With farms, ranches and rural communities facing unprecedented threats, a worrying trend leads to a critical question: Who owns the water? Eli Francovich, Columbia InsightDec. 15, 2021 Ghost cattle — 200,000 made-up heifers. A massive fraud rocking eastern Washington’s arid ranching communities, leading to criminal charges and bankruptcy. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and […]
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Summary The panel vacated the district court’s summary judgment in favor of the City of Vacaville and remanded for further proceedings in a citizen suit brought by California River Watch under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. River Watch claimed that the City’s water wells were contaminated by a carcinogen called hexavalent chromium, which in […]
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08/04/21 By Brad Hooker The State Water Resources Control Board on Tuesday approved a regulation granting it new authority to curtail senior water rights and ramp up enforcement for illegal diverters. The action is in response to one of the driest periods on record for California and the entire western U.S. The order targets more than 5,000 water right […]
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California’s farmers are pumping vast amounts of water from underground aquifers this year to make up for water they can’t get from rivers. It’s unsustainable, and the state is moving to stop it.July 23, 2021
The next time you pick up some California-grown carrots or melons in the grocery store, consider the curious, contested odyssey of the water that fed them. Chances are, farmers pumped that water from underground aquifers […]
June 28, 2021 Written by Communications Intern Sage Bachman As California enters another severe drought, residents are once again being asked to use water more judiciously so as to make it last longer. While it is indeed crucial for all of us to reduce our water usage, is also critical to investigate how California’s limited sources […]
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The highly engineered rivers that sustain California cities and farms upset streamside woodlands’ relationship with groundwater, a new study finds, jeopardizing their future in a changing climate.
California’s perennially drought-parched Central Valley bears little resemblance to the vibrant landscape of the pre-Gold Rush days, when wild rivers sustained lush woodlands and floodplains teeming with life.
Trees at the center of these biodiversity hotspots evolved in an arid landscape sculpted by finely tuned exchanges […]
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MavenBreaking NewsJuly 1, 2021 From the California Coastkeeper Alliance: Today, California Coastkeeper Alliance filed a lawsuit in Superior Court to compel the County of Sonoma to consider and mitigate impacts to public trust resources caused by groundwater extraction in the Russian River watershed. As the Russian River watershed faces a drought emergency, California Coastkeeper Alliance is […]
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GLEN MARTINFOR THE PRESS DEMOCRATJune 24, 2021 The drought is intensifying efforts to conserve all of Sonoma County’s water resources, including a supply that has eluded oversight until recently: groundwater. But even as plans for groundwater monitoring and sustainable use proceed, tensions are building over its management. The authority to evaluate and regulate groundwater comes […]
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Numerous issues around equity and the plan’s rollout loom. Nick BowlinMay 10, 2021 Beneath the almond and citrus fields of the San Joaquin Valley lies an enormous system of aquifers that feeds some of the world’s most productive farmland. Hundreds of miles north and east, along the Nevada border, is the Surprise Valley, a remote, […]
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The very ground upon which Corcoran was built is steadily collapsing, a situation caused primarily by agriculture. Lois HenryMay 25, 2021 In California’s San Joaquin Valley, the farming town of Corcoran has a multimillion-dollar problem. It is almost impossible to see, yet so vast it takes NASA scientists using satellite technology to fully grasp. Corcoran […]
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Emily DennyApr. 28, 2021 California water officials have accused Nestlé of draining more water out of southern California’s Strawberry Creek in the San Bernardino National Forest than permitted. The drafted cease-and-desist order, which was sent to the company on Friday, asked Nestlé to stop draining millions of gallons of water out of the forest every […]
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The Biden-Harris transition team identified COVID-19, economic recovery, racial equity and climate change as its top priorities. Rivers are the through-line linking all of them. The fact is, healthy rivers can no longer be separated into the “nice-to-have” column of environmental progress. Rivers and streams provide more than 60 percent of our drinking water—and a clear path toward public health, a strong economy, a more just society and greater […]
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When humans over-exploit underground water supplies, the ground collapses like a huge empty water bottle. It’s called subsidence, and it could affect 1.6 billion people by 2040. But scientists haven’t modeled global risks of subsidence—until now. To build their model, Sneed and her colleagues scoured the existing literature on land subsidence in 200 locations worldwide. They considered […]
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A legal dispute over water rights in California’s Mojave desert has growers for The Wonderful Co. on one side and a town reliant on a sprawling naval base on the other. As Brent Crane reports in FERN’s latest story, published with Bloomberg Green, the case offers a glimpse of the coming water wars in California, as the state’s all-powerful agriculture interests increasingly square off against thirsty communities over a dwindling supply of fresh water. […]
