For Clients & Friends of The Gualco Group, Inc.
IN THIS ISSUE – “This could be the mother of all floods”
San Joaquin Valley farmer on the looming Sierra record snowpack “Big Melt”
- Is California the Nation’s Recession Bellwether? “Risks Became Realities”
- “Trailer Bills” are State Budget’s Hidden Back Door
- Gov. Adapts to Newsom’s Frequent Travel
- Tulare Lake Resurfaces as a Slow-Motion Disaster
- Drought & Energy Resilience Combined with Canal Cover Experiment
- Climate Change Impacts Drinking Water
Capital News & Notes (CN&N) harvests California policy, legislative and regulatory insights from dozens of media and official sources for the past week. Please feel free to forward this unique client service.
FOR THE WEEK ENDING APRIL 14, 2023
Is California the Nation’s Recession Bellwether? “Risks Became Realities”
NY Times
California has often been at the country’s economic forefront. Now, as fears of a national recession continue to nag, the state is hoping not to lead the way there.
While the California economy maintains its powerhouse status, outranking even those of most countries, the state’s most-powerful sectors — including tech companies and supply chain logistics — have struggled to keep their footing, pummeled by high interest rates, investor skittishness, labor strife and other turmoil.
Even the weather hasn’t cooperated. Severe flooding throughout much of the winter, caused by atmospheric rivers, has left farming communities in the Central Valley devastated, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in crop losses.
Thousands of Californians have been laid off in the last few months, the cost of living is increasingly astronomical, and Gov. Gavin Newsom revealed in January that the state faced a $22.5 billion deficit in the 2023-24 fiscal year — a plummet from the $100 billion surplus a year ago.
“It’s an EKG,” Mr. Newsom said at the time, comparing a graph of the state’s revenue to the sharp spikes and drops of the heart’s electrical activity. “That sums up California’s tax structure. It sums up the boom-bust.”
The structure, which relies in large part on taxing the incomes of the wealthiest Californians, often translates into dips when Silicon Valley and Wall Street are uneasy, as they are now. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, one of the state’s most prominent corporations, said in January that it was cutting 12,000 workers worldwide, and Silicon Valley Bank, a key lender to tech start-ups, collapsed last month, sending the federal government scrambling to limit the fallout.
This has coincided with a drop in venture capital funding as rising interest rates and recession fears have led investors to become more risk-averse. That money, which declined 36 percent globally from 2021 to 2022, according to the management consulting firm Bain & Company, is critical to Silicon Valley’s ability to create new jobs.
“The tech sector is the workhorse of the state’s economy, it’s the backbone,” said Sung Won Sohn, a finance and economics professor at Loyola Marymount University. “These are high earners who might not be able to carry the state as much as they did in the past.”
Entertainment, another pillar of California’s economy, has also been in retreat as studios adjust to new viewing habits. Disney, based in Burbank, announced in February it would eliminate 7,000 jobs worldwide.
In California alone, employment in the information sector, a category that includes technology and entertainment workers, declined by more than 16,000 from November to February, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data, which predates a recent wave of job cuts in March.
A recent survey from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found widespread pessimism about the economy. Two-thirds of respondents said they expected bad economic times ahead for the state in the next year and a solid majority of respondents — 62 percent — said they felt the state was already in a recession.
When Mr. Newsom announced the deficit earlier in the year, he vowed not to dip into the state’s $37 billion in reserves, and instead called for pauses in funding for child care and reduced funding for climate change initiatives.
Joe Stephenshaw, director of the California Department of Finance, said in an interview that he and top economists had begun to spot points of concern — persistent inflation, higher interest rates and a turbulent stock market — on the state’s horizon during the second half of last year.
“Those risks became realities,” said Mr. Stephenshaw, an appointee of the governor.
He acknowledged that the problem was driven largely by declines in high earners’ incomes, including from market-based compensation, such as stock options and bonus payments. As activity slowed, he said, interest rates rose and stock prices fell.
But the state’s problems aren’t limited to the tech industry.
California’s robust supply chain, which drives nearly a third of the state’s economy, has continued to buckle under stresses from the pandemic and an ongoing labor fight between longshoremen and port operators up and down the West Coast, which has prompted many shipping companies to rely instead on ports along the Gulf and East Coasts. Cargo processing at the Port of Los Angeles, a key entry point for shipments from Asia, was down 43 percent in February, compared with the year before.
