We Need to Start Budgeting Water Like We Budget Our Expenses

By Margaret Clune Giblin, Center for Progressive Reform. Posted February 11, 2009.

For example, the bill would require the Bureau of Reclamation to coordinate with other federal and non-federal agencies to assess the effects of global climate change on water resources in specified watersheds, and to develop adaptation strategies to cope with shortages and conflicts that may result.  Another program would require the federal government to work with state and local water resource agencies to provide a more accurate assessment of water resources throughout the country and work on means of improving ability to forecast future availability.  Under both programs, states would maintain their current authority over water management, but would receive funding to assist in these critical analyses, either under a cost-sharing or grant arrangement.     

This is likely to be a cost-effective means of collecting information and developing adaptation strategies.  In some areas, particularly those that have been contending with water shortages for years, data regarding availability and use of existing water resources may already exist.  For example, management of California's water supply has been the subject of fierce debate for decades.  A federal-state partnership, called the CALFED Bay Delta Program, was formed in the mid-1990s to improve the State's water supply and the ecological health of the San Francisco Bay/Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.  More recently, the Delta Vision initiative was launched, to broaden the focus of CALFED.  Through a Blue Ribbon Task Force appointed by Governor Schwarzenegger, Delta Vision will recommend actions to address competing demands in a way that will achieve a sustainable delta. 

However, even in such an intensely-studied context, critical pieces of information are lacking.  CPR Member Scholar and Professor Holly Doremus (University of California, Davis and Berkeley) has served as a consultant to CALFED.  She points out that one of the most interesting revelations to come from the Delta Vision Task Force is how little is known about who holds what rights and who is using how much water.  For example, a report by the State Water Resources Control Board concludes that it has "very limited information on water use" for either of the two basic categories of surface water rights in California, and has "no information on groundwater use in the Delta watershed."  Where such known data gaps exist, the federal-state collaborations and cost-sharing envisioned in the Secure Water provisions will mean that federal funds will be effectively leveraged to build on information already collected by the states -- including what they don't know.

It's not hard to imagine less information having been collected by areas that so far have had the luxury of taking water supply for granted.  Collection and analysis of data regarding how much water is available, how much is used, and who has the right to use it (analogous to a household's current budget) is a critical first step to planning for and adapting to a warmer future.  Scientific data regarding the likely impacts of climate change on the availability and use of water, and how the holders of various legal rights to water will be impacted is equally necessary.  The Executive Director of the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies recently noted that "[w]ater resource managers in many parts of the country are already beginning to face water quality and quantity obstacles that may be linked to climate change, but at this point there is not enough reliable data available to help water systems make plans based on accurate long-term projections."

If S.22 (and the SECURE Water Act) passes the House, collection and analysis of that data can commence.  Then, just as households determine where spending in their budgets can most easily be cut, water resource managers can determine what readily available opportunities for water conservatio

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Margaret Clune Giblin, J.D., M.C.P., is a Policy Analyst with the Center for Progressive Reform.

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