Working with water to slow climate change
Climate Change has brought fiercer storms with devastating floods and long-lasting droughts that stressed and killed plants and animals. Once we controlled water. These days, water is in control and is harming us.
What if we changed our relationship with water to better understand its behavior?
What if we were more respectful and asked, what does water want?
Communities that have taken a less confrontational and more collaborative approach with water have created better places in which people are happier.
Farmers in Watsonville, California, irrigate strawberries, artichokes, cauliflower, broccoli, lettuce, raspberries, and native plants with water pumped up from the aquifer beneath their fields. But with the amount of water farmers were pumping, and saltwater from Monterey Bay encroaching on the aquifer, the level of usable water in the ground was shrinking.
In response to the over-pumping problem, California created the Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency (PVWMA) to charge water users for the groundwater they drew in hopes that they would use less water. Still, the groundwater diminished.
In a novel approach to water management, PVWMA paid farmers to essentially run their irrigation pumps backward to recharge groundwater with rainwater that would otherwise go into storm drains to the sea. (Separate pumps with meters are deployed and situated at low points to gather the most water).
Farmers are credited 50 percent of the recharge against their future groundwater pumping costs. That figure is conservative because some of the infiltrated water will flow outwards into the wider hydrologic system before the farmer can pump it out.
There are multiple spinoff benefits to paying farmers to pump stormwater into the aquifer. This water helps to push seawater back into the ocean, reducing saltwater intrusion. Pumped stormwater keeps the soil moist, which reduces the need to irrigate, and it maintains higher groundwater levels. Best of all, there are no arguments as to who owns the water. In the Pajaro Valley, the water belongs to everyone.
With this inventive apprach, this community that was losing groundwater to agriculture, experienced a dramatic shift from a scarcity mindset to one of shared abundance. Arguments about competing, and tradeoffs, gave way to collaborative efforts, resulting in quality-of-life benefits for everyone, even including what's good for nature.
We can adapt to climate change and reduce the damages of deluges or droughts by slowing water down with soil and with more green spaces - as a replacement for concrete - and by actively putting water back into the ground. Research indicates we can slow sea level rise by as much as 25%.
If we incentivized property owners to pump stormwater into the ground, there would be reductions in stormwater damage, more water for farmers, and steadier water flow in rivers during dry months.
Working with climate change, we may literally set up a rainy-day fund measured in gallons of water in the ground.
In Massachusetts, we are drafting the Slow Water Drought Relief Carbon Offset Fund. Property owners pump water into the ground and they are compensated with reduced water bills. Unlike energy, which costs money to generate, the cost of managing water does not go down with less use. The state-matching fund would pay water managers upfront for potentially lost revenue.
By investing in pumping water, we will see big returns in the form of more resilience during droughts, less need to water plants, fewer flood damages, more water in our cold stream rivers during dry periods, and a reduction in sea level rise.
More difficult to quantify, but no less important, are the quality-of-life improvements when there is more green vegetation with shade and windbreaks, more cooling in summer (evaporation), and more warming when it's cool (condensation). Finally, there will be more nature in our local landscapes and happier people in our neighborhoods.
More soon,
Rob