“The longer it drags on, the more cargo will be diverted,” said Geraldine Knatz, a professor of the practice of policy and engineering at the University of Southern California, who was executive director of the Port of Los Angeles from 2006 to 2014.
Still, wherever the economic cycle is leading, California heads into it with some strengths. Although unemployment in February, at 4.3 percent, was higher than in most states, it was lower than the rate a year earlier.
In the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas, unemployment was below 3.5 percent, better than the national average.
Over decades, California’s economy has historically seen the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, part of the state’s boom-bust history. During the recession of the early 1990s, largely driven by cuts to aerospace following the end of the Cold War, California was hit much harder than other parts of the country.
In March, the U.C.L.A. Anderson Forecast, which provides economic analysis, released projections for both the nation and California, pointing to two possible scenarios — one in which a recession is avoided and another in which it occurs toward the end of this year.
“Even in our recession scenario we have a mild recession,” said Jerry Nickelsburg, director of the Anderson Forecast.
Regardless of which scenario pans out, California’s economy is likely to be better off than the national one, according to the report, which cited increased demand for software and defense goods, areas in which California is a leader. Mr. Nickelsburg also said the state’s rainy-day fund was healthy enough to withstand the decline in tax revenues.
But that shortfall could complicate the speed at which Mr. Newsom can carry out some of his ambitious, progressive policies. In announcing the deficit, Mr. Newsom scaled back funding for climate proposals to $48 billion, from $54 billion.
The fiscal outlook also casts a cloud over progressive proposals, widely supported by Democrats, who have a supermajority in the Legislature.
A state panel that has been debating reparations for Black Californians is set to release its final report by midyear. Economists have projected that reparations could cost $800 billion to compensate for “overpolicing,” housing discrimination and disproportionate incarceration rates. Once the panel releases its report, it will be up to lawmakers in Sacramento to decide how much state revenue would support reparations — a concept that Mr. Newsom has endorsed.
Through all this, one thing has remained constant: Many Californians say their biggest economic concern is housing costs.
The median value for a single-family home in California is about $719,000 — up nearly 1 percent from last year, according to Zillow — and recent census data shows that some of the state’s biggest metro areas, including Los Angeles and San Francisco Counties, have continued to shrink. (In Texas, where many Californians have relocated, the median home value is about $289,000.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/11/business/economy/california-economy.html
“Trailer Bills” are State Budget’s Hidden Back Door
CalMatters commentary from Dan Walters
California’s governors and legislators have, as often noted in this space, developed a bad habit of using the state budget to make sweeping changes in state law while minimizing or ignoring traditional legislative procedures.
They do it with so-called “budget trailer bills” that are often passed in batches coincident with the budget each June after minimal hearings and debate. Like the budget, they take effect immediately and are shielded from being challenged via referendum.
It can take weeks or even months for those outside the Capitol to figure out the real-life impacts and decipher the dense legalese of trailer bills, which often run hundreds of pages.
The Legislature is once again plowing through the latest budget, this one proposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom for the 2023-24 fiscal year, prior to the last frantic – and largely secret – negotiations on a final version.
Dozens of would-be trailer bills are kicking around, some of them legitimately attached to the budget, and some just using the process to minimize scrutiny.
One of the most complex, potentially important trailer bills, not yet formally introduced, would overhaul how electrical energy is procured. It would make the state Department of Water Resources the state’s central purchaser of power, citing the need to construct or acquire enough non-polluting generation to meet the state’s self-proclaimed goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2045.
What could possibly go wrong?
California’s track record on managing the state power supply is, to say the least, spotty.
A quarter-century ago, California experimented with what was termed “deregulation,” but really wasn’t, of electricity, and it quickly became one of the worst human-caused disasters in state history. It allowed power suppliers to game the system, pushed costs through the ceiling, drove one utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, into bankruptcy, almost did the same to another, Southern California Edison, and was a major reason voters recalled a governor, Gray Davis.
The Department of Water Resources became, for a time, the state’s central power buyer because its water supply system was, and is, a major generator of electricity and a major purchaser.
After the experiment was repealed, California returned to its previous system, based on purchases by utilities such as PG&E and SCE and regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission. But a few years later, the state embarked on its quest for carbon neutrality, greatly complicating the situation.
