Beyond the Ship That Sailed: Co-Creating California’s Water Future

When sitting with the weight of the climate crisis, and the history of resource extraction that goes with it, it’s easy to wish that we could go back and do things differently. As I’ve learned more about the past and present of California’s water system in undergrad and in my service year at Sustainable Conservation, I’ve wished much of the same. As you learn about the feats of engineering that brought water to Los Angeles and that unlocked the Central Valley for agriculture, you learn about the valleys dammed, the rivers diverted and dried, the miles and miles of wetlands drained, the rights and traditions denied. California’s hydrologic landscape is permanently altered, and climate change will strain our system immensely. As much as we might wish to go back with the knowledge that we have now and better prepare, that ship has long since sailed, and we’re called to work with what’s in front of us today.

There’s a saying that people love to repeat: when it comes to water in California, we’re working with 19th-century laws and 20th-century infrastructure, trying to solve 21st-century problems. Water is in massive demand across the state - California uses about 42 million acre-feet of water per year between urban and agricultural uses, roughly equivalent to 14 trillion gallons of water. Needs have shifted over time, yet many of California’s most senior water rights were parceled out over 100 years ago - others date back to the time of Spanish occupation. Many of our major canals, the concrete arteries that move water for hundreds of miles and supply arid Southern California, are decades old, requiring expensive maintenance to restore the capacity and functionality they have lost over time. 

When surface water is difficult to acquire, many users turn to groundwater to meet their needs. Once the technology was there to easily drill agricultural wells, California’s aquifers were treated as infinite wellsprings - growers pumped like there was no tomorrow. Economic difficulty and the opportunity for profit also caused huge numbers of growers in the Central Valley to plant high-value orchards on their land, growing almonds, walnuts and pistachios. Because these are high-value, permanent, and thirsty crops, they must be watered year-round and cannot be fallowed in dry years. This transition created a vast ‘hardened’ water demand, where these huge swaths of nut orchards must always receive their water, no matter how limited supply may be. Eventually, decades of unregulated pumping led to contaminated groundwater, dry wells, and subsidence, where land sinks as water is pumped out from under it. Finally, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) was passed in 2014, mandating that users must come into sustainable groundwater use by 2040. 

Moving forward, California is facing difficult questions with few easy answers. Agricultural interests, fish groups, native Tribes, Delta ecosystems advocates, water and land managers, and disadvantaged communities in the Central Valley all need more water, and there just isn’t enough to go around at our current use rate. This is not to say that nobody is working to address these questions - people from across the water sector understand the situation we are in, and the need to both limit our consumption and identify new, creative sources of water. Growers are working with local agencies to repurpose farmland in creative ways, reducing applied water demand while creating new community or ecological benefits. Irrigation districts are working with non-profits like Sustainable Conservation to implement groundwater recharge projects, turning floodwaters from winter storms into groundwater supplies for future use. 

These examples of local collaboration are essential steps in the right direction, and they inspire others to do similar work. They represent the opportunity that comes with working together to tackle a common problem, an opportunity that California’s water sector must throw it’s full weight behind if we hope to achieve a sustainable water future.

For too long, California’s water and environmental agencies, regulatory bodies, water and land managers, and agricultural users have prioritized developing and executing their own internal visions for sustainability initiatives or regulatory compliance, doing their part to contribute to statewide goals while hoping that everyone else will do the same. However, systemic change is not built piece-meal. Individual actors coming up with their own plans, and then everyone trying to iron out the differences later is a less-than-efficient method for effectuating state-wide change. It is essential that California’s state and local agencies and water managers break down these silos and create more opportunities to get in the same room to develop collaborative, system-scale solutions. Most of California’s specific water issues - groundwater depletion, contaminated water supplies, flooding, and others, are often interconnected within a watershed. In terms of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, they become state-scale. Such problems require integrated, collaborative solutions. Instead of silos, we need watershed-scale pilot projects, data sharing, inter-agency workgroups, planning summits, and more. We need active collaboration and coordination. 

Collaboration and resource-sharing cannot be discussed without acknowledging the historical exclusion of California’s native Tribes from the decision makers’ table. Despite being California’s original water stewards, much of California’s water policy up until now has centered on the transfer of water rights away from Tribes and into the hands of speculators, agribusiness and growing urban centers. While there have been a growing number of regional initiatives to co-manage rivers and other water resources with Tribes, a welcome shift, California’s Tribes largely remain sidelined in the largest discussions on managing our water resources state-wide moving forward. 

Assembly Bill 2218, currently under deliberation in the state Senate, seeks to change that. If passed, the bill would require state agencies to formally acknowledge the water-related impacts of the disenfranchisement and removal of California Tribes from their lands, and that they consider and address these impacts when revising or adopting future policies and regulations. This is a truly significant step towards recognizing Tribal knowledge and authority in managing our water resources, and we must keep the momentum going.

Despite all the challenges and the growing pains that come with adjusting to a new climate landscape, the most meaningful experiences I’ve had at Sustainable Conservation have come from seeing just how much progress the water sector is making on building change-making relationships. Attending Flood-MAR Forum in Sacramento in November 2025 and the San Joaquin Valley Water Resilience Summit at Fresno State in May, I was able to see first-hand what can happen when people from state agencies, growers, environmentalists, community leaders, and more sit at a table together with a pen and scratch paper and actually brainstorm solutions in real-time. I got to see these co-conspirators draft a strategic action plan for the San Joaquin Valley and a unified message for state leadership, everyone finding their role and capacity to contribute. People overwhelmingly agreed that we are well past isolated or temporary fixes for our water struggles. As a state, we need to find more water via watershed-scale groundwater recharge, water re-use, fixing regulatory bottlenecks, and maintaining aging infrastructure, while also reigning in our consumption by repurposing farmland, transitioning to less water-intensive crops, fallowing land, and improving groundwater accounting. To do these things, people agreed, we can only hope to get there together.

It’s true that California needs more active collaboration and coordination, but I believe we are beginning to get on the right track. We must keep the momentum going.