Water Availability for Cannabis in Northern California: Intersections of Climate, Policy, and Public Discourse

Betsy Morgan,Kaitlyn Spangler,Jacob Stuivenvolt Allen,Mark W Brunson,Nancy Huntly,Christina N Morrisett,Shih-Yu Simon Wang

doi:10.3390/w13010005

Abstract

Availability of water for irrigated crops is driven by climate and policy, as moderated by public priorities and opinions. We explore how climate and water policy interact to influence water availability for cannabis (Cannabis sativa), a newly regulated crop in California, as well as how public discourse frames these interactions. Grower access to surface water covaries with precipitation frequency and oscillates consistently in an energetic 11–17 year wet-dry cycle. Assessing contemporary cannabis water policies against historic streamflow data showed that legal surface water access was most reliable for cannabis growers with small water rights (<600 m3) and limited during relatively dry years. Climate variability either facilitates or limits water access in cycles of 10–15 years—rendering cultivators with larger water rights vulnerable to periods of drought. However, news media coverage excludes growers’ perspectives and rarely mentions climate and weather, while public debate over growers’ irrigation water use presumes illegal diversion. This complicates efforts to improve growers’ legal water access, which are further challenged by climate. To promote a socially, politically, and environmentally viable cannabis industry, water policy should better represent growers’ voices and explicitly address stakeholder controversies as it adapts to this new and legal agricultural water user.

Highlights

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.license.Competing demands for water are intensifying globally, heightening concerns about water scarcity [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
The second section presents the implications of current water policy on legal water access for cannabis and how news media framed these policies and regulations, as well as the perspectives of related interest groups
We found that current water-use regulations, coupled with the multi-year drought phase of northern California’s inherent wet and dry cycles [13,38], have unbalanced impacts on water availability depending on the water right volume

Summary

Introduction

Competing demands for water are intensifying globally, heightening concerns about water scarcity [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Among these demands is the availability of water for dry-season irrigation in the western United States (USA), where precipitation and agricultural water demand are temporally misaligned [8,9]. The regulatory framework for agricultural water use in California includes cannabis (Cannabis sativa), a newly legal specialty crop [14]. Given the established negative impacts of illicit cannabis cultivation on native salmonids [16], water quality [17,18], and terrestrial species [19,20,21], the CCP seeks to minimize effects on aquatic and riparian ecosystems from legal cannabis cultivation while meeting cannabis water needs and encouraging regulatory compliance

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