Simultaneously, the state is trying to phase out power from generation by hydrocarbons, such as natural gas, while increasing the overall supply in expectation that demand will grow as other activities, such as transportation, make the same transition to electricity.
It hasn’t gone smoothly. The state has flirted with blackouts on hot days when air conditioning imposes huge demands and has been forced to keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant and several gas-fired generators, which had been scheduled for closure, online to avoid shortages.
So would making the state water agency the electric power czar again be the solution to meeting deadlines for decarbonization?
The Legislature’s independent budget analyst, Gabe Petek, is one skeptic. His office issued a report urging lawmakers to take enough time to analyze such a major change and questioning its necessity and its potential effect on California consumers, who are already paying some of the nation’s highest power rates.
Petek’s report also questions the need to use a fast-track budget trailer bill for such a momentous change, saying “Ultimately, ensuring it (the Legislature) has the time and opportunities for developing a greater understanding, sufficient input from stakeholders, and thoughtful deliberation will be vital to ensuring it can make an informed decision on these important proposals.”
Amen.
LAO Report:
https://lao.ca.gov/reports/2023/4735/Proposed-Energy-Policy-Changes-031023.pdf
Lt. Gov. Adapts to Newsom’s Frequent Travel
CalMatters WhatMatters
Monday, California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis issued a proclamation honoring labor activist Dolores Huerta on her 93rd birthday.
But it was Gov. Gavin Newsom who announced the state has secured an emergency stockpile of as many as 2 million Misoprostol pills in response to a federal judge suspending FDA approval of another abortion pill on Friday.
That’s pretty much how it goes when Kounalakis is acting governor because Newsom is out of state (or in this case, reportedly out of the country, in the Bahamas). Her job is far more issuing proclamations than making major pronouncements or signing legislation.
Kounalakis, the first woman to be elected to the No. 2 office in California, did make history last year as the first woman ever to sign a bill into California law when she extended an eviction moratorium while Newsom was on another family vacation abroad.
Last month, she signed her second piece of legislation, ensuring the availability of COVID laboratory testing and therapeutics after the end of California’s state of emergency. Last week, she submitted a requestfor federal disaster aid after the cancellation of salmon season.
In some states, Texas for example, the lieutenant governor’s office has more responsibilities and wields a lot more influence. But in California, the role has historically been rather minimal: voting on the boards of the three public higher education systems, serving on the commission that oversees state land, and stepping in when the governor leaves the state.
California is also one of a handful of states where the lieutenant governor is independently elected. That can lead to some friction: Newsom, when he had the job, didn’t always see eye to eye with then-Gov. Jerry Brown. And when governors and lieutenant governors belong to different political parties, they can clash, as happened with Democrat Brown and Republican Lt. Gov. Michael Curb.
In the case of Newsom and Kounalakis, however, their relationship is much more amicable. As their press offices told CalMatters, they coordinate what happens when she’s filling in:
Aleksandra Reetz, Kounalakis spokesperson: “We have a really collaborative and close and positive working relationship with the governor’s office. That comes from the top. The lieutenant governor and the governor have a decades-long relationship, and this governor knows what it’s like to be the lieutenant. He understands what the job is, and that goes for his staff as well.”
Alex Stack, Newsom spokesperson: “There are some things you can plan for, like the Dolores Huerta Day proclamation, and some things you can’t plan for like what the judge did on Friday…. It’s a case-by-case basis, and we’re all a team and we work with each other very closely.”
And while lieutenant governor is not always a stepping stone to governor, Brown and Newsom both made that move. Kounalakis makes no secret she wants to be next: She told CalMatters during her reelection campaign last year that it’s “very good training ground for the bigger job.”
Tulare Lake Resurfaces as a Slow-Motion Disaster
NY Times
It is no secret to locals that the heart of California’s Central Valley was once the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River, dammed and drained into an empire of farms by the mid-20th century.
Still, even longtime residents have been staggered this year by the brute swiftness with which Tulare Lake has resurfaced: In less than three weeks, a parched expanse of 30 square miles has been transformed by furious storms into a vast and rising sea.
The lake’s rebirth has become a slow-motion disaster for farmers and residents in Kings County, home to 152,000 residents and a $2 billion agricultural industry that sends cotton, tomatoes, safflower, pistachios, milk and more around the planet. The wider and deeper Tulare Lake gets, the greater the risk that entire harvests will be lost, homes will be submerged and businesses will go under.
