By Natalie Willis, Reporter, Valley Ag Voice used with permission and gratefulness. To reprint this report, contact Valley Ag Voice at info@ValleyAgVoice.com
‘Twas a dangerous cliff, as they freely confessed, though to walk near its crest was so pleasant; but over its terrible edge there had slipped, a duke and full many a peasant. So the people said something would have to be done, but their projects did not at all tally; some said, “Put a fence ’round the edge of the cliff,” some, “An ambulance down in the valley.”…“For the cliff is all right, if you’re careful,” they said, “And, if folks even slip and are dropping, it isn’t the slipping that hurts them so much as the shock down below when they’re stopping.” So day after day, as these mishaps occurred, quick forth would those rescuers sally, to pick up the victims who fell off the cliff, with their ambulance down in the valley. — Excerpt from the poem “The Ambulance Down in the Valley” by Joseph Malins (1895).
According to the California Department of Water Resources, the first investigation of California’s water supplies began in 1873 when President Ulysses S. Grant commissioned a federal study from Colonel Barton Stone Alexander of the Army Corps of Engineers.
Published in 1874, the “Report of the Commissioners on the Irrigation of the San Joaquin, Tulare, and Sacramento Valleys of the State of California,” established the first documented blueprint for irrigation in the Central Valley.
Alexander envisioned a system of canals to complete an exchange of water from the Sacramento to the San Joaquin Valley, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. In the eighth of 24 conclusionary statements, the report stated that both the state and federal governments should support irrigation in the Central Valley.
“That it is the duty of government, both State and national, to encourage irrigation, and the first step in that direction ought to be to make a complete instrumental reconnaissance of the country to be irrigated, embracing the sources from whence the irrigating-canals ought to commence, gauging the flow of the rivers and streams, and defining the boundaries of the natural districts of irrigation into which the country is divided,” the report stated.
The historic report outlined a common theme relevant to modern water management — water is more abundant in some parts of the state, scarce in others, and moving it requires infrastructure.
While California has spent over a century and a half researching, engineering, and studying its water resources, a gap exists between defining water challenges and implementing solutions, according to Dr. Jay R. Lund, vice-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences and civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of California, Davis.
“California has been working on these problems for over a century now. The very first studies of Central Valley water problems were in the 1870s, so 150 years now, and this is just a tough neighborhood hydrologically,” Lund said. “We’ve got very pronounced wet and dry seasons. The rest of the country has four seasons, we have two: wet and dry.”
He explained that California, as the world’s fourth largest economy, also has various interests and industries competing for water supply.
“In addition to that, we have a very large economy, a lot of people, a tremendous agricultural industry, all of which like water. And we also decided we like the environment for the last few decades, so we have a lot of different kinds of water demand,” Lund said.
“Sometimes we have too much water, we have floods, and probably most of the time we’d like to have more water. So, it’s a tough neighborhood. There have been studies of how to provide more water, how to have less floods for 150 years now, so this is not a new problem to anybody that’s lived here for very long.”
Studying the Cliff Forever
Lund, along with Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Davis Alvar Escriva-Bou and Josué Medellín-Azuara, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Merced, published a study in May 2025 on the economic risks of inaction on California’s water resource challenges.
The report, “Inaction’s Economic Cost for California’s Water Supply Challenges,” explained that California’s total water supply may shrink by 12% to 25% by 2050, which is a loss of up to 9-million-acre feet per year. The report was commissioned by the California Municipal Utilities Association.
Without coordinated state action, this supply loss could result in 3 million acres of fallowed farmland, 67,000 lost jobs, and lasting damage to the state’s agricultural and rural communities, according to the report. Further, the report explained that the failure to make improvements in water management or infrastructure would cause direct economic losses of $3.4 billion to $14.5 billion a year, depending on the severity of the scenario.
“We’ve done the math—and the costs of inaction are high economically and environmentally,” Lund said in a press release. “California urgently needs a long-term, statewide strategy to prepare for growing water challenges ahead.”
The research found that while conservation efforts remain important, new investments in stormwater capture, water recycling, desalination, and storage and conveyance infrastructure are also needed to maintain current supplies.
These conclusions echo previous research and findings from the Public Policy Institute of California, Stanford University Woods Institute for the Environment, and California’s 2025 Infrastructure Report Card.
According to a 2019 PPIC fact sheet titled, “California’s Water Grid,” the important elements of the state’s water infrastructure are in poor condition. It should be noted that the report was co-authored by Alvar Escriva-Bou of UC Davis who also supported the 2025 research on the costs of inaction with Lund. “Two-thirds of California’s dams are at least 50 years old, and more than 90 need major upgrades to better handle large floods or withstand earthquakes. The aqueducts that convey water across the state are also facing problems,” the 2019 PPIC report stated. “Three of the most important in the Central Valley—the California Aqueduct, the Delta-Mendota Canal, and the Friant-Kern Canal—have significant reductions in their capacity caused by land subsidence from excess groundwater pumping.”
The PPIC report explained that strategic investments are necessary to help California store and convey water more effectively.
In 2021, a Stanford-led study, “Climate-informed hydrologic modeling and policy typology to guide managed aquifer recharge,” found that infrastructure investments would tap floodwater potential and increase recharge.
