Our California water team is helping landowners in the Central Valley identify and transform areas with the greatest potential to conserve and replenish groundwater while delivering additional benefits. These benefits include more resilient flood management and increasing wildlife habitat for migratory waterfowl and other species such as the San Joaquin kit fox. We are developing several pilot projects to prove this approach, using a decision-support tool developed with UC Santa Barbara and drawing on our years of experience collaborating with farmers through our Central Valley Habitat Exchange<\/a>.<\/p>\n Water sharing<\/strong><\/p>\n Transparent, well-designed water trading programs<\/a> are a powerful tool to encourage and reward sustainable groundwater management. EDF is developing a pilot with the Rosedale-Rio Bravo Water Storage District, a 44,000-acre area west of Bakersfield where groundwater demand exceeds supply by 9,000 acre-feet per year. (One acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, or enough water to cover a football field one foot deep. An average California family uses one-half to one acre-foot of water per year.)<\/p>\n The goal of the pilot with Rosedale-Rio Bravo is to support effective accounting and management of available supplies, foster the movement of water to the highest value and best uses, protect sensitive ecosystems and rural community drinking water supply, and ultimately help the district rebalance groundwater while minimizing the economic costs to the community.\u00a0What\u2019s next for California\u2019s Central Valley? Even with water cutbacks, the region can still thrive. Here\u2019s how. <\/a><\/span>Share on X<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Healthy water trading that protects ecosystems and disadvantaged communities is part of a portfolio of water management strategies that will be needed to comply with SGMA. The Public Policy Institute of California<\/a> estimates a portfolio approach that includes water trading to comply with SGMA would decrease the need for land fallowing by more than a quarter (from 750,000 acres to 535,000 acres); reduce annual revenue losses from crops and related activities by more than a third (from $2.1 billion to $1.3 billion); and reduce job losses from 21,000 to 13,000.<\/p>\n Community engagement <\/strong><\/p>\n It is imperative that rural communities understand SGMA and are fully engaged in co-creating a new vision for the valley that they call home. Working with local environmental justice partners, my colleague Ana Lucia Garc\u00eda Briones<\/a> has developed and led a bilingual Leadership Academy<\/a> to educate and empower small rural water board members to advocate effectively for their own water needs. Another colleague, Christina Babbitt<\/a>, has developed an interactive groundwater game to inform communities about the strategies for balancing groundwater supply and demand.<\/p>\n EDF is in the preliminary stages of exploring new opportunities for farm workers, including job training to transition to work restoring and managing habitat and new outdoor spaces such as trails and parks.<\/p>\n Complying with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act will be not be easy; it will require difficult tradeoffs in the Central Valley, a region where it has often been easier to fight than to fix problems. However, SGMA also represents a major opportunity to create a new model for building resilience to the increasing uncertainty and variability of water supplies threatened by climate change. If the Central Valley can succeed at creating a more resilient future for its people, wildlife, and economy, then there is no limit to where this can be achieved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What\u2019s next for California\u2019s Central Valley? Even with water cutbacks, the region can still thrive. Here\u2019s how. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[71922],"tags":[71775,92490,102771],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-10646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-water","tag-central-valley","tag-resilience","tag-sgma"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/growingreturns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/growingreturns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/growingreturns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/growingreturns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/127"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/growingreturns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10646"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/growingreturns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10646\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/growingreturns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/growingreturns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/growingreturns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10646"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/growingreturns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=10646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/growingreturns\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/52\/files\/2019\/06\/kit-foxie-1024x683.jpg\")
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