Across the region, the surprise barrage of atmospheric rivers that swept through California over the past three months already has saturated the ground, overflowed canals and burst through levees. The fear now is that record walls of snow in the southern Sierra Nevada will liquefy in the intensifying spring heat into a downhill torrent that will inundate the Central Valley.
And the resurrected Tulare Lake (pronounced too-LAIR-ee), already more vast than all but one of California’s reservoirs, could remain for two years or longer, causing billions of dollars in economic damage and displacing thousands of farmworkers while transforming the area into the giant natural habitat it had been before it was conquered by farmers. “The Big Melt,” unsettled meteorologists have begun to call it.
“This could be the mother of all floods,” said Phil Hansen, 56, a fifth-generation farmer who has already lost more than a third of his 18,000 acres to a breached levee. “This could be the biggest flood we’ve ever seen.”
Already, several communities have been evacuated, and hundreds of homes and farm buildings have been destroyed or damaged. Sandbags are being helicoptered in. Dairy cattle have been hustled to higher ground by the tens of thousands. The authorities said last month that a local poultry facility surrounded by water was weighing whether to move or slaughter a million chickens. And farmers are sparring over whose land should get flooded first, knowing that inundation likely will be a question of when, not if.
In the lake’s revival, scientists, historians and growers see an epic rematch gathering between nature and humans. For now, nature seems determined to win in an era of climate change with extended dry periods followed by storms that deliver more water than anyone knows what to do with. The runoff has no natural place to drain, and experts say there is no easy way to send this water to other areas of the state that could use it for irrigation or residential purposes, even as the state remains desperate for long-term drought solutions.
Around the farm and prison town of Corcoran, gray-blue waves now whoosh surreally to the horizon. Snowy white birds soar over dirt levees that, so far, are shielding some 22,000 residents and inmates. Submerged fields lie bereft of the tomatoes and Pima cotton that would ordinarily fill them, an agricultural Atlantis larger than Manhattan.
The lake bed is essentially a 790-square-mile bathtub — the size of four Lake Tahoes — that dates back to the Ice Age. Mammoths once sipped at Tulare Lake’s shores, and tule elk ranged in its marshlands.
Now the landscape is among the most heavily engineered in the nation. Great dams, run by the federal government and underwritten over the years by large growers, manage the water released into it from the Kings, Tule, Kaweah and Kern Rivers. Downstream, farmers and cities have erected hundreds of miles of levees and canals.
High in the southern Sierra Nevada, a record snowpack, triple the historical average, will strain the water managers who are already running that plumbing system like never before as the days lengthen and the spring skies heat.
The load of water waiting to course downhill dwarfs what is there already. It is so immense that officials project that in addition to expanding Tulare Lake, it will fill the area’s four largest reservoirs two or three times over. If the snow melts too fast, it could overwhelm flood protections, wiping out crops and inundating already-saturated farm towns. Veterans of past floods say that, even with all the fortifications in place, the lake could spread to 200 square miles or more.
“We have no control over nature, and we have no control over the water flows that are coming around us,” said Greg Gatzka, the city manager of Corcoran, where county authorities have repeatedly expressed concern about the height of the levees.
n 1983, when a long-lasting snowmelt submerged about 130 square miles of the lake bed, the damage just in Kings County cost nearly $300 million in today’s dollars, and the water took two years to clear, according to John T. Austin, the author of “Floods and Droughts in the Tulare Lake Basin,” a book about the region. That summer, two men kayaked through the floodwaters from the banks of the Kern River just outside downtown Bakersfield to the San Francisco Bay, a meandering 450-mile journey across what would typically be sun-baked land.
Since then, the population has roughly doubled, both in Kings County and in the surrounding San Joaquin Valley that includes Fresno and Merced, a region that is now home to about three million people.
Mark Grewal, an agricultural consultant and former executive at the dominant J.G. Boswell Company, one of the largest privately owned farms in the nation, said that the long-term, regionwide economic impact could be exponentially higher than in 1983 because the commodities that are now grown — high-end crops such as nuts, tomatoes and Pima cotton — are much costlier and are spiking in value with inflation. The region is so crucial to the world’s supply that sustained substantial flooding could lead to higher prices for consumers.
