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3 reasons why California's drought isn't really over, despite all the rain

Lauren Sommer

Water pours out of Lake Oroville in Northern California in March. Reservoirs levels plummeted over the last three years, but now have more water than they can hold. Ken James/California Department of Water Resources hide caption

Water pours out of Lake Oroville in Northern California in March. Reservoirs levels plummeted over the last three years, but now have more water than they can hold.

Ask a water expert if California's drought is finally done, and the answers sound something like this:

"Yes and no." "Kind of." "Depends what you mean by drought."

The state has been deluged by storms this winter, hit by 12 atmospheric rivers that have led to evacuation orders, rising rivers and broken levees. In some parts of the Sierra Nevada, more than 55 feet of snow have fallen.

With reservoirs filling up, many Californians are eager to put the severe, 3-year drought behind them. A major water supplier in Southern California recently lifted mandatory conservation rules that limited outdoor watering. Large parts of the state are now free of drought, according to the federal government's Drought Monitor , which looks at rainfall and soil moisture.

But in California, water shortages aren't just due to a lack of rain, and the state's chronic water problems are far from over.

"While we've seen some pretty fantastic wet weather and we've seen conditions improve, in a whole lot of places we still have some lingering impacts that still challenge California," says Mike Anderson, the state's climatologist.

Decades of drought have taken their toll, and experts say that deeper issues need to be addressed before California can be fully-drought free. Here are three reasons why:

#1 - California's groundwater drought is still bad

When California's reservoirs declined, many cities and farmers turned to another water source: vast aquifers underground.

In drought years, groundwater has supplied up to 60% of California's water. But the pumping has been largely unregulated. So over the decades, water levels have fallen dramatically in California's aquifers. Before this winter, some groundwater wells were at the lowest points ever recorded. That's because in the Central Valley, groundwater hasn't been replenished after previous droughts .

"Groundwater is the dark matter of the hydrologic cycle," says Graham Fogg, professor emeritus of hydrogeology at the University of California Davis. "The fact that these are such huge volumes of water allows them to take a lot of abuse and to be depleted year after year."

Floodwater in Fresno County, Calif., is diverted onto agricultural land, so it can seep into underground aquifers. Groundwater levels have fallen dramatically during the state's droughts. Andrew Innerarity/California Department of Water Resources hide caption

Floodwater in Fresno County, Calif., is diverted onto agricultural land, so it can seep into underground aquifers. Groundwater levels have fallen dramatically during the state's droughts.

As a result, more than 2,000 household wells went dry over the last three years in California, many in low-income communities of color. Temporary water supplies, including bottled water, had to be brought in.

"We're not out of a drought," says Susana De Anda, executive director of the Community Water Center, an environmental justice organization in the Central Valley. "In California, the human right to water was passed in 2012. Unfortunately to this day, many Californians don't have that reality, and it's important to recognize that."

This winter, a new effort is underway to use some of the floodwaters to fill aquifers . California is also in the process of implementing a new groundwater law, intended to get over-pumping under control. Water users are currently writing plans for keeping groundwater use in balance with supply, but they won't be fully implemented until 2040.

"Over the years, pretty consistently, California has been using a lot more water than its surface water and groundwater system can supply," Fogg says. "So that has to change."

#2 - California's other water source is still in drought

Most of California's major cities exist today because their water is delivered from hundreds of miles away. In Southern California, that distance is thousands of miles, because the region uses water from the Colorado River.

A two-decades long drought has hit the Colorado River hard, causing its massive reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, to plummet . Climate change is shrinking the snowpack that feeds the river, and the seven states that use it have long made claim to more water than is available on average.

Heavy storms caused a levee to break in Pajaro, Calif., flooding nearby homes. The parade of winter storms has tested the state's infrastructure. Ken James/California Department of Water Resources hide caption

Heavy storms caused a levee to break in Pajaro, Calif., flooding nearby homes. The parade of winter storms has tested the state's infrastructure.

Those states are now in emergency negotiations over cutbacks to their water supply, but are struggling to agree . With some of the oldest water rights on the river, California has seniority and is technically last in line for cuts. But its water supply will still be impacted. Many Southern California cities have been working on conserving and recycling water locally, so they're less dependent on faraway supplies.

"We just have to get better at managing the more limited resources that we have there, and that means figuring out how to share a smaller pool of water than what we've been using up till now," says Ellen Hanak, director of the Water Policy Center at the Public Policy Institute of California.

#3 - The next drought is coming...

Cue the John Steinbeck quote – it's easy to forget about the dry times once the rains come. But drought will return.

"We always have to be ready," Hanak says. "Drier times could come again as soon as next year."

As the climate gets hotter, California's extremes are expected to get more extreme . That means droughts will be drier, putting even greater strain on the state's water supply.

After the last major drought ended in California in 2017, some water conservation behavior seemed to stick . Water use didn't rebound to pre-drought levels, because some residents made lasting changes, like replacing water-hungry lawns and swapping for more efficient fixtures and appliances.

Still, experts warn that keeping a drought-mindset can only help California weather future challenges. So there's a risk in acting like drought is a thing of the past. Saving water now could help keep reservoirs fuller, a safe bet in a state where next year's winter storms are never guaranteed.

• climate change
• California drought

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A retrospective study of the 2012–2016 California drought and its impacts on the power sector

Jordan D Kern 1 , Yufei Su 2 and Joy Hill 2

Published 18 August 2020 • © 2020 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd Environmental Research Letters , Volume 15 , Number 9 Citation Jordan D Kern et al 2020 Environ. Res. Lett. 15 094008 DOI 10.1088/1748-9326/ab9db1

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1 Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, United States of America

2 Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27516, United States of America

Yufei Su https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0133-4593

• Received 6 March 2020
• Accepted 17 June 2020
• Published 18 August 2020

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Method : Single-anonymous Revisions: 1 Screened for originality? Yes

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Over the period 2012–2016, the state of California in the United States (U.S.) experienced a drought considered to be one of the worst in state history. Drought's direct impacts on California's electric power sector are understood. Extremely low streamflow manifests as reduced hydropower availability, and if drought is also marked by elevated temperatures, these can increase building electricity demands for cooling. Collectively, these impacts force system operators to increase reliance on natural gas power plants, increasing market prices and emissions. However, previous investigations have relied mostly on ex post analysis of observational data to develop estimates of increases in costs and carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions due to the 2012–2016 drought. This has made it difficult to control for confounding variables (e.g. growing renewable energy capacity, volatile natural gas prices) in assessing the drought's impacts. In this study, we use a power system simulation model to isolate the direct impacts of several hydrometeorological phenomena observed during the 2012–2016 drought on system wide CO 2 emissions and wholesale electricity prices in the California market. We find that the impacts of drought conditions on wholesale electricity prices were modest (annual prices increased by $0–3 MWh −1 , although much larger within-year increases are also observed). Instead, it was an increase in natural gas prices, punctuated by the 2014 polar vortex event that affected much of the Eastern U.S., which caused wholesale electricity prices to increase during the drought. Costs from the drought were very different for the state's three investor owned utilities. Overall, we find that increased cooling demands (electricity demand) during the drought may have represented a larger economic cost ($3.8 billion) than lost hydropower generation ($1.9 billion). We also find the potential for renewable energy to mitigate drought-cased increases in CO 2 emissions to be negligible, standing in contrast to some previous studies.

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1. Introduction

There is growing interest in understanding the effects of hydrometeorological variability, and especially drought, on the economic and environmental performance of bulk power systems and electricity markets (van Vliet et al 2012 ; van Vliet et al 2016b , Voisin et al 2016 ). In the United States (U.S.), California is particularly vulnerable to drought due to its reliance on in-state and imported hydropower (California Energy Commission 2017a ). Over the period 2012–2016, California experienced a drought considered to be one of the worst in state history (Griffin and Anchukaitis 2014 , Belmecheri et al 2016 , Lund et al 2018 ). During this time, hydrometeorological impacts included extremely low precipitation, snowpack, and streamflow, along with elevated temperatures (Aghakouchak et al 2014 , Mote et al 2016 ). The drought is estimated to have caused 10 billion dollars in economic damages across the state (Lund et al 2018 ).

The lone estimate of the drought's negative economic impact on California's electric power grid is $2.45 billion (Gleick 2017 ), a number that reflects the estimated market value of hydropower that was 'lost' over the years 2012–2016. On average, California relies on in-state hydropower to provide 13% of its electricity needs, with most of this generation coming from dams located in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. In the worst year of the drought (2015), in-state hydropower generation decreased to 41% of average (California Energy Commission 2017b ), helping to meet only 6% of California's electricity needs (California Energy Commission 2017a ).

This estimated $2.45 billion in lost hydropower revenues was reported widely (Fracassa 2017 , Kasler 2017 ), but it likely does not represent the full cost of the drought to electric utilities and their customers. Drought can also impact electricity demand. For example, if drought is associated with elevated air temperatures that increase residential and commercial cooling needs, it can increase the amount of electricity utilities need to purchase on the wholesale market or produce from self-owned resources. Overall, electricity demand in California appears to have increased mostly along a linear growth trajectory over the years 2010–2018, including during the drought (California Energy Commission 2019 ). However, the effects of the drought on demand varied across sectors, and across end-uses within sectors. For example, in the residential and agricultural sectors (the second and fourth largest consumers of electricity in California, respectively (California Energy Commission 2019 )), many utilities reported decreased electricity consumption during the drought years, even as elevated air temperatures increased cooling demands and irrigation (pumping) requirements on a per crop basis. This has been attributed to reduced water consumption during the drought, which in turn reduced energy requirements for water treatment and distribution (Spang et al 2018 ).