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Caitrin Chappelle | October 20, 2020 Over-pumping of groundwater has caused domestic wells to go dry in the San Joaquin Valley. Yet many of the first round of plans prepared to comply with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) do not yet propose ways to address this problem. We explored groundwater planning with three members of […]
Read MoreA new U.S. Supreme Court ruling puts groundwater science at the center of decisions about how to regulate water pollution. Today, in a closely watched case with extensive implications, the court ruled six to three that the federal Clean Water Act applies to pollution of underground water that flows into nearby lakes, streams, and bays, as long as […]
Read MoreMarch 27, 2020By Jennifer Clary – Program Manager With all that’s happening right now, it can be difficult to pay attention to anything other than the news of the day. I’m focused on groundwater; how we use it – and use too much; how we protect it from pollution – or don’t; and how we […]
Read MoreThe Nature Conservancy is pleased to announce the release of the Critical Species LookBook (the LookBook) which may be found on the Groundwater Resource Hub. The LookBook is a compendium of 84 state and federally listed species likely to be affected by groundwater management and merit consideration by Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act […]
Read MoreReaders: This is a situation where there is an attempt to continue polluting groundwater and therefore the beaches and ocean where fresh water ends up. You can help by boycotting traveling there and opting to go somewhere else where environmental laws are respected and followed. Or you can send a letter out of outrage using […]
Read MoreGokce SencanSeptember 10, 2019 This is part of a series on issues facing California’s rivers. Water managers across the state face new and more extreme challenges as the climate warms—from balancing the sometimes conflicting needs of urban, agricultural, and environmental water users to reducing risks from fires, floods, and droughts. We talked to Grant Davis, general […]
Read MoreAugust 6, 2019 Robert Shibatani Guest blogger By Robert Shibatani Whether you are a water utility manager, elected official, or homeowner, future water availability is a concern. There are several factors fostering that concern and one of them is climate change. In fact, these days, climate change is a rapidly growing global hot topic (no […]
Read MoreLaw requires new environmental review of Cadiz plan to pump from Mojave aquifer. By Phil Willon SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom has thrown another roadblock in front of a long-fought venture to pump and market groundwater from the Mojave Desert, leaving the Cadiz Inc. project facing a new set of state environmental reviews. Newsom signed […]
Read MoreJune 21, 2019By Christina Coxchristina@theacorn.com A case making its way through Santa Barbara County Superior Court is challenging the amount of water farm owners can pump from a groundwater basin that sits below Moorpark. The lawsuit was filed more than a year ago, in March 2018, by a group of Ventura County landowners and agricultural […]
Read MoreFebruary 1, 2019 Legal Notes by Christian Mars The common law public trust doctrine in California has long played an important role in protecting navigable waters and waterfronts for the purposes of public use and enjoyment, such as commerce, navigation, fisheries, recreation and preservation. Cities periodically encounter the doctrine when: Administering tideland grants; Maintaining or operating […]
Read More“Cadiz hopes to pump 16.3 billion gallons of water from the desert each year, equivalent to 50,000 acre-feet. A required environmental assessment, paid for by the company, found that 32,000 acre-feet of water would naturally recharge the aquifer each year, an 18,000-acre-foot annual deficit that Cadiz acknowledges would last for the project’s 50-year life. The assessment […]
Read MoreWebsite provides a one-stop shop for information on the state’s landmark Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SAN FRANCISCO, CA – Sept. 18, 2018) Maven’s Notebook, in partnership with Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and Stanford’s Program on Water in the West (WitW), launched a new website today at www.groundwaterexchange.org to provide a central hub of science-based information related to […]
Read MoreCourt Rejects Claim That SGMA “Displaces” Public Trust’s Application to California Groundwater The California Court of Appeal for the Third Appellate District has issued an important decision declaring that California’s powerful public trust doctrine applies to at least some of the state’s overtaxed groundwater resources. The court’s opinion also rejects the argument that California’s Sustainable […]
Read MoreCourt Rejects Claim That SGMA “Displaces” Public Trust’s Application to California Groundwater RICHARD FRANK, August 29, 2018 The California Court of Appeal for the Third Appellate District has issued an important decision declaring that California’s powerful public trust doctrine applies to at least some of the state’s overtaxed groundwater resources. The court’s opinion also rejects […]
Read MorePRESENTED BY MELANIE GOGOL-PROKURAT: The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) Areas of Conservation Emphasis (ACE) project is a non-regulatory tool that brings together the best available map-based data in California to depict biodiversity, significant habitats, connectivity, climate change resilience, and other datasets for use in conservation planning. ACE compiles and analyzes information from […]
Read MorePosted: January 11, 2018 To address future climate change effects on water resources, scientists at five UC campuses, and Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories will study California’s water systems, from the headwaters in the Sierra Nevada, through rivers, reservoirs and groundwater in the Central Valley. The goal is to provide information to optimize water […]
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