Emergency officials have sought to drive home the enormous catastrophe that could develop as the thaw comes.
David Robinson, the sheriff of Kings County, recalled that he was 12 years old when the 1983 flood hit, and he never imagined he would see such a spectacle twice in his lifetime. In an interview, his assistant sheriff, Robert Thayer, said aerial footage was not reassuring. Both men described the potential for flooding as “biblical.”
“This will impact the world, if people can just grasp that,” Sheriff Robinson said at a news conference after asking the public to stop using the lake for boating. “We’re going to have a million acre-foot of water covering up an area that feeds the world.”
In Corcoran, city officials are struggling to keep the roads open and waiting for the state to decide whether to evacuate 8,000 inmates from two prisons. Brian Ferguson, a spokesman for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, said that local power plants, oil wells and derricks are also an intense concern. Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order on Friday that was intended to accelerate flood preparations in the Tulare Lake basin, and a team from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention arrived last month in neighboring Tulare County to prepare for a potential disaster.
But coordination on the ground has been fraught.
At tense emergency meetings last month, farmers claimed that rogue actors were secretly cutting holes in levees, violating longstanding traditions about the order in which farms were supposed to be flooded in wet years.
At one session, a public works official in Corcoran reported that the city had posted an armed guard at the levees protecting it. At another, county authorities thanked farmers for refraining from engaging in fistfights. Kings County has twice ordered the Boswell Company to release some floodwater onto its own land.
In smaller towns, residents worry that the protection of their homes will be at the mercy of powerful growers.
“All around, if you drive in your car, it’s just water everywhere,” said Cecilia Leal, 27, who lives across the county line in nearby Alpaugh, where evacuations were ordered last month after a levee breach. “You turn, there’s water.”
She and her parents stayed behind for Cesi’s Cafe, the family restaurant they operate from the front of their house on a country road. But only one route into town is open, and she said she feared the town’s only gas station would run out of fuel.
A video of desperate pistachio growers launching two dirt-filled pickup trucks into a local levee breach has gone viral. At the Lake Bottom Brewery and Distillery in Corcoran — which finally was compelled to end its $3-a-pint drought-related “Pray for Rain” special — Fred Figueroa joked that he and his sons, who own the bar, were considering naming their latest beer “Two Chevys in a Levee.”
Nature’s ascendance is not all bad news. Birds that once wintered at Tulare Lake — ibises, blackbirds and American coots — are returning in increasing numbers. On a recent sunny afternoon, a row of pelicans glided over drowned furrows, and long-legged herons rested on the muddy banks of a drainage canal near Alpaugh. A tiny bird with tall, skinny legs and a black ring around its neck scuttled across the road.
Drought & Energy Resilience Combined with Canal Cover Experiment
NY Times California Newsletter
| A new state-funded project in the San Joaquin Valley hopes to find a new way to build drought resilience. The idea is simple: Cover the state’s canals and aqueducts with solar panels to both limit evaporation and generate renewable energy. |
| “If you drive up and down the state, you see a lot of open canals. And after year after year of drought it seemed an obvious question: How much are we losing to evaporation?” said Jordan Harris, co-founder and chief executive of Solar AquaGrid, a company based in the Bay Area that’s designing and overseeing the initiative. “It’s just common sense in our eyes.” |
| The California Department of Water Resources is providing $20 million to test the concept in Stanislaus County and to help determine where else along the state’s 4,000 miles of canals — one of the largest water conveyance systems in the world — it would make the most sense to install solar panels. The project is a collaboration between the state, Solar AquaGrid, the Turlock Irrigation District and researchers with the University of California, Merced, who will track and analyze the findings. |
| “This hasn’t been tried in the U.S. before,” said Roger Bales, an engineering professor at U.C. Merced who specializes in water and climate research. “We want these to eventually be scaled across the western U.S., where we have a lot of irrigated agriculture and open canals.” |
| California’s efforts got a jump start from a 2021 study published by Bales and his colleagues, who determined that covering the state’s canals with solar panels could reduce evaporation by as much as 90 percent and save 63 billion gallons of water per year — enough to meet the residential water needs of more than two million people. |
The team identified other possible upsides: The installations could generate large amounts of energy; reduce algae growth and the need for maintenance by limiting sunlight falling on the water; enhance the functioning of the solar panels by allowing them to stay cool near the water; and improve air quality by creating an energy source that would limit the need for diesel-powered irrigation pumps.