“This highlights the important role of infrastructure provision as a key adaptation strategy to buffer future uncertain climate locally and the potential to partially bridge the north-south geographic mismatch of [water available for recharge], evidenced by California’s historical development of state-wide water transfer projects,” the study stated. “The importance of expanding diversion capacity to capture high-magnitude-flows is further supported by a recent recharge survey in California. It shows that local stakeholders (e.g., Groundwater Sustainability Agencies) are highly concerned about infrastructure capacity issues (e.g., system conveyance and district basin capacity), but funding these gray infrastructure might be difficult due to the potential large environmental impacts.”
The “recharge survey” referenced by the study points to another PPIC report from 2018 titled, “Replenishing Groundwater in the San Joaquin Valley.” The report explained that one of the key challenges in expanding recharge is that most available flows are in the northern part of the valley, while most of the overdraft and best recharge lands are in the south.
“In addition, these flows are mainly available for just a few months. A top priority is to evaluate opportunities for improving the use of existing infrastructure (conveyance facilities, surface reservoirs, and recharge basins) and determine where additional investments are warranted,” the 2018 PPIC report stated. “A big bottleneck is likely to be regional conveyance, which is inadequate for capturing and moving high flows to suitable recharge locations.”
According to the 2025 Report Card for California’s Water Infrastructure, the state’s dams, levees, and drinking water infrastructure received a D+ grade — characterized as a “failing” grade — with commonly cited issues such as aging infrastructure, environmental regulations, prolonged droughts, and flood hazards. Stormwater infrastructure was given a D grade as necessary system improvements are underfunded.
While California’s water supply challenges are well-defined and researched, Lund explained that continuously studying an issue is often more economical than taking action. “It’s cheaper to live with the problem than to solve it, and I think that’s the nature of water problems in California,” Lund said. “We have all these demands. We have this huge amount of variability. You’re not going to be able to make everybody happy.”
Common Ground
There is documented recognition among the public, lawmakers, researchers, and state agencies that increasing water supply is a top priority. In July 2026, a statewide survey of California voters conducted by the Association of California Water Agencies and Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates, or FM3 Research, found bipartisan support for prioritizing the state’s water issues.
From June 6 to June 11, 2026, FM3 completed 623 online and telephone interviews with likely November 2026 voters, and the margin of sampling error for the study is +/-4.0% at the 95% confidence level.
According to the findings, 87% of voters surveyed believe California needs to accelerate the construction of water infrastructure to prepare for droughts, floods, and changing climate conditions.
Additionally, 77% of voters said they are more likely to support a candidate for governor who prioritizes improving the state’s water reliability and affordability. According to the survey, that support is consistent across political party preferences, including 83% of Democrats, 77% of Independents, and 67% of Republicans.
On the legislative side, Senate Bill 72 — authored by Democratic Senator Anna Caballero — was signed into law in October 2025, mandating the modernization of the California Water Plan and setting an interim statewide planning target of 9-million-acre feet of additional water supply, water conservation, or water storage by 2040.
SB 72 was formally supported by several agricultural organizations and associations, such as the California Farm Bureau, California Association of Winegrape Growers, Agricultural Council of California, and the Western Growers Association.
Given the public support for improving water infrastructure and increasing supplies, John Duarte, president of Duarte Nursery and former Republican U.S. Representative for California’s 13th District, believes that California’s water challenges stem from a lack of effective executive leadership.
“We don’t have a governor who is willing to bring in the heads of all its agencies together and say, ‘Let’s solve these problems,’” Duarte said. “Water abundance doesn’t lie within one agency, nor within one level of government — we’ve got failures at the federal government level also — nor do its impacts fall just on one agency within the state.”
He explained that water scarcity and the resulting drinking water toxicity, poor air quality, housing affordability, and negative economic impacts on agriculture have created a civilizational problem.
“We can study this forever and nitpick small problems or raise questions that are unanswerable or require more studies,” Duarte said. “But, at the end of the day, our common sense tells us that having water in our society — abundant — is going to help everyone as well as the environment.”
Fence Blueprints
According to Eddie Ocampo, Board Chair of the Water Blueprint for the San Joaquin Valley, while there is a clear understanding of California’s water challenges and potential solutions, barriers to progress and implementation remain.
“People are the challenges and people are the solution. I think right now we have the plans… If we really needed to, we could figure out how to get the money,” Ocampo said. “The question is: Can the right people agree with the right people to be able to do that? And right now, the right people are sometimes focused on the wrong things…some of it may be politics, some of it may be a different interpretation of who the other right people might be.”
Ocampo explained that the Water Blueprint for the San Joaquin Valley — a coalition of farmers, water districts, local governments, businesses, and community leaders — brings the right people together to create actionable plans for regional projects and infrastructure development.
“We’re kind of in that point where we need to figure out what we need to do to be able to move forward with these plans and move these plans from these great ideas to an area where they’re funded, and they’re implementable, and they’re benefiting regions and communities and local industries across our valley and state,” Ocampo said.
To meet that goal, the Water Blueprint is moving forward with a Unified Water Plan, evaluating the state’s water resource challenges and proposing a vision for prioritized investments. According to Ocampo, a draft of the Plan is publicly available, and a final version is expected in the coming months.
While it is another plan on paper, it outlines a roadmap to implementation based on technical evaluations of potential combinations of projects, actions, and investment scenarios. However, its value will be measured by whether the state and local communities act on it before another crisis forces their hand.
“We’ve seen these patterns before. I mean, we’ve all read about the ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ we’ve all heard about the Great Depression; we’ve all heard about the Dust Bowl. We forget quickly,” Ocampo said. “We need to remind ourselves that these things happen, and they tend to happen because some people decided that action wasn’t needed at that particular moment.”
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