An additional mechanism for drought to impact costs for utilities is by altering the wholesale price of electricity. In particular, the combination of reduced hydropower availability (supply) and increased cooling requirements (demand) that can occur during drought in California may increase wholesale prices by forcing the market to rely on higher marginal cost generators (i.e. more expensive natural gas power plants) (Boogert and Dupont 2005 ). If the 2012–2016 drought caused wholesale electricity prices in California to increase, it would have mitigated some financial pain for hydropower-owning utilities; hydropower production, although greatly reduced, would have been more valuable. At the same time, however, higher market prices could have made it more expensive for utilities to meet demand via purchases from the wholesale market. Wholesale electricity prices in California did increase during the middle of the drought, reaching an apex in 2014 (figure 1 ). However, there has been no attempt to understand how supply and demand effects from the drought might have contributed to this increase (especially compared to other factors known to affect market prices, like natural gas prices); nor has there been an attempt to quantify how increased prices influenced the cost of the drought for California utilities.

Figure 1.  Comparison of historical daily electricity prices in the CAISO market during the 2012–2016 drought (green) alongside prices simulated by the CAPOW model (black). The model is able to capture a significant portion of the variation in daily prices, but struggles in some instances to capture very large price spikes. Note that prices generally increased during the first half of the drought, reaching an apex in 2014, before declining during the last two years.

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Another open question from the 2012–2016 drought has to do with the role of the state's growing reliance on variable renewable energy (wind and solar) in mitigating the environmental impacts of drought. In particular, the substitution of natural gas generation for hydropower during drought is known to increase carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions in California (Fulton and Cooley 2015 , Hardin et al 2017 , Herrera-Estrada et al 2018 ). Previous studies have pointed to the state's growing fleet of wind and solar capacity as a counterbalancing force that was able to mitigate increases in CO 2 emissions that would have occurred during the 2012–2016 drought due to a loss of hydropower (Hardin et al 2017 , Zohrabian and Sanders 2018 , He et al 2019 ). In fact, carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions from California's electric power sector actually decreased over the years 2012–2016 (California Air Resources Board 2019 ).

On the surface, these data seem to support the idea that wind and solar power can help reduce the drought-vulnerability of power systems—an idea that has gained more attention in recent years (van Vliet et al 2016a , He et al 2019 ). However, the role wind and solar play in reducing drought-caused increases in emissions deserves further examination. Previous studies have relied exclusively on historical data from 2012–2016 to evaluate the California grid's response to drought without accounting for the confounding effects of year-to-year changes in the generation mix. From 2012 to 2016, installed capacity of wind and solar in the state more than doubled, and generation from those resources partially offset losses in hydropower generation, in turn reducing the amount of 'replacement' generation needed from natural gas plants. This may (falsely) give the impression that future grid configurations with greater installed wind and solar capacity will be better equipped to replace lost hydropower during a drought, and thus avoid associated increases in carbon emissions. Here, we develop a more nuanced understanding of the role that renewable energy in California plays in mitigating CO 2 increases caused by drought.

In this study, we use newly developed grid simulation software to perform a series of controlled computational experiments that identify the direct influence of drought (and its hydrometeorological constituents) on CO 2 emissions, wholesale electricity prices, and costs for utilities in California. We test different underlying generation mixes, varying the penetration of variable renewable energy, in order to better understand how the presence of renewable energy affects the magnitude of drought-caused increases in CO 2 emissions. Our results provide new insights and important context regarding the economic and environmental impacts of the 2012–2016 drought, its effect on the California grid, and the vulnerability of California's power system to drought in the future under alternative grid configurations.

2.1. Modeling approach

We make use of the California and West Coast Power system (CAPOW) model (Su et al 2020 ), an open source stochastic simulation tool designed specifically for evaluating hydrometeorological risks in the U.S. West Coast bulk power system. The model accurately reproduces historical daily price dynamics in California's wholesale market (figure 1 ), although it sometimes fails to capture the highest observed peak prices due to its use of publically available natural gas 'hub' price data. These data are averages of contracted gas prices experienced by market participants. It is likely that during high demand periods, certain power plants experience gas prices much higher than the hub price, causing spikes in the wholesale electricity price that our model does not capture.

The model's geographical scope covers most of the states of Washington, Oregon and California and the operations of the region's two wholesale electricity markets, the Mid-Columbia (Mid-C) market in the Pacific Northwest and the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) in California. Within the CAISO market, we focus on the service areas of the state's three main investor owned utilities, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), Southern California Edison (SCE), and San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E).

CAPOW simulates power system operations using a multi-zone unit commitment and economic dispatch (UC/ED) model formulated as a mixed integer linear program. The model's objective function is to minimize the cost of meeting demand for electricity and operating reserves in the two major markets represented, subject to constraints on individual generators, the capacity of transmission pathways linking zones, and others. CAPOW takes as inputs time series of air temperatures and wind speeds at 17 major airports from the NOAA Global Historical Climatological Network (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 2019 ); solar irradiance at 7 different National Solar Resource Database sites (Sengupta et al 2018 ); and streamflow at 105 different gauges throughout the West Coast (Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) 2019 , CDEC 2019 ). Air temperatures and wind speeds are used to simulate daily peak electricity demand via multivariate regression; hourly values are conditionally resampled from the historical record. It is important to note that in this paper we do not directly account for the effects of reduced water consumption during drought on electricity demand. There is limited data available that would allow for parameterization of a tight model coupling among hydrologic triggers, water conservation policies, and electricity demand.

We use daily wind speeds to simulate aggregate zonal wind power production, and daily solar irradiance to simulate zonal solar power production (both via multivariate regression), before conditionally resampling down to an hourly time step. Time series of daily streamflow are forced through hydrologic mass balance models of major hydroelectric dams in the Federal Columbia River Power System (Pacific Northwest), Willamette River basin (Oregon), Sacramento, San Joaquin and Tulare Lake basins (California). Hydropower availability is calculated on a daily basis across every zone in the model, then dispatched optimally on an hourly basis by the UC/ED model. Model outputs include the least cost generation schedule identified down to the individual generator level, hourly zonal electricity prices ($/MWh), and plant level emissions of CO 2 (tons).

For this study, we collected historical daily temperature, solar irradiance, and streamflow data over the period 1970–2017, and wind data over 1998–2017. Missing wind data (1970–1998) at each site were filled by bootstrapping from the historical record, conditioned on daily temperatures. For the purposes of placing the 2012–2016 drought within the larger context of stationary hydrometeorological uncertainty, we also make use of a 1000-year stochastic dataset of air temperatures, wind speeds, solar irradiance and streamflow created by the authors and described in a separate paper (Su et al 2020 ).

Figure 2 compares drought hydrometeorology (2012–2016) with the full 1970–2017 observed record (black) and the 1000-year synthetic dataset (gray). Data shown are averages across all weather and streamflow monitoring stations. The drought years experienced historically low stream flows and elevated temperatures, relative to the recent observed record and the synthetic dataset, while wind speeds and solar irradiance were relatively normal. Even compared alongside the expanded, 1000-year synthetic dataset, modeled hydropower availability and electricity demand for 2012–2016 (and especially 2014–2015) indicate extraordinary conditions (figure 3 ). Note again that demand data shown are modeled purely as a function of hydrometeorological data being passed through statistical models. These estimates thus represent scenarios in which reductions in energy consumption by the water sector do not occur.

Figure 2.  Comparison of historical drought year hydrometeorology (2012–2016) with the longer observed record (1970–2017) (black) and the 1000-year synthetic dataset (gray). While stream flows reached historical lows (B) and temperatures were elevated (A), the 2012–2016 drought experienced relatively normal wind speeds (C) and irradiance (D).

Figure 3.  Joint density function of total CAISO hydropower production and average CAISO peak demand for the 1000-year synthetic dataset (green) and the 2012–2016 drought years (pink). Historical data shown is purely a function of observed hydrometeorological data passed through statistical estimation of electricity demand and reservoir operations models. No policy feedbacks (reduced water use) are considered when predicting electricity demand.

3. Results and discussion

3.1. effects of drought on market prices and emissions.

First, using the 1000-year synthetic dataset, we calculate an average, 365-d profile for every streamflow gauge, wind/temperature station, and solar irradiance site used in the CAPOW model. We pass these average profiles through the CAPOW model, which first translates them into to corresponding time series of available hydropower, wind and solar power production, as well as electricity demand. Then the UC/ED component of the CAPOW model simulates the operation of much of the West Coast grid, including the CAISO market. Representing 'non-drought' hydrometeorological conditions in this manner is unrealistic, in that the 365-d profile does not exhibit any within-year extremes (which do occur even in non-drought years). However, it does allow for easy assessment of within year anomalies caused by the drought, as well as comparison of the timing of these anomalies with the timing of extreme prices.