| The sheer number of benefits documented in the study eased hesitations about the idea and “kind of changed our thinking,” said Josh Weimer, spokesman for the Turlock Irrigation District, which volunteered its 250 miles of canals in Stanislaus County for the pilot. Another benefit for the district, which is also a power provider, is that it doesn’t need to buy new, costly tracts of land to install solar panels since the canals are already its property. |
| The project, expected to break ground this fall, will start out on just two miles of canals in the Central Valley district in the small agricultural town of Ceres, just outside Modesto off Highway 99, where the concrete-banked canal winds through shady orchards and past narrow farm roads frequented by tractors. |
| The results will very likely be closely watched. Harris told me he had already been contacted by water districts and canal operators around the world — including in Spain, the Philippines and Brazil — that are curious about replicating the design. |
| “This is a global issue, and potentially a big contributor to a global solution to evaporative losses and renewable energy generation at the same,” Harris said. |
Climate Change Impacts Drinking Water
LATimes Essential California
When you turn on the tap, how confident are you that clean water will flow? Are you that certain about water access in five years? In 10? How about 20?
Perhaps the most consequential impact of the climate crisis is how it will affect our access to reliable, clean drinking water. California has been through the wringer in the last decade with extreme heat, record drought, historic wildfires and, most recently, devastating flooding — all of which can and have affected some residents’ access to water.
But to what extent do Californians perceive the risks that events like those pose to their water supplies? And how will perceptions and personal experiences affect public support for strategies to address the changing climate and ensure future Californians have water to drink?
“Whether perceived or not by water users, these climate change-driven extreme weather events have clear implications for California household water access,” climate scientists wrote in a new study.
Researchers from the Union of Concerned Scientists, UC Berkeley, UCLA, San Jose State and Texas A&M surveyed roughly 700 Californians “to better understand how to both advance and leverage support among households for climate change adaptation.”
The scientists focused on the Golden State specifically because it’s “the most populous U.S. state and one that is widely expected to experience intensified impacts resulting from climate change in coming years.”
The survey respondents represented every census region in California and nearly every county, with researchers focusing on two questions:
- In the last five years, has your household water supply been impacted by an extreme weather event?
- How much do you agree with this statement “I am concerned about California’s water supply reliability due to future extreme weather events”?
More than a third of Californians surveyed reported dealing with water supply issues due to extreme weather events, with drought the most common experience among those surveyed.
Here you might be thinking: But isn’t the drought over?
In the short term, yes. Historic winter storms have provided some “breathing room,” as one water management official told my colleague Ian James, but they don’t offset over two decades of drought that has imperiled the Colorado River.
Researchers said impacts to water supplies were “relatively evenly distributed across Californians with respect to education, income level, and water provider.” But they point to “significant differences across gender and racial divides.”
A larger share of women reported water supply impacts compared with men. “Genderqueer/non-binary respondents reported an even higher rate of these impacts,” researchers noted.
And as for the impacts among different races and ethnicities, the survey found:
“Both Latino and Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) residents are more likely than others to report impacts to their household water supplies. Whether this is attributable to residential type and location which, in turn, informs an individual’s water supply source, or highlights racial differences in risk perception and climate concern cannot be answered in this present study.”
As for that second question about the future, 85% of those surveyed expressed some level of concern.
Overall, Californians that had their water supply jeopardized by an extreme weather event were more likely to be concerned about water accessibility moving forward. But the level to which the respondents gauged their concern about future water access varied, depending on which extreme weather event they experienced.
The researchers found that Californians who experienced water supply issues related to drought, extreme heat and landslides were more likely to agree that water security was an ongoing concern. Residents who reported water impacts due to fires or flooding were less likely to express those concerns.
Study co-author Amanda Fencl, a Western states senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the findings are particularly important for “local, regional, and state governments, water managers and decisionmakers.”
“[They] all need to concern themselves with how and whether residents perceive climate risks,” Fencl wrote in a blog post on UCS’ website, adding:
“Our study demonstrates how personal experiences with extreme events affect perceptions of climate risks to water supplies, reminding us it is important to listen to the people who have experienced climate impacts as they will be the best advocates for future-proofing California’s water management system.”