The eternal challenge: California's water

Another soggy mess

A new nightmare for greens: conserving water may encourage sprawl

A CENTURY ago, William Mulholland scared up support in Los Angeles for an aqueduct to bring water from the Owens Valley. "If you don't get the water now, you'll never need it. The dead never get thirsty." Nowadays, the brutish water baron's bailiwick, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, merely "urges Los Angeles residents and businesses to take measures to conserve water during the hot weather."

That familiar advice, issued on August 1st after "brief water outages" in the West San Fernando Valley, will not be the last appeal to Angelenos' doubtful sense of civic responsibility. Back in Mulholland's day, Los Angeles had 200,000 residents; now it has 3.8m. The state's population is due to rise from 36m residents to 48m by 2030; and so will its thirst for water-to fill swimming pools, wash cars, water lawns, build golf courses and keep orchards from reverting to deserts.

Is this sustainable? A recent report from the Public Policy Institute of California reckons that if per capita urban use of water remains at its 2000 levels of 232 gallons per person per day, California will need another 3.6m acre feet of the stuff by 2030-a 40% increase on the current level. (An acre foot, almost 326,000 gallons, is the amount of water needed to cover one acre to a depth of one foot.)

Part of the challenge will be geography. Most Californians live in the arid southern bit of the state; the water they need comes from the Sierra Nevada mountains in the north and from California's share of the Colorado river to the east, which its fast-growing neighbours covet. It is not hard to see why greens bleat about California's growth being unsustainable.

However, California's real problem (as the PPIC report makes clear) remains not shortages but allocation and pricing. Farmers, who use up to 80% of California's water, deplore the demand that comes with urban sprawl; city-dwellers see no reason to be held hostage by the farmers, who employ no more than a million workers a year; and environmentalists accuse almost everyone in sight of both wasting water and polluting it.

Peace, of a sort, has broken out-the result of three changes in the aftermath of the 1987-92 drought. In 1994, state and federal agencies hashed out a deal to restore the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem while still ensuring a sufficient supply of water. In 2001, the state legislature passed two "show-me-the-water" bills that require developers first to prove they have access to water while still, as required by previous legislation, satisfying environmental worries. Finally, in 2003, another deal was brokered with six other states and the Department of the Interior, whereby California kept its access to the Colorado river but reduced its demand from more than 5m acre feet to the 4.4m acre-feet limit it had agreed to-and ignored-as long ago as 1929.

These deals might seem to put a limit on the state's sprawl. Perversely, however, the conservation measures that greens have long championed will now allow further expansion. Peter Gleick, of the Pacific Institute of Oakland, reckons that California could save 30% of its current urban water use simply by fully implementing existing conservation technologies.

Even small things can make a difference. The Metropolitan Water District, which distributes most of southern California's water, notes that people in Sacramento, which has no metering system, use 271 gallons a day; by contrast, per capita use in metered Los Angeles is just 155 gallons a day, not least because the water department has also installed 1.24m low-flush toilets since 1990. There is also water to be saved in delivery systems: according to the Department of the Interior, each dollar spent modernising a canal brings a return of up to $5 in conserved water.

Then there is the issue of pricing. Stephanie Pincetl, a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, argues that more places should adopt progressive pricing (the more you use, the higher the rate). Sprinkler-dotted Beverly Hills, which is notoriously profligate, has just added a fourth tier to its pricing structure.

The most obvious opportunity for better pricing and better conservation, however, is in farming, especially in the vast Central Valley. The federally financed Central Valley Project is the largest irrigation system in the country, supplying some 20,000 farms with enough water to serve ten cities the size of Los Angeles. But whereas the cities have to pay anything from $400 to $600 for each acre foot, a Central Valley farmer may pay only $80.

The farmers point out that they are closer to the source and do not have to pay the transport and purification costs that the cities have to bear. But they are also massively subsidised: they pay no interest on the capital cost of the irrigation project, now more than 50 years old. Indeed, given the small amount of principal so far repaid, Barry Nelson of the National Resources Defence Council reckons the valley's farmers are enjoying what amounts to a 500-year interest-free loan-quite apart from cheap energy and subsidies for pasture land and for growing low-price crops such as cotton, rice and alfalfa.

Hence a fundamental problem: as long as America wants California to be its bread-basket, providing produce that can be grown much more cheaply elsewhere in the world, California's farmers will need cheap water-and if their water is cheap, they have no incentive to conserve it. Why, for example, should they invest in expensive sub-surface drip-feed irrigation when they can simply let water flood across a field?

Conservation does not solve everything-and it can have unintended consequences. Ms Pincetl notes, for example, that re-lining the All-American Canal to stop seepage into the groundwater affected the wetlands south of the border with Mexico-and resulted in a lawsuit by a Mexican NGO against America's Department of the Interior. And, for the true gloomsters, there is always global warming: if the snows that fall on the Sierra Nevada are replaced by rain, too much of California's water supply will run off to the sea instead of sinking into the groundwater. Then the battle between the cities and the farmers would turn really nasty.

LOAD-DATE: August 26, 2005