By Nicholas Pinter, Jay Lund, and Peter Moyle
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California’s droughts and floods and tension between economic growth and environmental protection have pushed it to develop a diverse toolkit for managing water.
The toolkit consists of an integrated system of infrastructure, laws, institutions, and economic tools. This system, the ”California water model,” has evolved from the first Spanish settlement, through the gold mining era, the ascendancy of agriculture and major cities, to the recent broad mix of objectives that includes strong environmental protection. California has steadily adapted its water management by making mistakes and then learning from those mistakes.
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We suggest that a prerequisite for providing and maintaining healthy aquatic ecosystems and adequate supplies of clean water is “far-sighted incrementalism” among water managers and political leaders. Incrementalism involves addressing seemingly intractable problems by small forward-looking steps. “Far-sighted,” at least in California, has involved forward-thinking planning among scientists, managers, and leaders during and after each water-related crisis. The common response after a damaging flood is reactive – repair the levee breach and rebuild floodplain neighborhoods. Far-sighted leaders see opportunities in such a crisis to move the system forward, usually incrementally, in a longer-term strategic direction (usually too controversial or difficult to achieve in one step). California must continue to support organized and independent learning from and adapting to disasters and extremes.
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