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Sustainable Conservation recently produced a short video bringing to life the results to date of our partnership in supporting groundwater recharge. It’s an insightful look at the impact of well designed collaborations and targeted digital tools for one of the most complicated environmental issues: managing water.
There’s a hoary adage in the American West that whiskey is for drinkin’ and water is for fightin’. Expanding demands on finite water resources for agriculture, domestic use, industry and the environment have only intensified long-standing conflicts. In recent years, as over consumption of surface water and prolonged drought due to changing climate have diminished supplies from rivers and lakes, users have accelerated extraction of water from aquifers, permeable, water-bearing subterranean rocks and soil. The result was severe overdraft — the depletion of groundwater at a rate greater than is restored through percolation. Aquifers are de facto reservoirs. What was happening was equivalent to draining water stored behind dams without replenishment from river flows.
In California, which historically did not regulate the use of groundwater, the result was fierce groundwater competition in the “breadbasket” of America — the Central Valley. Whoever could drill deeper, more powerful wells, often at great cost, could suck up as much water as they liked. Many growers were unable to keep up. Some rural communities, populated primarily by low-income farmworkers, have seen their wells for domestic water use go entirely dry, leaving households without running water. In addition, without the buoyancy provided by underground water, large areas of the San Joaquin Valley have subsided as much as twenty feet.
In 2014 the California Legislature responded to this crisis by passing the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). The Act not only established a regulatory regime on groundwater extraction, it also required water managers of severely depleted basins to adopt groundwater sustainability plans. These basins must reach sustainability within 20 years of plan implementation. It is estimated that the storage capacity of underground water basins in California is three times the capacity of dammed reservoirs. Replenishing these basins is the most effective way to achieve sustainability. This was just the kind of situation that fits the mission of Earth Genome:
to accelerate the sustainable management of natural resources by equipping decision-makers with easy-to-use tools derived from environmental data, conservation science, and earth observation.
We partnered with Sustainable Conservation, a highly-regarded non-profit that drives collaborative solutions to meet the water needs of California’s environment, people, and economy.
One of the core principles of Earth Genome is that we work closely with decision-makers to fully understand their needs so we can create easy-to-use tools that meet those needs. Through trusting relationships Sustainable Conservation had forged with growers and water managers in the Central Valley we were able to quickly begin working with high priority water districts. The result was the formulation of the Groundwater Recharge Assessment Tool (GRAT), which curates relevant raw data, hydrologic/agronomic science, and financial information to create a tool that enables water managers to determine when, where, and how to optimize groundwater recharge.
The most effective way to recharge groundwater is to shunt excess water flows during major flood events onto lands that are highly permeable, allowing the water to percolate into the ground. Very early on, the CA Department of Water Resources, the agency responsible for oversight of SGMA, praised the work of EG and SC. Eventually, DWR launched the Flood-Managed Aquifer Recharge Management and Restoration initiative (Flood MAR), to advance the idea of synchronizing traditionally very separate functions: flood control and water supply.
Impressed with the usefulness and stakeholder adoption of GRAT, the DWR next engaged Earth Genome and Sustainable Conservation to be in charge of the groundwater recharge estimates being done as part of the groundbreaking Flood-MAR watershed studies for some of the most heavily used river systems in California.
Earth Genome’s work in California is a great example of our aspiration to use technology, science, and data to produce tools that reveal the multiple benefits of sustainably managed natural resources. As Kamyar Guivetchi, Manager of Planning at DWR says in the video, GRAT “moved a theoretical idea to something that people actually saw working on the ground.”