Figure 4 compares daily CAISO prices calculated using the 365-d average hydrometeorological profile (turquoise) alongside prices modeled using observed weather and streamflow data from the 2012–2016 drought (magenta). Comparing these two series within a given panel (year), we see significant differences in daily price dynamics, especially in late spring/summer during the worst years of the drought (2013–2015), when prices in the drought simulations are as much as $10 MWh −1 greater than 'average' conditions. Underlying these higher prices in the drought simulations are a lack of snowmelt (hydropower) and elevated temperatures (increased demand), which cause scarcity in the CAISO market.

Figure 4.  Daily wholesale electricity price dynamics in the CAISO market, 2012–2016. Different colors represent different hydrometeorological scenarios. Natural gas price fluctuations are responsible for most observed within year price dynamics and year-to-year differences. The large price spike in early 2014, at the height of the drought, was not caused by drought conditions in the California. Instead, this was caused by extreme cold conditions in the Eastern U.S. that increased the price of natural gas across the entire U.S.

Nonetheless, compared to price differences observed between 'average' and drought conditions within a given year, the differences are much greater across years (e.g. 2013 vs. 2014). This suggests that within year electricity price dynamics, as well as differences in prices across years, are driven more by fluctuations in the price of natural gas than by weather and streamflow conditions. Natural gas prices varied continuously over the period 2012–2016, increasing sharply during 2014, especially at the beginning of the year, when a polar vortex event drastically increased heating demands in the Eastern U.S., causing natural gas shortages and a spike in the price of fuel across the entire country (U.S. Energy Information Administration 2014 ). Note that during this period, there is close agreement between estimated prices in 'average' and drought conditions. This strongly suggests that this other hydrometerological extreme—extreme cold weather occurring thousands of miles away in the Eastern U.S.—was the primary cause of the very high wholesale electricity prices experienced in early 2014 at the height of the drought. This is particularly interesting given evidence (Wang et al 2014 ) that both dry conditions in California during 2014 and the occurrence of the polar vortex in the Eastern U.S. were caused by the synoptic climate event—a jet stream pattern that created a persistent high pressure 'ridge' over the Western U.S. If these atmospheric conditions become more frequent and/or severe as a result of climate change (Swain et al 2014 ), it could add a significant, new dimension to the vulnerability of California's grid in the future.

We can also isolate the effects of the individual hydrometeorological constituents of droughts on both prices and emissions (figure 5 ). In the top panel, yellow bars show daily CAISO prices under a 365-d average hydrometeorological profile calculated from the 1000-year synthetic dataset. One-by-one, we then add in constituents of the 2012–2016 drought, beginning with historically low streamflow in California, then observed streamflow in the Pacific Northwest (which typically exports a significant amount of hydropower down into California), elevated air temperatures, and finally wind speeds and solar irradiance. The time series labeled 'Historical' represent results from the full historic 2012–2016 weather and streamflow dataset.

Figure 5.  Additive effects of individual hydrometeorological constituents of drought on average electricity prices in the CAISO market (top panel) and CO 2 emissions (bottom panel). Results confirm that year-to-year changes in the price of natural gas (i.e. comparing across years) leads to much more significant changes in price than weather and streamflow conditions (i.e. comparing across scenarios within a single year). In the bottom panel, we see that low streamflow and high temperatures in California result in the largest relative increases in power sector CO 2 emissions.

Power sector CO 2 emissions (bottom panel) appear more sensitive to drought conditions than prices (top panel). Comparing emissions under average hydrometeorology with emissions under 2012–2016 conditions, we see large increases, particularly during the two hottest and driest years, 2014–2015. There are clear differences in the strength of the effect across individual drought constituents. In most years, the two largest contributors to increased emissions are very low streamflow in California (i.e. reduced in-state hydropower production) and high air temperatures (i.e. increased electricity demands for cooling).

Note as well that the bar graphs in figure 5 indicate standard errors associated with each price and emissions estimate. For each hydrometeorological scenario (e.g. average conditions + historical CA streamflow), identical weather and streamflow inputs are used in multivariate regression models to create five separate records of power system inputs (time series of wind power, solar power, etc). For a given scenario (bar) shown in figure 5 , the standard errors measure the (limited) influence of randomness in regression residuals on the results.

3.2. The cost of drought to electric utilities

A first step in measuring the cost of the 2012–2016 drought for electric utilities in Calfironia is to quantify impacts on market prices in CAISO. In figure 6 (top panel), we compare the electricity price in CAISO under average hydrometeorology (solid bars) and historical 2012–2016 hydrometeorology (white bars). We also compare electricity prices resulting from two different model choices regarding the price of natural gas: (1) a static, average natural gas price of $3.5/MMBtu (orange bars); and (2) the historical 2012–2016 natural gas price regime (pink bars). The price impacts from drought are equal to the delta of each solid/white bar pair; these results are then plotted in the bottom panel of figure 6 .

Figure 6.  Top panel: Comparison of CAISO electricity prices under historical meteorology (white bars) and average conditions (solid bars), and under historical natural gas prices (pink bars) and average natural gas prices (orange bars). Bottom panel: The drought likely caused wholesale prices to increase between $0–3 MWh −1 , depending on the year. We also find that the co-occurrence of high natural gas prices (brought about by the polar vortex in the Eastern U.S.) and drought conditions in California caused the biggest price impacts in 2014, even though 2015 experienced the lowest hydropower and highest cooling demands.

We find that the drought likely caused average market prices in CAISO to increase between $0–3 MWh −1 , depending on the year, although within-year price differences could be much greater (see figure 4 ). Figure 6 also indicates that natural gas prices influence how the market experiences the effects of drought. For example, in the bottom panel, if a constant, average price of natural gas is assumed for each year (orange bars), the most significant impacts from drought occur in 2015. This is consistent with our findings that, in terms of lost hydropower generation and increased cooling demands, 2015 was the 'worst' year during the 2012–2016 drought (see figure 3 ). In reality, the combination of extreme drought conditions in 2014, coupled with high natural gas prices (including those caused by the 2014 polar vortex) actually made 2014 the worst drought year, in terms of increased wholesale prices.

Table 1 further explores the potential costs of drought in the service areas of the three main investor owned utilities in California (PG&E, SCE and SDG&E). The first economic cost to grid participants that we consider is the 'net' value of lost hydropower. In table 1 , we estimate this as the difference between summed daily hydropower revenues (production in MWh multiplied by market price in $ MWh −1 ) under average hydrometeorological conditions and each drought year. This allows us to capture losses from reduced hydropower production, as well as the benefits to hydropower producers from experiencing higher market prices during the drought. In general, we find that increased prices do relatively little to make up for a loss in hydropower production. Across the three utility service areas considered, the net value of lost hydropower over 2012–2016 is approximately $1.9 billion. The only previous estimate of the value of lost hydropower generation during the drought is $2.45 billion (Gleick 2017 ). Our estimate is likely lower due to a few different factors. First, we only assess hydropower that directly participates within the CAISO market. A smaller, but still significant amount of hydropower capacity is operated by other utilities (e.g. Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Sacramento Municipal Utility District, San Francisco Public Utility Commission, PacifiCorp). Lost hydropower in those areas is not considered. We also directly account for the economic benefits to hydropower producers from increased market prices, which helps offsets lost production somewhat.

Table 1.  Evaluation of the costs of drought in the CAISO market. Higher temperatures increased modeled electricity demand while low streamflows reduce hydropower. The combined effects are an increase in market prices. PG&E and SCE are shown to be the most strongly affected, with PG&E impacted more by a loss of hydropower, and SCE affected more by a modeled increase in demand.

Next, we determine the costs associated with higher electricity demand due to elevated air temperatures during the drought. In table 1 , we estimate these additional costs as the difference between summed daily electricity costs (electricity demand in MWh multiplied by the market price in $ MWh −1 ) under average hydrometeorological conditions and each drought year. We find that, in the absence of secondary economic/policy feedbacks (e.g. water conservation efforts in urban areas), increased electricity demand driven by higher air temperatures could have increased costs for utilities by more than $3.8 billion—representing a significantly greater cost than the loss of hydropower.

We also find major differences in how the three investor-owned utilities likely faired during the drought. For example, in the case of PG&E, which is the largest private owner of hydropower capacity in the U.S., the value of lost hydropower represents a greater cost than increased consumption. The opposite is true for SCE, which owns less hydropower capacity and has electricity demands are more sensitive to temperature extremes.

3.3. Renewable energy and drought-caused emissions increases

The second major objective of this paper is to evaluate the potential for variable renewable energy to mitigate increases in CO 2 emissions caused by drought. To answer this question, we measure the response of two different versions of the CAISO grid to drought. In one version we assume 2012 levels of installed wind and solar capacity, and in another we assume 2015 levels of installed wind and solar capacity (more than double 2012 levels). Figure 7 compares the performance of these two versions of the model when simulated under 2015 hydrometeorological conditions (arguably the most extreme year of the drought). Panel A tracks daily differences in fossil fuel generation over the entire year, confirming that a version of the grid with greater (2015) levels of installed wind and solar power relies on less generation from fossil fuels to meet demand. Nonetheless, having increased wind and solar power capacity in place does not prevent the drought conditions from causing an uptick in the use of fossil fuels.

Figure 7.  (A) Changes in fossil fuel generation during 2015 attributable to more than doubling installed wind and solar capacity. (B) Crought caused changes in emissions for the two renewable energy scenarios (2012 (orange) and 2015 (black dotted line)). Differences between these two series are appear to mostly be due to random model errors (C). The presence of more renewable energy does very little to prevent increased reliance on fossil fuel generation during drought.

