Water Resources
This blog focuses on transit and urban planning, and water planning seems to lie just to the side of the usual urbanist discussion — perhaps because municipal supplies are often conveyed from waterways that are far removed from our city centers. But the fundamental goal of this website is to distill the Bay Area’s journey toward smart and sustainable growth, and how we plan and manage our precious water resources is an integral part of that. Water resources is also a topic of great personal interest, and so we will feature posts on this subject from time-to-time — particularly for the Delta, and eventually for Hetch Hetchy, which are both especially important for the Bay Area.
The crisis we face in California is all the more acute now. The state’s population is increasing, and so is its demand for water; but climate change and other factors point toward a dwindling supply. The tale of California history could be told in a surprisingly complete fashion just through the lens of its “water wars,” so central a role has water played in this state since the beginning. Indeed, water management and conservation has been a great challenge historically, and the challenge will likely be at least as great in the future.
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| Courtesy of EDF. |
Bay-Delta
Put simply, the San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary is California’s most important water resource. The Delta is the hub of California’s system of water conveyance; roughly two-thirds of Californians and several million acres of farmland rely on the Delta for water. The Delta is also just plain broken, and California’s future viability depends on an effective solution being found and implemented. In this series of posts, we explore the depth of the problems facing the Delta and evaluate the progress that California has made toward realizing a solution.
Read More:
An Introduction, 23 Mar. 2009
Levees, Climate Change, and Water Quality, 25 Mar. 2009
Shaking Things Up, 10 Jul. 2009
(Note: Rather than finish this series of posts, I started a separate blog devoted to California water issues.)
