California’s battle with the tragedy of the commons

California may have reached peak water usage, according to Dr Jay Lund of the University of California at Davis, speaking at the National Association of Water Companies meeting in San Diego earlier this week.

It seems that urban usage is already on the way down – due to water conservation measures – while the expansion of water usage in the agricultural sector has been brought to a standstill because real estate development has been steadily eating into the amount of land which is irrigated.

But this does not mean that there is no longer such pressure on water resources, and that the state will not need to take action to increase its water supply.

The real problem in California is the groundwater. As regulators have sought to reduce withdrawals from the Colorado river, the Owens Valley and the California Water Project in order to ensure that usage is sustainable, the farmers – and to a lesser extent householders – have turned to groundwater to meet their needs. Although in some cases a water master has been appointed to adjudicate rights to the aquifer, most groundwater pumping is not regulated, and continues regardless of whether it is sustainable or not.

Over-pumping groundwater is a bit like driving at 100 miles an hour in the dark with your headlights off. It may be exhilarating to do it for a while, but sooner or later you are going to end up in a tangled wreck of steel and glass. Californians are not the only ones who enjoy this game of chicken. Across whole swathes of the world from North East China and India to the Middle East and Latin America, over-pumping groundwater is probably the greatest existential threat facing the population.

At the NAWC event, I chaired a panel of water authors which included Brian Fagan, whose book Elixir charts the history of man’s interaction with water from the earliest times. It shows how the extent to which society has been formed by its relationship with water, and in many cases how the failure to balance the needs of nature with those of mankind, have led to the extinction of a society. The other panel members – Steve Maxwell (author of The Future of Water), David Zetland (author of The End of Abundance), and Robert Glennon (author of Unquenchable, and Water Follies) – also addressed the issue of changing the way the public thinks about the way we use water.

These authors seem to be part of a growing chorus of people sitting in the back seat shouting at the 100 mile-an-hour driver: “turn your headlights on!” But as Fagan remarked, it is incredibly difficult to change the habits of water usage. Although individuals may be prepared to turn off taps, take shorter showers or put bricks in their cisterns, the hardcore economic incentives to continue to exploit underground water resources are difficult to change. Water usage has essentially become an economic and political entitlement. If the groundwater is there, and available, it is best to pump as much of it as possible so as to ensure the biggest claim when the state steps in to regulate withdrawals. And rather like the Greek debt situation, the action governments can take to reduce the overdraft are just enough to be inadequate.

One gets the feeling that we in the water industry are destined to be the paramedics attending the wreck on the highway.