Friday July 22, 2022
San Joaquin Valley Sun —
A new policy brief from the Public Policy Institute of California is recommending cost-effective water storage investments as the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is seeing less inflow.
It also offers a damning picture of the thirty-year shift in how the Golden State divvied up water, largely pitting fish species against millions of its residents.
The institute – a nonpartisan think tank – initially published the brief in early spring, focuses on the Delta that supplies water to about 30 million residents and over six million acres of farmland.
“The ecological health of the Delta and the reliability of its water supplies are in decline,” the brief reads. “Given the challenges facing the watershed and the competing uses for scarce supplies, Delta water management issues are a source of conflict and many misunderstandings about water use. Weak water accounting systems make this worse.”