In panel B, we track daily differences in fossil fuel generation caused by drought conditions in 2015 (i.e. relative to average hydrometeorology) under two different levels of installed wind and solar capacity, 2012 (black) and 2015 (orange). Drought conditions in 2015 appear to cause nearly identical responses (increases) in fossil fuel generation under the two different capacity mixes, despite the fact that double the amount of renewable energy capacity is installed in 2015. This is confirmed by panel C, which plots the difference of the two series shown in panel B. The result approximates a stationary noise process, suggesting that differences between the two renewable energy scenarios is due primarily to stochastic model residuals created by CAPOW when translating hydrometeorological time series into corresponding records of wind and solar power production, electricity demand, etc (see error bars in figure 5 ).

Figure 8 confirms that the presence of more renewable energy does very little to prevent increased CO 2 emissions during drought. We track total CO 2 equivalents emitted by power plants in CAISO under historical drought conditions (open bars) and an 'average' hydrometeorological year (solid bars). We also control for installed renewable capacity. Black bars represent CO 2 emissions in a version of the model that assumes 2012 renewable energy levels. Green bars assume historical capacity levels, which gradually increase over the 5-year period (purple dotted line).

Figure 8.  Top panel: CO 2 emissions under historical 2012–2016 hydrometeorology (open bars), average hydrometeorology (solid bars), 2012 renewable energy capacity (black bars) and historical 2012–2016 renewable capacity (green bars), which gradually increase over the 5-year period. Bottom panel: CO 2 emissions increases during the 2012–2016 drought are actually slightly lower under 2012 renewable energy capacity. This is likely due to greater reliance on higher emission natural gas combustion turbine units when there is more renewable energy installed.

As installed renewable energy capacity increases from 2012–2016 (open bars), emissions are mostly steady before declining in the last year of the drought; they would have decreased faster under average hydrometeorological conditions (solid bars). However, the deltas in emissions between average and historical hydrometeorology look very similar for the two different renewable energy scenarios. The bottom panel confirms this; in fact, we see that drought-caused increases in CO 2 emissions are actually lower in most years if we assume static 2012 installed renewable energy capacity. This could be a sign that the model is relying more on higher emission natural gas combustion turbine units (as opposed to slightly less flexible combined cycle units) when there is more renewable energy installed. If the latter proves to be true, in the short term it raises the possibility that increased renewable energy capacity in CAISO could in fact lead to more severe (larger) emissions responses during drought.

4. Conclusion

In this paper, we closely examine the impacts of the 2012–2016 drought on California's electricity grid. For the first time, we isolate the drought's hydrometeorological constituents and perform a series of controlled experiments in order to understand how weather, streamflow, fuel prices, and renewable energy individually and collectively affected grid outcomes. We first explore the impacts of the drought on wholesale prices for electricity, finding that the drought increased prices on average by between $0–3 MWh −1 , with the biggest underlying causes being a decrease in streamflow (hydropower generation) and elevated temperatures (modeled electricity demand). While an important impact, our results also make clear that natural gas prices were the dominant driver of higher electricity prices experienced during the drought, especially during early 2014 when natural gas prices spiked nationwide due to extremely cold weather in the Eastern U.S. These high gas prices caused a spike in wholesale electricity prices at the height of the drought. Interestingly, the incidence of extreme cold in the Eastern U.S. and extreme drought in California were driven by the same synoptic climate event—a persistent high pressure ridge over the U.S. West Coast.

Our estimates of the cost of the drought in the CAISO system are on the same order of magnitude as the lone previous estimate. However, we find that the cost of the drought in the electric power sector could have been much higher than previously reported, with utilities experiencing significantly increased demand due to higher air temperatures and cooling demands. A limitation of this work, however, is our failure to account for feedbacks from policies aimed and reducing water consumption, which actually reduced electricity demand in some sectors. Improving understanding in this area remains an outstanding challenge. We find essentially no evidence supporting the idea that the presence of greater variable renewable energy capacity before a drought begins will help mitigate associated increases in CO 2 emissions caused by water scarcity and higher temperatures. The results of our controlled experiments show that even when renewable energy capacity more than doubles from 2012 to 2015 levels, the CAISO grid experiences the same increase in fossil fuel generation and CO 2 emissions during drought years. In fact, there is some evidence that drought-caused emissions increases may be more severe under higher installed renewable energy capacity. This could be caused by increased reliance on flexible but inefficient natural gas combustion turbines to help integrate renewables.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation INFEWS programs, awards #1639268 (T2) and #1700082 (T1).

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available upon reasonable request from the authors.

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Yale Climate Connections

California, ‘America’s garden,’ is drying out

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California, along with much of the rest of the western United States, is once again mired in drought. In fact, California has experienced significant drought conditions in 13 of the 22 years (60%) since the turn of the century.

A 2020 study in the journal Science concluded that 2000 through 2018 was the second-driest 19-year period in the U.S. Southwest in at least the past 1,200 years, and a 2014 paper in Geophysical Research Letters found that 2012 through 2014 was the driest three-year period in California over that same timeframe.

Nearly the entire state is currently in the ‘severe’ drought category or worse, and three-quarters is experiencing ‘extreme’ to ‘exceptional’ drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor .

The consequences of drought in California are felt well outside the state’s borders. California is effectively America’s garden – it produces two-thirds of all fruits and nuts grown in the U.S. The state’s agricultural industry generates $50 billion each year, which is more than the entire gross domestic products of Vermont and Wyoming, and as large as the economy of Alaska or Montana. California produces nearly all of the almonds, artichokes, avocados, broccoli, carrots, celery, kiwi, figs, garlic, grapes, raisins, raspberries, strawberries, honeydew melons, nectarines, olives, pistachios, plums, tangerines, mandarins, and walnuts grown in the U.S. About 80% of all almonds in the world are grown in California: The state’s almonds alone generate $6 billion annually. But nut trees are water-intensive (though notably less so than the alfalfa and pastureland grown for animal agriculture), and unlike seasonal crops, they cannot be fallowed in a dry year. Given the lack of water in 2021, some farmers have been forced to resort to tearing out valuable almond trees and instead planting less thirsty crops.

About 80% of the state’s developed water use goes to the agriculture industry, so anyone who enjoys eating fruits and nuts should be concerned that climate change is increasing the odds of megadroughts permanently drying California.

Changing climate is supercharging southwestern droughts

According to the 2020 study in Science cited earlier, human-caused climate change made southwestern drought conditions between 2000 and 2018 about 46% more intense than they would have been naturally, “pushing an otherwise moderate drought onto a trajectory comparable to the worst [U.S. southwest] megadroughts since 800 CE,” the heyday of the Mayan civilization.

It’s not just California; 96% of the western U.S. is currently experiencing drought conditions, including the entire states of Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. The drought conditions led Utah Governor Spencer Cox recently to urge the state’s residents of all faiths to hold a “weekend of prayer” for rain.

Different kinds of drought

There are several different kinds of drought, all worsened by human activity. Dwindling soil moisture is known as “agricultural drought,” and is exacerbated by the increased evaporation and transfer of moisture from land to the atmosphere that comes about in a warming climate.

A lack of rain and snow is called “meteorological drought.” A 2018 study in Nature Climate Change used climate models to predict that California’s precipitation patterns will shift in a hotter world, with more rain falling in the winter but less in spring and fall months, lengthening the state’s dry season. This prediction was borne out in a 2021 study published in Geophysical Research Letters, with researchers finding that “the precipitation season has become shorter and sharper in California” since the 1960s.

“Snow drought” also plays a key role in California, 30% of whose water supply originates from the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains. As temperatures rise, more precipitation falls as rain and less as snow, and the snowpack melts more quickly in the late spring and early summer. A 2018 study in Geophysical Research Letters estimated that global warming has already shrunk the Sierra Nevada snowpack by about 20% and increased early-season runoff by 30%, and that each additional degree Celsius of warming will shrink the snowpack by about another 20%.

Snow drought in California can then lead to “hydrological drought,” when water levels fall in rivers, lakes, and streams. In June 2021, California’s reservoir water levels were about 40% below the historical average, and the snowpack was completely gone more than a month earlier than normal.

Extensive drought damages felt widely

In addition to its adverse impact on California agriculture, drought results in damaged forests, worse wildfires, reduced hydroelectricity generation, stressed fish populations, and depleted groundwater aquifers. According to the Fourth National Climate Assessment Report , the combination of worsening droughts and expanding bark beetle populations due to warming winters killed 7% of the western U.S. forest area over the past four decades.

The hotter and drier conditions during most of the year, combined with the dead trees, have created more fuel for wildfires, which the report concluded have burned twice as much area in the southwestern states over the past three decades as would have burned in the absence of human-caused climate change. The smoke from those wildfires is dangerously unhealthy to breathe, and in the record-shattering 2020 fire season , the wildfire smoke spread all the way to the U.S. east coast.

That same report found also that the severe drought between 2011 and 2015 reduced hydroelectricity generation in California by two-thirds. The water level in Lake Mead, the reservoir formed by Hoover Dam near Las Vegas, has fallen by 130 feet to its lowest level since its creation in 1936, and the reservoir has lost 60% of its water volume since 2000. As the National Assessment Report concluded, “The reduction of Lake Mead increases the risk of water shortages across much of the Southwest and reduces energy generation at the Hoover Dam hydroelectric plant.”

