Aerial view of a nearly full Briones Reservoir, a large reservoir in the hills near Orinda, California.
It’s been a good winter for drought-stricken California. Record-breaking precipitation in January has raised reservoir levels and added to the essential Sierra Nevada snowpack.
According to the National Weather Service, some parts of the state received over 200 percent average precipitation for January, and current snowpack levels are at 173 percent of average. This is important, because snowpack stores vast amounts of water that is slowly released as temperatures rise in the spring and summer.
Heavy rainfall also provides the opportunity for on-farm recharge, a method of deliberately flooding farm fields to help replenish groundwater aquifers.
There is certainly cause for optimism, but it’s going to take more than a few rainy months to solve California’s water woes.
As populations in Colorado and the West continue to grow, water is moving from farms to cities. The current practice of “buy and dry” in Colorado – buying farmland only for its water – is bad for farmers, bad for rural communities and bad for critical ecosystems across the state.
In early December, I flew out to Amsterdam to attend the Global Impact Investor Network (GIIN) Forum with 600 other delegates ranging from managers of pension funds and banks to individual investors from at least 30 countries.
The corn and soybean fields that stretch for miles across the Midwest are quiet this time of year, mostly frozen surfaces waiting for the spring planting season.
