One of the most important environmental laws in state history celebrated its 10th anniversary last month. You’d be forgiven if you didn’t notice. The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act remains, like the declining resource it aims to protect, largely invisible to most Californians.
Despite this, the first decade of SGMA (“sigma” to those who know it well) laid the foundations, still a little creaky in places, for nothing less than the transformation of our rural landscape and our economy. If we allow it, this law could nurture a truly resilient landscape, capable of thriving in an era of climate whiplash.
On paper, it is a law relating solely to the management of a finite, limited and largely invisible resource. When implemented, it must be about revitalizing highly visible lands and communities in the heart of the state.
California created an orchard for the world largely by tapping the prehistoric aquifers that underlie the Central Valley. Much of this the water is now gonenever to fully return. By the early 2010s, this long underground decline finally became impossible to ignore, as drought dried up wells, land sank, and canals collapsed. Facing the growing scars of groundwater depletion, lawmakers passed SGMA — a sweeping road map to get the state to the point where we take only as much water as comes in.
A decade later, we still have not fully grappled with the scale of change needed to balance groundwater basins and ensure we have enough water to sustain our farms, ecosystems, and rural communities over the long term. term. Estimates suggest up to 900,000 acres of farmland in the San Joaquin Valley alone they may need to be fallowed to reduce groundwater withdrawal and balance supply and demand. This is larger than the total area of The five largest cities in California combined – and the San Joaquin Valley is not the only region that will need to take farmland out of production.
If you have ever trudged through the dust of a once heavily cultivated field, left to the sun and wind, you can guess what awaits us if we randomly remove land from production. The Central Valley would deconstruct into a patchwork of arid, tumbleweed-filled dust areas. In the early days of SGMA, conversations my colleagues and I had with producers across the valley made it clear that groundwater decline was as much a land problem as a water problem: we needed a plan to strong transition for the hundreds of thousands of acres facing reduced irrigation.
These concerns gave rise to the state’s Multi-Benefit Land Repurposing Program, a much-needed practical support plan for the transition to a smaller irrigated footprint. Launching in summer 2022, it provides block grants and technical assistance to organizations and tribes to repurpose irrigated agricultural land for uses that reduce reliance on groundwater while providing new benefits to communities. Including “multi-benefit” in the official name of the program is not just climate madness. There really are layers and layers of unrealized benefits hidden in repurposed agricultural land.
Take, for example, the revival of former farmland at the confluence of the Tuolumne and San Joaquin rivers in the Central Valley, an earlier accomplishment but one that should inform California’s land reallocation agenda. Approximately 1,600 acres former farmland has been transformed into Dos Rios State Park, a functioning floodplain whose long list of beneficiaries, human and otherwise, continues to grow. Scrub rabbits, wood rats, Swainson’s hawks, Central Valley chinook salmon, rainbow trout, Bell’s vireo, great sandhill crane – all protected species – have found a house on the restored floodplain. Many migratory birds from the Pacific Flyway make a regular stopover there.
Land and water can coexist in Dos Rios in a way that characterized much of the Central Valley before widespread European settlement. The unconfined space allows land to absorb floodwaters, recharge groundwater while protecting downstream lands, including tribal and socio-economically disadvantaged communities, from flooding. Additionally, the rewatered floodplain provides a bank of carbon-sequestering vegetation that also cleans our water supply. This is a wonderful thicket of benefits that highlights the potential of the Central Valley’s ancient farmlands.
The Land Repurposing Program provides funds to support exactly these types of projects across the state. Like its sister SGMA, it prioritizes regional and local leadership, providing grants to entities such as groundwater sustainability agencies and tribes who, in turn, work with local groups to develop plans and finance projects. In just two years, the program has seen quiet success, helping nearly 100 organizations working on dozens of projects in regions covering 3.3 million acres.
However, the current scale of public funding is not up to the challenge. The recent approval by legislators of a climate obligation is a welcome step in the right direction. As voters, we have the chance to approve this critical funding this fall when it appears on the November ballot in the form of Proposition 4. It would include $200 million for land repurposing, $15 million for dollars for water data, $610 million for safe and affordable drinking water, and $386 million for land reallocation. million for groundwater programs.
But rural communities will need much more to accomplish what amounts to reinventing our lives with the land. Through its regional funding structure, the Land Reallocation Program gives agricultural communities a chance to shape their own transition to a sustainable water future. We must provide them with the long-term funding required to help them make this transition.
SGMA has begun a transition to a more sustainable future in which agriculture is in balance with long-term water supplies. Ten years later, we need to understand what this means, not only for our relationship with all the water we can’t see, but also for the beautiful and powerful earth we have the privilege of living with every day.
Ann Hayden is vice president for climate resilient water systems at the Environmental Defense Fund.