The lack of surface water also threatens salmon and other fish species in California rivers. And it forces farmers to pump more water from groundwater aquifers, which leads to land subsidence that also stresses infrastructure.

As water resources experts at the Pacific Institute wrote earlier this month , there are steps that southwestern states can take to mitigate drought impacts, “including changes in the efficiency of urban and agricultural water uses, the expansion of non-traditional water sources like stormwater and recycled water, and voluntary changes in behavior.” Curbing greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels is of course the most important measure to lessen the threat of megadroughts in the future and their impacts on one of America’s key food-producing states.

Dana Nuccitelli

Dana Nuccitelli, research coordinator for the nonprofit Citizens' Climate Lobby, is an environmental scientist, writer, and author of 'Climatology versus Pseudoscience,' published in 2015. He has published... More by Dana Nuccitelli

The technologies that could solve California’s droughts

Water was never abundant in California, and the state has gone to great lengths to engineer a landscape where millions of people can live. As climate change grows more severe, it is only going to be more challenging to meet the water needs of city dwellers, farmers and nature.

But certain technologies and policy changes offer hope. California can recycle wastewater, capture stormwater and desalinate seawater, and policymakers can rethink water management. In this episode of the UCI Podcast, David Feldman, a professor of urban planning and public policy and the director of Water UCI discusses the options for overcoming worsening droughts, including the most important change of all.

In this episode:

David Feldman , professor of urban planning and public policy, and director of Water UCI

Water UCI , an interdisciplinary research center at UC Irvine’s School of Social Ecology dedicated to applied water science, technology, management, and policy.

Aaron Orlowski, Host: Dwindling reservoirs. Vanishing snowpack. Water curtailments for Central Valley farmers and restrictions for city dwellers. In California, drought is never far away. But even as climate change puts water supplies in peril, the state is leading the way in developing new solutions for a worsening problem.

What innovations might help California overcome water shortages? And are technologies sufficient to prevent future droughts?

From the University of California, Irvine, I’m Aaron Orlowski, and you’re listening to the UCI Podcast.

Today, I’m speaking with David Feldman, a professor of urban planning and public policy, and the director of Water UCI.

Professor Feldman, thank you for joining me today on the UCI Podcast.

David Feldman: Thank you, Aaron. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Orlowski: So earlier this summer, the governor asked Californians to voluntarily reduce their water usage 15 percent, which is a signal that the drought is in fact back, if it ever left in the first place. So how severe is this current drought in California right now?

Feldman: It’s quite severe. Snowpack and the Sierras, which is our principal water source in the state, is down considerably. Streamflow and the state’s major rivers are considerably low, and this is true also for the Colorado River, which is shared with six other states. Precipitation levels are very low. And I was just reading this morning that the Glen Canyon Dam — Lake Powell — which is in the Upper Colorado Basin before the water gets to water-thirsty California is also at near record low levels. So this is a very serious drought and it looks like we may be pushing some records.

Orlowski: So with these water supplies at such low levels is California actually using more or less water than we did in the past?

Feldman: It’s interesting. There have been a number of studies about this and on a per capita basis Californians are using less water than we have in the past. This is true for domestic and urban uses. It’s also true for agricultural uses. So it kind of begs the question: What’s the problem, if we’re using less water? And the answer is we have less water to use because of climate variability. And also even though we’re using less water on an individual level, there are more of us to share the water with.

Feldman: Well and you just mentioned climate variability, but in the long run climate change is also going to have an impact on our state’s water. So how will climate change affect these water shortages?

Feldman: Nobody is exactly sure, but the best theories available suggest that a couple of things are likely to occur, and we’re already seeing strong evidence of this right now. One is that we will have periods of more intense and longer droughts. And these periods of long, intense droughts will be punctuated at times by very severe precipitation events. And what I mean by severe precipitation is we will get rain, lots of it, unfortunately, too much to be stored. So this tremendous variability within precipitation levels is significant. Also of course, as climate change takes place, temperatures will warm, at least in some locations in the state and water demands might increase, particularly for power generation and so forth. So there’s a lot of things that are likely to happen that are not very positive.

Orlowski: And with the increased flooding events and the increased precipitation at certain times, not all the time, that’ll just make our challenges of storing and managing water more difficult.

Feldman: Precisely. If you remember a few years back Lake Oroville, which is now approaching a near record level of elevation — and this is the reservoir that it’s the very top of the state and the top of the state’s so-called Water Project, which provides water for agriculture in the Central Valley, and also for cities here in the Southland. Lake Oroville a few years ago was at record low levels. And then all of a sudden we had this tremendous series of rain events in February 2017, which nearly overtopped Oroville Dam. It was very dangerous. You might remember it did severe damage to the spillway system.

Orlowski: So yeah that is going to be a major challenge going forward. You’ve mentioned different users of water in the state, including all of us city dwellers and then agriculture as well. Farmers use much more water than urban folks. So why do we need to reduce our consumption when they use so much more?

Feldman: In thinking about water use, you don’t want to just think about the end use, but you want to think about the overall value of that end use. And to use water to produce food and fiber are certainly pretty beneficial things to society, particularly since California produces some 40 percent of the nation’s produce. And it’s a very significant industry in terms of employment and in terms of economic value, aside from the fact that we all need to eat. From the standpoint of urban users, however, why do we need to save? And there’s a couple of answers to that. Most cities in California, this is certainly true in the Bay Area and here in the Southland, we draw our public supplies from sources that are already severely overtaxed: the Owens Valley, the Bay Delta, and of course increasingly the Colorado River. So even though we may use less water than agriculture, the sources from whence we derive that water are severely taxed. So that’s one reason. Second reason is because the water that we are drawing from the Owens Valley, the Bay Delta is also shared with the environment and that means fish, who need water every day. So if we’re going to balance the needs of the environment with the needs of society, those are good reasons why we want to think about conserving and using water more wisely.

Orlowski: And if you’re a city dweller and you’re kind of frustrated with the fact that farmers are using so much more than maybe just take a look at the green lawn outside your front yard and think, do you want to have a green lawn or would you rather have some strawberries or other food on the table?

Feldman: Exactly right. And when we talk about irrigation, we often think about irrigating farmers’ crops, but we also have to think about irrigation as lawns. We have to think about it as golf courses, public parks and so forth. So we need to use water more wisely.

Orlowski: So we talked a lot about the water shortages that California is facing. Let’s also talk about some of the solutions to see if there’s a way to get through this and get past it. Maybe the first one we can address is water recycling. What kinds of recycling do you think are most promising?

Feldman: I think the most promising path for recycling is to think of recycling as basically different grades of water fit for purpose. So for example, using Orange County as an illustration, the Orange County Water District recycles wastewater, and then through a very pioneering process, one of the largest such projects in the entire world, it purifies that water to a high degree and then injects it back into our groundwater basin and eventually pulls it back out. And that’s a major source of potable water, drinking water for people here in Orange County. However, there are other ways you can recycle water. You can, as is done, for example, by the Irvine Ranch Water District and some of our other local water agencies, you can recycle water to what’s called secondary treatment. (Editor’s note: Irvine Ranch Water District clarified that their recycled water goes through three stages of treatment, so it’s actually tertiary treatment.) You wouldn’t necessarily want to drink it, but you can certainly use it for landscaping. And the UC Irvine campus is in fact irrigated through that recycled water. So thinking about grades of water is really good because if you can use recycled water, that isn’t good enough perhaps to drink, but you can use it for other societally beneficial purposes, you are in effect conserving precious and expensively treated drinking water.

Feldman: And Orange County has been a leader in this field for many decades. And you mentioned a couple different projects. For long-time residents, you might remember that the Irvine recycling system is called the purple pipe system. That's right.

Orlowski: So that’s a great example. How else do you think that Orange County has been a leader in this water recycling field?

Feldman: Well certainly in terms of fit-for-purpose end uses. I think also in terms of the potability of water, the Orange County Water District. A couple of other ways, I think we’ve been really innovative is in terms of public education and public outreach. This is something I think where we’ve actually taught much of the rest of the world that has adopted recycled wastewater as a water source a great deal. Oftentimes when you talk about drinking recycled wastewater, people’s reaction is kind of negative. The yuck factor, as we often say. Or toilet to tap — the media likes to use that phrase. And one of the things that Orange County has done extremely well is to be very transparent in developing recycled water options in reaching out to various people within the community, including underrepresented populations, and making head-to-head comparisons among water options to illustrate why recycled wastewater is an option that is in the long run not only makes sense from the standpoint of public health and safety, but environmental protection and economics. It’s cheaper than some other options.

Orlowski: Well, and if you think about it, all water is recycled in some sense.

Feldman: Exactly right. Or some as some of my students like to say, ah, my goodness, the dinosaurs bathed in this water. And it’s true. It is. But again overcoming public reluctance and public concerns over the purity and the safety of water, understandably very important and water agencies here in the Southland are getting much better. In Los Angeles, for example, in San Diego where this option is also now being weighed, are becoming savvy on the need to educate, inform and make transparent the need for this option to the public.

Orlowski: Well and another way of getting water from a source that is not something that people think of immediately is stormwater. When it rains, just capturing that stormwater that falls on the streets and everywhere else and storing that and using it. How has Orange County conducted stormwater capture?

