On the Water Front

Community expertise is key to effective, equitable water governance

The Water Leadership Institute demonstrates that local leaders want — and should have — a voice in water governance. As water crises deepen across the American West, we need more pathways for their participation.

The 2024 Water Leadership Institute focused on supporting leaders from disadvantaged and underrepresented communities across California’s strained Delta-Mendota Subbasin — an area on the frontlines of California’s water crisis.

Rosanai Paniagua admits that she felt a sense of hopelessness after joining the Richgrove Community Services District board, eager to help manage her unincorporated community’s water. “I’ve been at it for three years with no official training from experts who have been in the water world, and it has been really hard,” she says.

This spring, that all changed for Rosanai. Together with 20 other community leaders, she spent four full Saturdays over four months at The Bird Ranch in Gustine, California, as part of the 2024 Water Leadership Institute (WLI), co-hosted by EDF and the Rural Community Assistance Corporation, in partnership with local Groundwater Sustainability Agencies. The bilingual program brought together leaders from disadvantaged and underrepresented communities across the Delta-Mendota Subbasin, an area on the frontlines of California’s water crisis, with the goal of lifting up and reinforcing participants’ expertise, developing their leadership skills, sharing foundational information and resources, and, critically, providing a safe space for connection.

WLI graduate Rosanai Paniagua said she would be returning to her community filled with courage and inspiration—and some practical tools to help her confidently step into unfamiliar spaces and ask the right questions.

After this year’s Institute wrapped up in June, Rosanai said she would be returning to Richgrove filled with courage and inspiration — and some practical tools to help her confidently step into unfamiliar spaces and ask the right questions. “I now have more confidence, and knowledge to understand and tackle the water issues that surround me,” she says. Rosanai also plans to share what she learned with others in her community with the hope that they, too, will become engaged on local water issues. “We can’t do it alone,” she says. “We need to connect.”

Rosanai’s experience speaks to what EDF and partners strive to achieve through the Water Leadership Institute, and this year’s cohort showed incredible ambition for becoming part of crucial decision-making processes around water. With about one million people in California, mostly from small, low-income, Spanish-speaking communities, lacking access to clean, affordable drinking water, and with declining groundwater, increasing flooding, and worsening drought, these community leaders’ deep knowledge of local challenges are indispensable for charting a safe and resilient path forward for the state.

EDF’s José M. Rodriguez-Flores participates in a discussion session. The Institute’s curriculum focuses on enhancing participants’ expertise, developing their leadership skills, sharing foundational information and resources, and, critically, providing a safe space for connection.

Resham Sandu came to the WLI with the goal of helping his community adjust to its changing water supply. He celebrates the community the Institute brought together, and is grateful for the tools he now has as a result of the four workshops. “I’m excited to move forward to the next phase of taking my dream and making it into a reality,” he said at the program’s end. “That dream looks like me being involved in policy, in decision-making.”

Other participants have big plans for the future, too, from starting a youth water camp to hosting a WLI in their own community of Fireabaugh. Two members, Blanca Ojeda and Claudia Mendoza even formed a subcommittee to dive deeper into the relationship between housing and groundwater management. “I’m in it for the longhaul,” Claudia, who is pursuing a PhD at UC Santa Barbara focused on community engagement and access to safe and affordable water, declared.

Until this spring’s Water Leadership Institute, the Delta-Mendota Subbasin GSAs were struggling to connect with a broader base of stakeholders in an area spanning six counties and having a total of 23 Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs). One critical opportunity for the 2024 WLI cohort was meeting directly with working professionals like John Brodie, Water Resources Program Manager for the San Luis and Delta-Mendota Water Authority and SGMA Plan Manager for the Subbasin. Brodie acknowledged the immense value of such arenas for community members to ask tough questions. Some participants wanted to know how to get on a GSA board themselves, while others pressed Brodie to address glaring water access inequities.

“These spaces where community members feel encouraged and safe enough to share what their experiences, and their challenges, are around water are so needed,” reflects Lucy Caine, an EDF project manager who helped organize this year’s Water Leadership Institute.

Since the conclusion of this year’s WLI, critical discussions have centered around how to create more opportunity for community leaders — acknowledging very little exists to begin with — and broadening outreach to be even more inclusive of California’s diverse communities.

With each year of the Water Leadership Institute, we continue to make strides toward better and more equitable engagement. But there is so much work left to do — not just in California, but across the West in places like Arizona and New Mexico. Local communities hold a wealth of knowledge and expertise, and many people are ready to engage on pressing water issues. We need to find better ways to help them do just that. The Water Leadership Institute provides a transformational foundation to get started, but we still need pathways for authentic, meaningful participation in decision-making.

