Abstract
The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) of 2014 and the Central Valley Salinity Alternatives for Long-Term Sustainability (CVSALTS) initiative were conceived to reverse years of inaction on the over-pumping of groundwater and salination of rivers that both threaten agricultural sustainability in the State of California. These largely stakeholder-led, innovative policy actions were supported by modern tools of remote sensing and Geographic Information System technology that allowed stakeholders to make adjustments to existing resource management and jurisdictional boundaries to form policy-mandated Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) and Salinity Management Areas (SMAs) to address future management responsibilities. Additional resources mobilized by the California Department of Water Resources (CDWR) and other water resource and water quality management agencies have been effective in encouraging the use of spreadsheet accounting and numerical simulation models to develop robust and coherent quantitative understanding of the current state and likely problems that will be encountered to achieve resource sustainability. This activity has revealed flaws and inconsistencies in the conceptual models underpinning this activity. Two case studies are described that illustrate the disparity in the challenges faced by GSAs in subregions charged with developing consensus-based Groundwater Sustainability Plans (GSPs). These case studies also illustrate the unique aspect of SGMA: that alongside mandates and guidelines being imposed statewide, local leadership and advocacy can play an important role in achieving long-term SGMA and CVSALTS goals.
Highlights
This paper deals with groundwater and salinity management issues in California, one of the major lessons we hope the international readership draws from the analysis we present is that good policy, properly implemented and adequately resourced, can move a region from having one of the worst water and salinity management records to a path to having one of the best
Following the mandates of the Little Hoover Commission [15], the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) architects have striven to aid and abet stakeholder jurisdiction acting through the Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) over policy related to future groundwater management, encouraging innovation while making sure that the process adheres to state law
The design of an institutional framework for SGMA implementation was achieved with the decision to require all entities, initially those in the medium- and high-priority basins in the Central Valley, to develop Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) [1,4,5]
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) and Central Valley Salinity Alternatives for Long-Term Sustainability (CVSALTS) initiatives have fundamentally changed future groundwater management in California [1,2]. Both embrace a holistic conceptual understanding of the resource and the interconnectedness of this resource with other vulnerable resources and the citizenry of the state. 515 alluvial basins and prioritized the severity of the groundwater overdraft as high, medium or low [3] Those prioritized as high and medium and critically overdrafted were obligated to submit groundwater management sustainability plans by January 2020 [1]. The development of a water budget for current and projected future conditions to 2070, to include the impacts of climate change, is the first step in developing a management plan [4,5]
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