Schwarzenegger Declares Drought Emergency

Last Friday, Governor Schwarzenegger declared a statewide drought emergency. Despite this recent spate of rain, Schwarzenegger said that California is facing its third consecutive year of drought and emphasized the possibility that the drought will continue for years into the future. In his declaration, Schwarzenegger urged all urban water users to reduce consumption by 20 percent and instructed the state Department of Water Resources to assist people affected by the drought, expedite water transfers and take various other actions. In addition, the emergency declaration paves the way for state-mandated cutbacks on water supply allocations and for prioritization of urban over agricultural water rights generally and of urban over agricultural users in State Water Project deliveries. Schwarzenegger's action will also make it easier for water suppliers to declare that local water shortages exist within their service districts, allowing them to regulate water consumption and restrict delivery, including the denial of applications for new or additional service connections.

Schwarzenegger's action was a necessary one, even if it did come a tad late. And it is encouraging that the Governor still made the emergency declaration despite the recent glut of rain and emphasized the potentially very long-term nature of this and future droughts. Nonetheless, I have my doubts that water suppliers and the state government will take any significant strides to reform California's water rights, water supply planning and land use planning schemes without continued drought for a few more years to come. Thus, while I personally love rain and deplore the dire effects of drought on people and the environment, I am more than a little worried that this current rain and any significant amount of future rain will cause water suppliers, local governments and the state to lapse back into "everything is fine" mode, continue allowing our state to grow prodigiously and fail to make the necessary structural changes to better plan for and cope with future droughts.

Politicians often lack the foresight or desire to champion precautionary measures to protect against uncertain or temporally distant harms; they instead tend to react to crises as they happen. With drought, it is no different. However, with drought in the American West, the consequences of failing to act preemptively can be particularly disastrous. The West has a history of tremendously long droughts with penchants for wiping out entire civilizations, such as the Hohokam people of the Southwest. The longer we wait to act and the more California's population and water demands grow, the harder it is going to be to cope with drought in the future and the greater the impacts on our people (particularly those with fewer financial resources) and environment will be.