Feldman: Yeah, this is interesting. A lot of people are not fully aware of this, but our most common way of harvesting stormwater here in Orange County is the Santa Ana River. There are a number of impoundments. One is Anaheim Lake, which in fact capture rainwater and high flows on the Santa Ana River when those rare events occur, and then store the water. And it eventually percolates down into our groundwater basin, the same basin that’s used by our wastewater recycling plant in Fountain Valley. And it’s a very efficient way of harvesting water. And of course, since you’re storing it underground, it pretty much drought proof.

Orlowski: Well and as that water runs across the roadways and everywhere else, does it pick up pollutants? And is that something that we should be worried about?

Feldman: Great question. It does pick up pollutants and this is a huge challenge in making stormwater harvesting an effective option. What do we do? How do we do it? Well, there have been many technologies that have been developed. We see these technologies in places such as Singapore, Australia, parts of Western Europe, and increasingly here in the U.S., where water can be stored in lagoons and through what are called biofiltration systems, where in fact, you can grow plants that actually in effect eat up many of the nutrients, the substances that are collected by the stormwater. And then after you store it and remove some of the contaminants, you then of course have to treat it to various grades before it can be used. And certainly if you’re going to drink it, it has to then be treated to a very high degree. These innovations are not cheap. They require sophisticated ways of approaching both the harvesting of the water and land use practices and of course, public information and education. But they can be very fruitful means of augmenting our water supply.

Orlowski: Well so what would it take to implement more of this type of stormwater capture across the state of California?

Feldman: I think Los Angeles is learning this lesson right now. A few years ago, they passed a bond measure, which requires property owners to pay a small surtax into a fund that will in fact build stormwater harvesting projects. These projects are not easy or quick to build or design. For one thing, you have to, in many cases, acquire the land. For another, you have to be able to figure out where you’re going to store that water. Are you going to percolate it into a groundwater basin, assuming you have one? Or are you going to store it on the surface? Are you intending to use an immediately, for example, to irrigate parklands. Or are you seeking to eventually use it to supplement domestic water supply for homes? It’s a challenge and it requires a very holistic view of both water and land uses.

Orlowski: Well another option that is perennially appealing, especially to us in California with our hundreds of miles of coastline, is desalination, which involves taking the salt out of seawater. The largest desal plant in North America was built just a few years ago in Carlsbad, and the same company that built that plant is in the process of obtaining permits for another one in Huntington Beach. So do you think that desalination is a potential answer to California’s water shortages?

Feldman: I think desalination has to be thought of as a part of the mix. And in some areas of the world where you have really few other choices, the Middle East, Israel, even Singapore, certainly Australia, it may be your first, best option, assuming that you can satisfy the energy demands, assuming you can satisfy public concerns over coastal aesthetics and, again, land use issues. And of course that you can justify the costs, because thus far, because of the energy consumption, desalination is still a relatively more expensive option than some of the other options. Here in California, it has its place. And you mentioned the Carlsbad plant. It turns out that north San Diego county really at the time had few other options that seemed to be tractable. They were limited in how much water they could draw from the Colorado River. They do not have a groundwater basin of substantial size. So desalination made sense. Does it make sense in Huntington Beach? Hard to answer. What I would say is that whether it is, or is not, has to be determined by the efforts of water agencies to show that they’re being responsive to public concerns over coastal access, coastal aesthetics, land use, costs of operation, maintenance, water security, those sorts of questions, which I think arise whenever you’re applying an elaborate technology to solving a social problem.

Orlowski: We have talked a lot about technology, but I do want to talk a little bit about policy as well. So here in California, we have a system of private water rights where if you own the rights to the water you can do pretty much whatever you want with it. But so here in California, when do those private water rights get superseded, if they do at all?

Feldman: Yeah that’s a great question. It’s kind of like the Electoral College or the third rail in American politics. You don’t want to touch water rights.

Orlowski: Sorry for bringing it up.

Feldman: It’s all right. In point of fact, however, there are limits to water rights or private water rights. For example, here in California even people who have rights to withdrawing water lying under their property or adjacent to their property in rivers and streams, do not actually own the water. The water is owned by the state. It’s a very important fact. And in fact, from time to time, the state of California has employed rules governing what is called beneficial uses. If you’re not using the water that you have access to in a beneficial way, that right can be amended. And that has been done from time to time. In addition, during emergencies, such as droughts, water users that have what we call junior appropriative of rights, that is to say their rights to the water arose later than more senior controllers of the water in their district, can also be denied the right to withdraw large amounts of water. There’s no question that water rights doctrines could stand to be modified and perhaps managed in ways that are most beneficial to the public, particularly in times of drought emergency. But we do have in place systems that allow it. I think more significant than the water rights is being able to manage and control those rights in ways that are perceived as fair and equitable by everyone having access to the water.

Orlowski: So what would that look like? More, more fairness and equity in making sure people have access to that water?

Feldman: For one thing, making sure that underrepresented populations and those who need water for drinking potable uses have the highest priority to that water. Making sure that whatever water is withdrawn is used beneficially and not wastefully, and encouraging the use of the water in ways that are highly efficient. For example, moving toward more efficient irrigation technologies, rather than just spraying water in a field, using more drip irrigation systems and those sorts of things. And of course being careful in what you grow, what kinds of crops are suitable to what environments. These things by the way are being done in California. Some would say, they’re not being done quickly enough, but they’re being done gradually.

Orlowski: You just mentioned that we are learning to use water better. And we talked a lot about these different technologies that have been developed and are being used increasingly. So when you look at the big picture, do you think that California has the capacity, the desire, the ability to actually implement these solutions and hopefully make future droughts less severe?

Feldman: I certainly think we have the capacity to do so. And perhaps most importantly, between our universities and our water agencies and our officials and state government, we have the intellectual engines to be able to come up with innovations, both in the technological and the policy realms to do so. But to the other part of your question, do we have the willpower? Do we have the political will to move ahead? That’s always been a question mark in California. When droughts arise, we do take action. As you alluded to the governor’s action in recent weeks, and of course, a number of water agencies here in the Southland have begun to take even more stringent measures, for example, by banning, in some cases, or proposing to ban, unnecessary outdoor uses until the drought emergency ends.

But every time the droughts end we kind of go back, not completely, but we kind of bounce back to our prior habits. And I think what we need more than anything is a long-term attitudinal change. We have to stop taking water for granted. We have to understand that while it can be a renewable resource, it can also be an exhaustible resource. And it’s not free. Somebody has to acquire it, treat it, transport it. And these are things that should, I think, compel us to value water as a more precious commodity than we do. If we could get over the hump of changing our attitudes toward water and thinking of it as something very precious, something that has to be guarded and taken care of with great regard, I think we’d be on a better path than we are now.

Orlowski: Professor Feldman, thank you so much for joining me today on the UCI Podcast.

Feldman: It’s been a pleasure.

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This site will be archived in January 2016. Application software will remain available here on Github after the site is archived. Thank you for your interest.

California drought, visualized with open data

Scroll down to learn more.

The data presented here are drawn from free and publicly accessible sources. In addition, the analytical, graphical, and software tools used are open-source and available for public re-use.

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Reservoir Storage

Drought reduces snowpack and results in decreased reservoir volume.

Here, the effect of drought on 56 of California's more than 700 reservoirs is shown through time.

Reservoir volume as a percent of total capacity

Percent total reservoir volume animated since 2011. Bar widths are proportional to maximum capacity. On the map, circles are proportional to reservoir volume. Data providers: U.S. Drought Monitor , U.S. Bureau of Reclamation , U.S. Army Corps of Engineers , and more ; reservoir data accessed from the CA Data Exchange .

Estimated reservoir surface area loss using USGS's Landsat satellite

Data providers: u.s. geological survey and national aeronautics and space administration.

Changes in reservoir volume impact the surface area of reservoirs. Above, Landsat imagery was used to estimate the change in surface area from August 2011 to August 2014 for two of California's largest reservoirs, Shasta Reservoir and Trinity Lake , both located just under 200 miles northwest of Sacramento, CA. The outlets of the two reservoirs are located approximately 15 miles apart. These reservoirs provide water for irrigation, hydroelectric power, drinking water, ecosystem management, and flood control.

Drought, snowpack, and reservoir storage

Snowpack in California is the primary source of water to reservoirs that serve drinking water, agriculture, and hydroelectric needs.

For any given year, less wintertime snowpack results in lower reservoir levels, and less water for consumptive use.

In 2014, California received only a fraction of its normal precipitation and snow pack, with the State now facing three years of devastating drought ( California Department of Water Resources ).

Drought, snowpack, and reservoir storage (2010 vs 2014)

Snow data provider: u.s. natural resources conservation service snotel, drought also affects flow in streams and rivers.

The current and historical streamflow in unregulated rivers and streams (those without upstream reservoirs or control structures) are shown in the graph.

Current vs historical streamflow

Data providers: u.s. geological survey gagesii and nwis.

Current streamflow (y-axis) is plotted against the historical (since 1980) median streamflow (x-axis) for this day of year. Axes are log-scaled . Mouse over streams on the plot (blue circles), and on map (colored according to flow; red is well below normal flow, dark blue is well above normal flow) for more information.

Water withdrawals

In 2010, the most recent year for which water use was comprehensively estimated, irrigation, thermoelectric power supply, and public supply withdrawals were the biggest uses of freshwater in California ( U.S. Geological Survey ).

