The Story of Water in Southern California: Part Four

The world is changing faster and in ways we can’t possibly comprehend. Abstract and easy-to-ignore warnings of looming climate change have stopped knocking at our door and have kicked it down instead. Too much heat, too little water, erratic weather patterns, and the ongoing fight between addressing immediate economic needs against investing in long-term global sustainability—along with America's deeply ingrained and misguided sense of exceptionalism—means that while we’re somewhat prepared for what lies ahead, our current climate trajectory remains grim.

Below our feet, wells are running dry. Look above, and the sky seems as barren as the earth. As I write this in the fall of 2021, 50 of California’s 58 counties are under a summer drought state of emergency, with San Diego being one of the notable exceptions. According to Richard Tinker, longtime meteorologist and drought expert on the team behind the US Drought Monitor, 75,748,354 people live in areas of at least moderate drought in the United States. That’s nothing new, says Tinker, explaining that in September 2002, nearly 160 million people lived in areas affected by drought. But what’s more alarming is the number of Americans now living in the most severe drought zones, which are classified as Extreme or Exceptional: approximately 41.3 million people.

San Diego currently falls under D1, or Moderate Drought conditions. “[That’s] far from ideal, but better than the rest of the state,” says Tinker.

Don’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet. “Many people are not most impacted by the drought severity they live in, but by drought in a distant water source or reservoir,” he explains. “For instance, Los Angeles gets much of their water from the Sierra Nevada snowpack. A bad year for snowfall there has a much greater practical effect on Los Angeles than drought physically in Los Angeles per se.” 

He goes on to say that there are three main stressors on California’s water supply. First, the long-term trend towards precipitation extremes, which he attributes partially to anthropogenic climate change. “[There have been] more dry periods than wet since the mid-1980s,” Tinker says. Second is a consistently increasing population (despite much attention spent on the rising number of people leaving California), and third is rises in temperature in areas that have a wider ripple effect. “Temperature increases have led to less snow on long-term average in higher elevations relative to how much total precipitation has fallen,” he says. “Rainfall-runoff is only about 40% as efficient at filling the large California reservoirs as melting snowpack, so ‘snow drought’ has been more common and more deficient than precipitation total.”‍

Who Dries Out First?‍

Most of the time, it’s California’s roughly 76,000 farms that feel the effects of water shortages first. Lack of water, like so many other resources, has disproportionately affected BIPOC farmers. Non-white farmers are historically less likely to have the ability to access new capital for projects like well-drilling, nor able to rely on generational wealth to tide them over—unlike white farmers, who currently own 98% of all farmland in the United States, according to a 2020 land policy report from the National Young Farmers Coalition and confirmed by the USDA. 

A huge variety of crops grown in the United States, like soybeans, are struggling more than ever to survive in current conditions. Crops often used in the beverage industry, like barley or grapes, are far from exempt. “In California, 55% of rangeland is in poor or very poor condition. [Nationally], almost 40% of spring wheat toward late June was in poor or very poor condition ([compared to] 6% same time last year), [and] about 30% of oats were poor or very poor in late July ([compared to] 12% same time last year),” says Tinker. 

But despite the seeming inevitability of the southwest’s inability to remain hospitable for farmers (and indeed, humans in general), Californians are actually poised better than most. That’s thanks to both luck and some surprising preventative measures that have helped stave off the worst so far. When the federal government slashed water accessibility to Lake Mead earlier this year in response to the ongoing drought, California escaped relatively unscathed, thanks to our longer-standing water rights agreements set forth a hundred years ago. 

However, while water rights acquisitions from our great-grandparents’ era remain helpful to San Diego, it hinders those who were unlucky to follow in our footsteps. 

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, even the most forward-thinking settlers could never have realistically predicted the massive and ongoing swell of people coming to Southern California, much less the corresponding water use and availability. “Between 1900 and 2000, California’s population skyrocketed from fewer than 2 million people to 34 million,” reports the Public Policy Institute of California. Despite abundant natural resources, there’s still only so much to go around.