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Revisiting the first OpenET Applications Conference: how satellite-based data is transforming water, farm, and forest management 

This spring, hundreds of scientists, engineers, water managers, farmers and ranchers gathered in New Mexico to share and learn about how OpenET data is being used to advance water resources management. OpenET has radically improved access to data on evapotranspiration (ET) — or how much water plants and other vegetation consume. The result has been a flood of new applications of ET data in land and water management. 

This year’s convening in New Mexico was a first-ever chance to take stock of all the ways people are using OpenET. The conference cut across a wide range of geographies and sectors and revealed a quickly emerging, dynamic community of practice centered on the platform.  Read More »

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How public-private partnerships can improve water sustainability

The scale of the global freshwater crisis requires an all hands effort. Fostering diverse, sometimes difficult, partnerships — particularly between policymakers, producers, and frontline communities — is at the heart of EDF’s water program.

Buzz Thompson’s new book argues the scale of the water crisis requires stronger public-private collaboration.

Partnership is also at the center of an intriguing new book from Stanford law and environmental social sciences professor Barton “Buzz” Thompson. In Liquid Asset: How Business and Government Can Partner to Solve the Freshwater Crisis, Thompson argues partnership — between the private sector, lawmakers, state agencies, philanthropic foundations, and non-profits such as EDF — gives us the best chance to address the growing freshwater challenges confronting the world today. He explores exactly how such public-private partnerships can develop by addressing four key questions:

    1. Does the private sector promise anything unique in solving the global water crisis?
    2. What are the risks of private involvement given the “public-ness” of water?
    3. What are the challenges of working in a traditionally public sector?
    4. How exactly can the private and public sectors partner?

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Cómo la reutilización de tierras está comenzando a transformar comunidades y ecosistemas vulnerables en California

[View the English version of this post]

El extenso Valle Central de California se enfrenta a la disminución de los niveles de agua subterránea y al incremento de cambios bruscos de clima, entre sequias e inundaciones, por cambio climático.

La próxima vez que te encuentres buscando direcciones en tu teléfono móvil, mueve el mapa hacia el centro de California y haz zoom. Activa la capa de satélite. Lo que verás es un desconcertante mosaico. Un inmenso tablero de ajedrez marrón y verde, dividido en rectángulos, cortado por autopistas, rodeado por colinas y montañas. Este es el famoso y problemático Valle Central de California, potencia mundial en producción agrícola que cada vez más se asocia con titulares sobre la sobreexplotación de aguas subterráneas, las crecientes olas de inundaciones y sequías. No es un paisaje que uno asociaría inmediatamente con colaboración y  transformación.  Read More »

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Here’s how land repurposing is beginning to transform strained communities and ecosystems in California

Satellite image of California's Central Valley

California’s sprawling Central Valley is confronting declining groundwater levels and increasing ‘climate whiplash’ between drought and flood.

Next time you find yourself looking up driving directions on your phone, scroll over to central California and zoom out a bit. Turn on the satellite layer. What you’ll see is a mindboggling patchwork. A massive brown and green checkerboard, cut up in rectangles, sliced by highways, besieged by a ring of arid foothills. This is California’s famed and troubled Central Valley — an agricultural powerhouse that’s increasingly associated with headlines about disappearing groundwater and growing waves of flood and drought. Filled with sharp lines, it’s not a landscape one would immediately associate with collaboration and transformation.   Read More »

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Rosa learned how to help her community get reliable, clean water. You can too.

Aerial view shows algae at O’Neill Forebay, a joint Federal-State facility and part of the State Water Project in Merced County, California. Algal blooms may contain toxins that can be harmful to people and pets. Photo taken May 25, 2022.
Florence Low / California Department of Water Resources, FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY

In 2022, Rosa applied for the Water Leadership Institute. Her motivation? To actively address severe water challenges impacting her family in El Nido in Merced County. Located in California’s breadbasket, Merced County is a scene of abundance with lush fields, orchards, and prospering dairy farms. Yet, beneath this scene lies a harsh reality. Rosa’s family and neighbors grappled with the consequences of water contamination, a pervasive issue with a grasp on daily life.

For years, Rosa made the bi-weekly trek to purchase clean water for her family’s ranch. Routinely, she stocked up on large quantities of jugs and bottled water to ensure her family had safe water to cook, clean, and drink. When this water ran low, they reluctantly turned to their domestic well for cleaning and personal care. Her family was aware that the well was not clean, but that was the best alternative available. Oftentimes, when they turned on the faucet, the water was foamy, had a strange smell, and ran white, the same color as the milk from the nearby dairy farms. She and her neighbors even began noticing their hair would fall out when they used the faucet water for bathing.

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