Water withdrawals in California (2010)

Data provider: u.s. geological survey, drought and food prices.

Agriculture represents the largest fraction of freshwater withdrawals( 1 ).

For the first time in history, some agricultural areas are not receiving any water for irrigation which is resulting in devastation of historically productive areas. The agricultural output for the state could fall by $3.5 billion this year ( 3 ).

Drought and food price anomalies (2011-2014 differences from the 5-year average)

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California cracks down on water pumping: ‘The ground is collapsing’

Farm region near Tulare Lake has been put on ‘probation’ as overpumping of water has caused faster sinking of ground

Even after two back-to-back wet years, California’s water wars are far from over. On Tuesday, state water officials took an unprecedented step to intervene in the destructive pumping of depleted groundwater in the state’s sprawling agricultural heartland.

The decision puts a farming region known as the Tulare Lake groundwater subbasin, which includes roughly 837 sq miles in the rural San Joaquin valley, on “probation” in accordance with a sustainable groundwater use law passed a decade ago. Large water users will face fees and state oversight of their pumping.

The move, which water officials reassured farmers would be lifted if local agencies progress on developing stronger sustainability plans to mitigate issues, is the first of its kind – but has been years in the making. Over-pumping of groundwater in this region has caused the land to collapse faster than in almost any other area in the country, in some places sinking more than a foot every year. Officials say the Tulare Lake groundwater subbasin failed for years to provide adequate plans to mitigate their well-known water problems.

Such plans are required under California’s 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), a landmark law that required local agencies to come up with their own long-term strategies to curb over-extraction and empowers the state to supervise and enforce them. Probation is a compulsory step to set lagging local agencies back on track to achieve sustainability goals that must be met by 2040.

The Tulare Lake subbasin is one of six the state has put up for possible probation due to inadequate plans, all in the San Joaquin valley, the powerhouse of California’s more than $50bn agricultural industry. The crackdown here has been met with a strong backlash.

The decision followed a nine-hour hearing on Tuesday where farmers protested the economic toll it would take on their industry. They cast the expected fees on their pumping as a devastating blow to the work they do and their ability to do it in the future.

“We all know there are several major farms that have filed bankruptcy in the last several months – it’s dire,” Doug Freitas, a third-generation farmer with 700 acres of land in the basin, said at Tuesday’s hearing. “I believe thousands of family farms and people who depend on groundwater will be displaced and homeless if we don’t take action on these excessive costs.”

Meanwhile, the decision was urged by clean water and environmental advocates who have called for more to be done to rein in dangerous overuse of groundwater.

“I see where the sensitivity is, but they have to remind themselves – they are farming on a lake that they pumped down,” Fred Briones, a representative of the Big Valley Pomo tribe said before the vote, referring to Tulare Lake, a vast freshwater lake that was drained to make room for agriculture. He added that Indigenous people who once flourished on these lands no longer have water rights there. “As we watch the farmers fight amongst each other, the ground is collapsing underneath their feet.”

Tensions were on full display during the hearing as multigenerational farming families, dairy owners and representatives of local water agencies spoke at length, pushing the board to delay probation.

One local elected official, Doug Verboon, a Kings county supervisor, who urged the state to act, said he’d been threatened for his position. “It’s difficult to stand up here, because I have people behind me that wish I would just shut the hell up,” he said.

The board, meanwhile, framed its position as softly as possible throughout the hearing, reminding triggered attendees that probation is temporary. But, according to the law, if the groups across the San Joaquin valley don’t make adequate progress within a year, further pumping restrictions could be put in place.

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For now, landowners will have to install and pay for meters that show how much they’re pumping, as well as fees for groundwater use. During probation, pumpers will be charged a base fee of $300 for each well each year plus $20 per acre-foot of water extracted; an acre-foot is a measurement used for large amounts of water, equal to roughly the amount of water needed to cover an acre of land in a foot of water. These costs, all together, are expected to mount to millions .

“We don’t take this decision at all lightly,” said Joaquin Esquivel, chair of the state water resources control board, at the start of the hearing, adding that associated fees inflicted on extractors are not to “punish the basins but to pay for the additional workload”.

At Tuesday’s hearing, farmers also spoke at length about how hard they have worked to curb groundwater overuse, and the difficult climate and economic conditions facing farmers across the country.

Greg Gatzka, city manager of Corcoran, a city listed by the state as a severely disadvantaged community, called on the board to consider the unintended consequences of the action, including the impact to urban residents depending on a local economy held up by agriculture. “We are the most vulnerable city that can be impacted by this,” he said, noting that things like sales taxes from farm equipment could drop.

Devon Matthis, a California assemblymember who represents the district affected by the probation, submitted a statement outlining the future implications of the decisions. “Food grows where water flows – my district feeds the state,” he said, adding that local water managers across the state would be watching what happens. “I ask that you remember who the stakeholders are and the negative effects the ag industry will suffer due to the state-mandated probation.”

The fees, which were cut in half from the initial proposed amount, will begin in mid-July, along with requirements for landowners to record their extractions. Reports on progress will also be required annually from the subbasin beginning in December.

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Facing Droughts, California Challenges Nestlé Over Water Use

A draft cease-and-desist letter sent to BlueTriton — known until this month as Nestlé Waters North America — is the latest development in a yearslong battle over water resources in the San Bernardino area.

By Jacey Fortin

After another dry winter that threatens to worsen water shortages across California , state officials have accused a water bottling company of diverting too much water from forests in the San Bernardino area.

The officials issued a draft cease-and-desist letter to the company last week — the latest development in a battle that has dragged on for years.

The company, BlueTriton, which was known as Nestlé Waters North America until it changed its name this month after being acquired by a private equity company, includes the bottled-water brands Poland Spring and Arrowhead.

In the letter , sent on April 23, the State Water Resources Control Board said that “Nestlé has 20 days from receipt of this notice” to respond. The process could lead to a formal cease-and-desist order, and possible monetary penalties, if it is formally approved by the board.

“During the state’s historic drought, the State Water Board’s Division of Water Rights received multiple complaints alleging that Nestlé’s continual water diversions depleted Strawberry Creek,” the board said in a statement , referring to a waterway that runs through the San Bernardino area, east of Los Angeles.

It said the water diversion had led to “reduced downstream drinking water supply and impacts on sensitive environmental resources.”

In an emailed statement, a spokesman for BlueTriton said that the company was “disappointed” with the move and that it would pursue legal options to correct state officials’ “misinterpretation” of California law.

“For more than 125 years, BlueTriton Brands and its predecessors have sustainably collected water from Arrowhead Springs in Strawberry Canyon,” the company said. “We take pride in being good stewards of the environment, while providing an excellent product loved by Californians.”

Strawberry Creek is not the only place in California where the company collects water, but it has become a focal point for local organizations, residents and environmentalists — especially as California struggles with water shortages, deepening droughts and devastating wildfires .

“Should we really be pulling water out of a national forest to stick in plastic bottles to sell at a significant markup?” said Michael O’Heaney, the executive director of Story of Stuff , an environmental advocacy group based in Berkeley, Calif., that has filed complaints against Nestlé. “It’s a poor use of our resources.”

The U.S. Forest Service charges the company an annual fee of $2,100 to maintain its infrastructure in the Strawberry Creek area, according to The Desert Sun, which investigated Nestlé’s activities in California in 2015 and reported that the Forest Service had been allowing the company to take water from the forest using a permit that had a 1988 expiration date.

Battles over the water diversion carried out by Nestlé — and, now, BlueTriton — have been brewing for years. State officials released a report on Nestlé’s water collection in 2017, and a revised report last week. Both said the company was diverting more water than had been permitted, which the company denies.

“This investigation has been a long time coming, and it’s taken several years due to its complexity, from both a technical and a legal standpoint,” said Robert Cervantes, a supervising engineer with the state’s water board.

“We just want BlueTriton to comply with California law,” he said, “especially now that we’re heading into another drought.”

The water board officials argue that BlueTriton is allowed to collect only about 2.4 million gallons of surface water in the area annually. That restriction applies to water in creeks and streams, as well as the springs that contribute to creeks and streams — not to water that percolates underground.

The company said it collected 59 million gallons from the water system last year, of which about 40 million gallons of overflow were returned to the area.

Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, has been involved in similar battles over water collection in other states, including Florida and Michigan .

Critics of the company say that its efforts to drain natural water supplies for bottling have been wasteful, and that the bottles themselves contribute to plastic waste. Since at least last year, the company has been considering selling most of its bottled water operations in the United States and Canada. The sale and renaming of Nestlé Waters North America is in line with that push.

The water being siphoned from California streams depletes the natural environment in an area that was already prone to water shortages and wildfires, Mr. O’Heaney said. The draft of the cease-and-desist letter sent to BlueTriton last week was a significant step, he said, even though it cannot yet be formally enforced.

“I hope it’s a wake-up call for them,” he said, “that the business they just bought is not being seen in a positive light by the communities in which it operates.”

America’s Vulnerable Water Systems

The Sinking Town: In Arizona’s deeply conservative La Paz County, the most urgent issue facing many voters is not inflation or illegal immigration. It is the water being pumped  from under their feet.

Paying the Price: Siemens and other corporations vowed to fix water woes in Mississippi and save cities across the state millions. The deals racked up debt instead , leaving many worse off than before.

