California has to change the way it manages the hub of its vast water system or face economic and environmental disaster in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, warns a report released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California.
The book-length document, written by a group of UC Davis experts and institute research fellow Ellen Hanak, adds to a growing consensus that the status quo in the delta, which provides two out of three Californians with fresh water, is unsustainable.
"The delta is facing a crisis that will affect all Californians," said Hanak, whose organization is a private nonprofit that conducts independent research on major policy issues in the state.
While stopping short of recommending one solution, the authors say several controversial options should be investigated, including reducing water exports and piping water supplies around the delta in a smaller version of the peripheral canal that was rejected by voters in the 1980s.
Part of the largest estuary on the West Coast, the delta east of San Francisco is the center of water shipments from the state's wet north to its arid Central Valley and urban Southern California, playing a vital role in California's economy. It also has hundreds of thousands of acres of cropland and a network of utility lines and roads.
But it faces a mounting list of problems despite a decade-long government attempt to improve its environment and water deliveries.
The delta's lengthy levee system could collapse in a major earthquake. Rising sea levels caused by global warming coupled with the continued subsidence of its farming islands increase the risk of flooding that would contaminate fresh water supplies with ocean flows.
Housing developments are rising on its edge. Fish populations, including that of the native delta smelt, have collapsed in recent years. Invasive species are altering the delta's basic food systems.
Moreover, CalFed, the state-federal program created to fix the ailing delta, has foundered amid a shortage of funding and criticism that it tried to please everybody.
The public policy report is not so politic. "There's something in that package to make everyone nervous," Barry Nelson, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said after a briefing on the document.
Saying that the situation is not hopeless, the report lays out a handful of alternatives for doing things differently in the delta while rejecting other options.
