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Discovery and Innovation for a Resilient Water Future

The UC WATER Security and Sustainability Research Initiative is focused on strategic research to build the knowledge base for better water-resources management. Unprecedented climate change, population growth and changing landcover are radically altering the water cycle, with dramatic impacts on human and environmental uses of water. In 2015 the University of California established the UC WATER Initiative to address these issues. UC WATER brings researchers together from multiple University of California campuses—Berkeley, Davis, Merced, Santa Cruz, San Diego, and CITRIS.

UC WATER initiatives:

  • UC WATER is developing innovative, quantitative water accounting and analysis methods, and introducing modern information systems into California’s aging infrastructure. Current water policy lacks salient, credible, and legitimate water information forcing policymakers to rely on century-old technology and analysis techniques.
  • UC WATER will improve our understanding of the way water flows through the natural environment, and how it is extracted, conveyed and stored in built and natural infrastructure. This initiative also contributes to research by developing understanding of landcover changes on source-water areas, and tools and techniques for better groundwater management.
  • UC WATER tightly weaves legal and policy research into our findings. Our research will help facilitate more integrated water management institutions in California and aid in the development of the capacity to adapt to 21st-century stressors.

Water-Energy Nexus

 

California's water and energy systems are highly inter-dependent, however, they are largely managed and regulated independently. The California 2013 Water Plan Revisions begin to address this nexus, and water providers and energy providers across the state are looking at energy management as an integral part of water management.

Water is used in all phases of energy production and energy is used in all phases of water management and production.

We have two near-term plans under UC WATER:

Initiate a water-footprinting analysis in agricultural areas that more accurately answers the question of How much water does it take to produce a unit of food (fruit, vegetables, grain and meat)?.These equivalencies are often developed using “footprinting” techniques, which are quite prevalent for carbon and energy accounting. The methods employed are often limited by available data and by assumptions. Scrutiny and improvement of the techniques used in water footprinting can yield new insights, and, at minimum, provide a unique and powerful means to communicate the magnitude and importance of consumptive water use.

Water footprinting is an increasingly accepted method of water accounting that can be combined with other, similar methods, such as energy footprinting, which can facilitate a better understanding of resource supply and demand, as well as system constraints. This footprinting effort can be used to identify specific intermediate and long-term threats to regions of interest (irrigation districts) or commodities.

The UC WATER vision is that a fully informed water-information management system would include some element of end uses for water, principally for irrigated agriculture. This requires that we have a method that is both robust to the data and meaningful from a decision-making or institutional perspective. Water footprinting is one means to accomplish this, with some effort required to do the following.

  • Develop a tool, initially using irrigation districts as regions of interest, that can quickly calculate water footprints using existing data.
  • Make the tool extensible to incorporate a geographically variable region of interest, and to easily incorporate new data.
  • Allow for user specific queries, such that the complexities of WF sources and sinks can be partitioned geographically and by commodities/demands.

The near-term UC WATER goal will be to develop and apply a water footprinting tool.

  • First, we will develop a GIS-based tool to estimate types of consumptive use in agricultural regions with a variable geographic extent, or region of interest, using established methods.
  • Second, we will parse out the surface versus groundwater fraction from blue water. Currently the Blue water footprint does not distinguish sources of irrigation water, but knowing surface water supply and/or groundwater depletion could allow for refined estimates of surface versus groundwater.
  • Third, we will add seasonal distinctions to the analysis. Currently water footprints are often summarized annually, but real constraints are often seasonal.
  • Fourth, we will add water-year variability. Wet versus dry year analysis for relative water footprints would be more powerful and informative to our understanding, possibly influencing intuitional and consumer behavior.

Later goals will involve developing a variable-source-area contribution component. For a given return on investment, assess what and where are the sources of water available and developing an energy footprint component. For the irrigation focus, this will become more important in conjunctive use analyses and assessments of other groundwater issues.