A Tax on Groundwater: While American farmers elsewhere can freely pump the water beneath their land, growers in California’s Pajaro Valley pay hefty fees. Experts say the approach is a case study in how to save a vital resource .

A Diet Feeding a Crisis: America’s dietary shift toward far more chicken and cheese in recent decades has taken a major toll on underground water supplies .

First Come, First Served?: As the world warms, California is re-examining claims to its water that are  based on a cherished frontier principle and have gone unchallenged for generations.

Jets Powered by Corn: America’s airlines want to replace jet fuel with ethanol to fight global warming. That would require lots of corn, and lots of water .

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California reports the first increase in groundwater supplies in 4 years

FILE - In this aerial drone photo provided by the California Department of Water Resources, the primary pump in the foreground is part of a groundwater recharge project designed to capture excess flow for groundwater storage in Fresno County on March 13, 2023. After massive downpours flooded California’s rivers and packed mountains with snow, the state reported Monday, May 6, 2024, the first increase in groundwater supplies in four years. (Andrew Innerarity/California Department of Water Resources via AP, File)

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — After massive downpours flooded California’s rivers and packed mountains with snow, the state reported Monday the first increase in groundwater supplies in four years.

The state saw 4.1 million acre-feet of managed groundwater recharge in the water year ending in September, and an 8.7 million acre-feet increase in groundwater storage, California’s Department of Water Resources said. Groundwater supplies are critical to growing much of the country’s fresh produce.

The semiannual report came after water officials stepped up efforts during last year’s rains to capture water flows from melting snowpack in the mountains and encouraged farmers to flood fields to replenish groundwater basins.

“The impressive recharge numbers in 2023 are the result of hard work by the local agencies combined with dedicated efforts from the state, but we must do more to be prepared to capture and store water when the wet years come,” Paul Gosselin, deputy director of sustainable water management for the agency, said in a statement.

California has been seeking to step up groundwater recharge with ever-drier years expected from climate change . Much of the state’s population counts on groundwater for drinking water in their homes, and farmers that grow much of the country’s food rely on the precious resource for crops ranging from carrots and almonds to berries and leafy greens.

For many years, Californians pumped groundwater from wells without measuring how much they were taking. But as some wells ran dry and land began sinking, the state enacted a law requiring local communities to start measuring and regulating groundwater pumping to ensure the basins would be sustainable for years to come.

In Monday’s report, California water officials noted that some areas where land had been sinking saw a rebound as users pumped less groundwater since more surface water was available following the rains. Overall, the state extracted 9.5 million acre-feet of groundwater during the last water year, down from 17 million a year before, the report said.

Some farmers in California have reported seeing a recovery in their wells this year, prompting them to question how much the state needs to cut groundwater pumping. Joaquin Contente, a dairy farmer in the crop-rich San Joaquin Valley, said he has seen recovery in his wells, with one returning to 19 feet (5.8 meters) deep from more than 30 feet (9.1 meters) deep two years ago.

“They’ve already come back to almost a normal level,” he said.

California water officials welcomed the recharge but said it would take five rainy years like last year to boost groundwater storage to levels needed after so many years of overpumping.

California Water Library

Economic Impacts of the 2020–22 Drought on California Agriculture

Josué Medellín-Azuara, Alvar Escriva-Bou, José M. Rodríguez-Flores, Spencer A. Cole, John T. Abatzoglou, Joshua H. Viers, Nicholas R. Santos, Daniel A. Summer | November 22nd, 2022

California just ended its third consecutive year of drought, resulting in the driest three-year period in the instrumental record. Multi-year deficits in precipitation in the state’s usually wetter northern regions have been compounded by increased crop evaporative demands, leading to water scarcity impacts to agriculture across the state.

Although 2020 was a dry year, water reserves stored during the wetter years of 2017 and 2019 greatly diminished drought impacts during that year. The water outlook changed rapidly in 2021—the third driest water year on record with the highest evaporative demand. The northern regions of the state—including the Sacramento Valley, the Scott and Shasta valleys, the Pit River valleys (northern intermountain valleys), and the Russian River—faced unusually dry conditions. Drought emergency conditions in 2021 were proclaimed first in the Russian River, Scott River and Shasta River basins, which faced subsequent curtailments. Water curtailments were extended to the Sacramento Valley later in the season. Water for local agriculture, ecosystems, exports, and water quality protection in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta were compromised by low water reserves.

Atmospheric rivers in October and December 2021 provided temporary drought relief for a portion of the state, but record low precipitation from January-September allowed for extreme drought conditions to reign into the 2022 water year. To overcome persistent precipitation deficits and below-average storage in major reservoirs, the state again implemented water rights curtailments and low water deliveries from the State Water Project. The US Bureau of Reclamation announced reduced Central Valley Project deliveries—including unprecedented cutbacks to senior contractors in the Sacramento Valley—and local agencies implemented cutbacks as a first tier of drought response measures. Compared with the 2021 water year, however, 2022 brought less severe water cutbacks in the San Joaquin Valley.

This report provides estimates of the economic impacts to agriculture for first three years of the current drought, which began in 2020. We use a combination of climate, hydrologic, agricultural and economic models, supplemented by informal surveys of irrigation districts and remote sensing data. The study includes nearly 88% of the 8.7 million acres of irrigated crop area in the state (LandIQ, 2019) excluding idle land. Our preliminary analysis for 2020–21 (Medellín-Azuara et al. 2022), focused on the Central Valley, and also examined the Russian River basin (North Coast), and northern intermountain valleys in Siskiyou, Shasta, and Modoc counties. Here, we expanded our spatial coverage to include the Central Coast, South Coast, and Colorado River.

agriculture , drought , economic analysis

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• Upper Ojai Valley 4-001
• Upper Santa Ana Valley - Chino 8-002.01
• Upper Santa Ana Valley - Cucamonga 8-002.02
• Upper Santa Ana Valley - Rialto-Colton 8-002.04
• Upper Santa Ana Valley - Riverside-Arlington 8-002.03
• Upper Santa Ana Valley - San Bernardino 8-002.06
• Upper Santa Ana Valley - San Timoteo 8-002.08
• Upper Santa Ana Valley - Temescal 8-002.09
• Upper Santa Ana Valley - Yucaipa 8-002.07
• Vallecito-Carrizo Valley 7-028
• Ventura River Valley - Lower Ventura River 4-003.02
• Ventura River Valley - Upper Ventura River 4-003.01
• Vidal Valley 7-042
• Ward Valley 7-003
• Warren Valley 7-012
• West Salton Sea
• Wingate Valley 6-019
• Yuma Valley 7-036

Climate-Smart Intervention Takes Top 2023 Case Studies in the Environment Prize

Case Studies in the Environment is pleased to announce the winners of the 2023 Case Studies in the Environment Prize Competition .

Eligible submissions are judged for their ability to translate discrete case studies into broad, generalizable findings; for advancing a strong perspective and engaging narrative; for being accessible to their intended audiences; for addressing topics that are important or notable in their novelty, impact, or urgency; and which contribute to the teaching of environmental concepts to students and/or practitioners.

The winning case study from the 2023 competition, “ Building Resilience in Jamaica’s Farming Communities: Insights From a Climate-Smart Intervention ,” from The University of the West Indies’ Donovan Campbell and Shaneica Lester, demonstrates that while climate change poses immense threats to the environment and to human livelihoods, adaptation also provides opportunities to strengthen a community.

“This positivity and sense of agency is critical to the success of climate initiatives,” noted CSE Editor-in-Chief Dr. Jennifer Bernstein. “The editorial team felt that the manuscript exemplifies the journal at its best–identifying and evaluating an important environmental question using robust interdisciplinary methods.”

The honorable mention articles from the 2023 competition are “ Teaching the Complex Dynamics of Clean Energy Subsidies With the Help of a Model-as-Game ,” from Rochester Institute of Technology’s Eric Hittinger, Qing Miao, and Eric Williams; and “ Barriers and Facilitators for Successful Community Forestry: Lessons Learned and Practical Applications From Case Studies in India and Guatemala ,” from Vishal Jamkar (University of Minnesota), Megan Butler (Macalester College), and Dean Current (University of Minnesota).

“‘Teaching the Complex Dynamics of Clean Energy Subsidies’ recognizes the value of subsidies, while at the same time acknowledging contextual constraints. The game itself allows students to work through subsidy design via a number of cases, and provides high quality material for use immediately in the classroom. This is a wildly useful tool, and exemplifies what we want to see with respect to accessible pedagogy using environmental case studies as a focus.”

“Barriers and Facilitators for Successful Community Forestry” is the author team’s second case study contribution to the journal, extending the well-developed framework of their previous article, “ Understanding Facilitators and Barriers to Success: Framework for Developing Community Forestry Case Studies ” and applying it to two unique locations.

Both the winning case study and honorable mentions have been made freely available to the public at online.ucpress.edu/cse .

The Case Studies in the Environment team extends their gratitude to everyone who submitted articles for the 2023 competition. For previous Case Studies in the Environment Prize Competition winners, please see our prize competition landing page .

Case Studies in the Environment is a journal of peer-reviewed case study articles and case study pedagogy articles. The journal informs faculty, students, researchers, educators, professionals, and policymakers on case studies and best practices in the environmental sciences and studies. online.ucpress.edu/cse

TAGS: Case Studies in the Environment , climate change

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