snowpack. "People should realize we're in a new era. The idea of your nice little green grass getting water every day—that's going to be a thing of the past."
Brown joined Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys Program, for the fourth manual snow survey, conducted when the snowpack is usually at its peak. The survey—done on bare grass for the first time in history—found that the snowpack was 5 percent of the April average.
The lack of snow will have devastating consequences for California’s summer water supply, since the Sierra snowpack, through runoff, provides roughly one-third of the water used by California’s cities and farms.
“We have to pull together and save water in every way we can,” Brown said in response to the survey result.
The question of whether truly everyone has to pull together remains, though. The mandatory restrictions largely spare agriculture—the one industry that uses more water than any other sector—and has led to observations that the state is perhaps not doing all it can to limit water use.
According to the Department of Water Resources, farmers in California—the nation’s largest farm state—use about 80 percent of available water, compared with 10 percent used in cities. So why is agriculture, which only accounts for two percent of the state economy, exempt from the mandatory water restrictions?
“Agriculture has already suffered major cutbacks,” Brown told reporters at the Phillips news conference. “A lot of people are letting their land go fallow. Trees are dying.”
Felicia Marcus, the state water board chair charged with crafting the details of Brown’s plan, also defends going easy on agriculture.
“Agriculture water goes to growing food, which is important to urban areas,” Marcus, told the Los Angeles Times. “Someone in L.A. may have more in common with a Central Valley farmer than the guy next door watering his lawn.”
By cracking down on lawns and expanding existing technology like water recycling and desalination, officials hope to meet the new restrictions. Others don’t think that urban conservation is enough and have called for a multifaceted approach that would include agriculture.
Absent that, say experts such as Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the mandatory measures will not fix the crushing combination of ongoing extreme drought and the increasingly higher water demands of a growing population.
“Desalination is part of it and sewage recycling is part of it,” Famiglietti told NPR. “More efficient irrigation, better water pricing, better crop choices — there's all sorts of things we need to include in our portfolio to bridge that gap between supply and demand.”
Elke Weesjes Sabella is former editor of the Natural Hazards Observer. She joined the staff in December 2014 after a brief stint as a correspondent for a United Nations nonprofit. Under her leadership, the Observer was revamped to a more visual format and one that included national and international perspectives on threats facing the world. Weesjes was the editor of the peer-reviewed bimonthly publication United Academics Journal of Social Sciences from 2010 to 2013.
Weesjes Sabella also worked as a research associate for the Center for Disaster and Risk Analysis, formerly located at Colorado State University (although no longer active). In that role, she collected and analyzed data and translated research findings for a broader audience. She played a central role in finalizing the Disaster Preparedness among Childcare Providers in Colorado project, which examines all-hazards preparedness in daycares and in-home childcare across Colorado. She co-authored the report based on the first stage of the project, which was funded by Region VIII of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Weesjes Sabella specializes in cultural memory and neighborhood/community change in times of acute and chronic stress. She has published articles on the impact of drought on farming communities in Kansas, the effects of Superstorm Sandy in Far Rockaway, Queens, urban renewal in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, and health services for vulnerable populations in the South Bronx.
Weesjes Sabella received her PhD from the University of Sussex. Her dissertation, Children of the Red Flag: Growing up in a Communist Family During the Cold War (2012), as well as the majority of her publication record, share the common methodology of understanding culture and identity through oral history.