EVENT DETAILS
Toward Sustainable Groundwater Management in California: New Frontiers in Groundwater Science and Policy
AbstractFor a century-and-a-half, California's groundwater has been a used for a diverse array of purposes including mining, farming, domestic and urban water use, and for supporting instream flow. How to best allocate this resource has always been a major point of contention among users. Groundwater makes up over one-third of the state's developed water supply. It is the state's major insurance against long-term drought, when groundwater provides more than half of the state's water. Yet, prior to 2014 the state exercised little oversight of groundwater resources. Instead, limited groundwater supply in wealthy urban Southern California basins led to court battles and groundwater adjudications starting in the early 20th century. The Central Valley and many coastal basins dominated by agriculture have experienced continued overdraft, leading to seawater intrusion, land subsidence, water quality degradation, and significantly reduced baseflow to streams. In 2014, California's legislature passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which requires sustainable management of groundwater under local oversight. By 2017, over 300 local Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) emerged. Each will develop a Groundwater Sustainability Plan (GSP) that includes monitoring and assessment, stakeholder engagement, development of sustainability metrics and indicators, and identifies projects and approaches to enhance supplies or adjust demands as needed to achieve sustainability by 2042. Unlike historic court decisions, which considered groundwater isolated from surface water, SGMA sets broad mandates for integrated management that considers groundwater-surface water interactions, supply management - water quality interactions, and the interface between water management and land use decisions. SGMA's mandates will lead to significant challenges for local GSAs. Some will need to implement significant agricultural land retirement to halt continued overdraft. Most GSPs will require new and innovative approaches to assess groundwater management linkages to surface water and water quality impacts, governed under already existing regulations - surface water rights, the Endangered Species Act, California's Clean Water Act, the Public Trust doctrine and others. Agencies and scientists are challenged to integrate across historic disciplinary and programmatic siloes. Opportunities for new science abound, while large funding and capacity building needs exist to enable GSAs to effectively and efficiently pursue their mandates.
BiographyThomas Harter is the Robert M. Hagan Endowed Chair for Water Resources Management and Policy at the University of California, Davis. He holds a joint appointment as Professor and Cooperative Extension Specialist in the Department of Land, Air, and Water Resources and is currently chair of the Hydrologic Sciences Graduate Group. Dr. Harter received his BS and MS in Hydrology from the Universities of Freiburg and Stuttgart, Germany; and his PhD in Hydrology from the University of Arizona. He spent the first six years of his career with UC Davis at the Kearney Agricultural Research Center in Fresno County, where he became familiar with San Joaquin Valley groundwater management and protection issues and established his research program in agricultural groundwater hydrology - a program he has continued to pioneer over the past 18 years at UC Davis. He is a member of the American Geophysical Union and is serving on the Board of Directors of the Groundwater Resources Association and of the Water Education Foundation. He is associate editor for the Journal of Environmental Quality. Dr. Harter's research and extension emphasizes the nexus between groundwater and agriculture. His research group focuses on nonpoint-source pollution of groundwater, sustainable groundwater management, groundwater and vadose zone modeling, groundwater resources evaluation under uncertainty, groundwater-surface water interaction, and on contaminant transport. His work uses a range of numerical, statistical, and stochastic modeling approaches, often with field research, to evaluate the impacts of agriculture and human activity on groundwater flow and contaminant transport in complex aquifer and soil systems, and to support development of tools needed in agriculture and by decision- and policy makers to effectively address sustainable groundwater management and water quality issues in agricultural regions. In 2008, Dr. Harter's research and extension program received the Kevin J. Neese Award in recognition of its efforts to engage scientists, regulators, farm advisors, dairy industry representatives, and dairy farmers to better understand the effects of dairy operations on water quality. (http://groundwater.ucdavis.edu/People/)
TIME Friday November 16, 2018 at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
LOCATION A230, Technological Institute map it
ADD TO CALENDAR&group= echo $value['group_name']; ?>&location= echo htmlentities($value['location']); ?>&pipurl= echo $value['ppurl']; ?>" class="button_outlook_export">
CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney-acott@northwestern.edu
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering