Water warriors

Photo: “We can’t solve anything without the public understanding the gravity of the challenges facing the state’s water future,” says UCI Water director David Feldman. Steve Zylius / UCI

UCI experts work to inform public policy and educate about California’s water future

Despite the recent series of atmospheric river storms that inundated California and more than tripled the Sierra Nevada’s vital snowpack, experts say that both the state and the region remain locked in a megadrought worse than anything the U.S. Southwest has seen in roughly a millennium. Unfortunately, this local crisis mirrors a global reality in which more than 40 percent of the world’s population will see increasing water shortages, while every day, almost 1,000 children die from preventable waterborne and sanitation-related diseases.

At UCI, a group of scholars is working to bridge the gap between scientific knowledge and public policy to help address this existential challenge to human survival. Water UCI aims to mobilize university experts in a variety of academic fields to not only conduct crucial research but provide educational and outreach programs, foster workforce development, and advance policy solutions to critical water problems facing the state, the nation and the world.

Not surprisingly, however, a major portion of Water UCI’s mission involves addressing California’s drought and other water challenges. For the past few years, says Water UCI director David Feldman, professor of urban planning and public policy and political science, the group has worked to connect the water industry, government agencies, nongovernmental organizations and K-12 schools with the vast resources of UCI and the UC system in order to both educate the public and craft practical policy responses to the state’s water crisis.

“In May 2022, we completed a project for Gov. Newsom’s natural resources cabinet called the California Water Resilience Portfolio,” Feldman says. “This project represents the Newsom administration’s effort to face up to the fact that California’s water future is precarious.”

In compiling the data, Water UCI sought ideas from experts and regular citizens throughout the state. “A lot of the comments were contradictory,” Feldman notes. “Some would say we give too much water to farmers; some would say we care too much about fish.”

Following that, he says, Water UCI produced a stakeholder report that includes three main recommendations. First, California’s water agency needs to […]

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