It’s not just water: How the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) may leave community wells dry
By Ellie Fajer
California’s Central Valley provides ¼ of the crops that feed communities in America. But as climate change causes increasingly frequent and severe droughts, farmers are relying more and more on groundwater use to keep up crop yields. So much groundwater is pumped across the Central Valley that the land sinks up to one foot further each year. Since the start of 2023, this has caused 451 wells to go dry for families across California, with Latinx and low-income communities facing the greatest burdens. Fortunately, thanks to the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) passed by the California state government in 2014, the Central Valley’s water issues are no more.
Well, not quite…
Due to the history of water injustice in the Central Valley, the structure of the SGMA, and the barriers to community involvement, current regional proposals for carrying out the SGMA are failing to ensure water justice for disadvantaged communities. And we cannot achieve a sustainable future for the Central Valley if any communities lose access to safe drinking water.
To understand how we got here, it’s important to look at the history of the valley, specifically the structural racism built into many regional development and housing policies. Starting in the 1800s, the Central Valley became home to many black farmworkers who migrated to the region from the South. Structural racism built into city planning and housing policies forced black farmers to live outside of the more developed areas in towns, leaving them with less desirable land and fewer resources. Over time, other immigrant groups continued to move into the Central Valley, and they continued to be forced to marginal lands with disinvested, lacking infrastructure. For instance, while local governments invested in deeper wells in whiter cities, they largely left areas with greater Latinx and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) populations with shallow wells, which are more likely to dry up or be contaminated.
After generations of worsening water issues, the California state government finally stepped in. The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA, pronounced sig-ma) is the first legislative act passed in California designed to ensure that groundwater use becomes more sustainable for all residents, attempting to balance the needs for agriculture and industries with the needs of local communities in the face of drought. The structure of the bill leaves much of the decision-making to local governmental groups called groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs). Over the coming years, these agencies are required to bring forward proposals for how to sustainably manage their local water basins to ensure water access for generations to come.
And that’s where we see one of the key water justice challenges with the implementation of the act: limited participation of under-represented groups in the decision-making. It’s necessary to break down groundwater management to the district level, as the former Governor Jerry Brown emphasized how “groundwater management in California is best accomplished locally.” However, in many districts, Big Ag and other powerful stakeholders are controlling the process. A report from the Groundwater Leadership Forum found that only 9% of plans included at least one member of an under-represented stakeholder group (e.g., small farmers, disadvantaged communities) in the decision-making bodies. They suggest that state funding could be used to help bridge this gap and achieve procedural equity (i.e., impacted communities would have a voice in the decision-making process). For instance, funding could be used to compensate community members for their involvement and improve shallow well monitoring systems near impacted communities.
Without the voices of community members, many of the GSA proposals so far are “fail[ing] to protect drinking water for vulnerable communities” according to the Community Water Center. Rather, most plans don’t explicitly consider the negative impacts on domestic wells, and a quarter of plans fail to even identify disadvantaged communities in their regions. As a result, the Community Water Center has exposed how current proposals would leave up to 12,000 domestic wells to go dry by 2040, impacting 127,000 residents and costing the state $359 million. As Chirag Bhakta, the California director of Food and Water Watch, stated in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, “We need to rein in the water abuse that’s happening right now and build the infrastructure we need. California likes to put itself out there, as a climate leader… but right in our backyard, right here in California, that’s not what our water situation actually shows.”
That’s where local water and environmental justice organizations are stepping in. The Community Water Center, or El Centro Comunitario Por El Agua, is fighting for safe and affordable access to water for disadvantaged communities across California. They empower local communities through multilingual education and outreach, helping them to build coalitions, construct improved water systems, and advocate for new policies. Alongside them, Self-Help Enterprisesworks together with low-income communities across the Central Valley to build and sustain improved water infrastructure and homes. As emphasized by Joseph Heide, the community development manager with Self-Help Enterprises, “we need to make sure small, disadvantaged communities have the resources and funding to fix their water… because this has real impacts.”
While many current proposals are missing the mark, community and coalition involvement has contributed to a few more promising solutions that more directly address environmental racism and prioritize the well-being of marginalized communities. In particular, solutions that propose to repurpose or retire farmland strategically could help minimize the number of new dry wells while also mitigating other environmental injustices. Under the limits of the SGWA, a certain amount of current farmland will have to be retired, or stop production. By retiring large farms specifically near disadvantaged communities, aquifers will be less depleted near communities, and other harmful effects like nitrate pollution in water, air pollution, and fertilizer pollution can be mitigated. This could be an impactful policy approach to address structural inequities with water access and other environmental injustices for communities in the Central Valley.
Despite the visionary goals of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, current proposals are falling short. If the planning process does not include all voices, particularly disadvantaged communities and small farmers, it will perpetuate the water injustices that arose from the Valley’s history of structural racism in policymaking and community disinvestment. And if communities lose access to safe drinking water, groundwater sustainability can never be achieved.
To truly attain sustainable groundwater management across California, water justice for all residents must be prioritized. We must demand that our state government draws a hard line on proposals that fail to protect the groundwater supply of disadvantaged communities, and that state funding is leveraged to ensure procedural equity in local decision making.
The solution is clear: it’s just water.
Raised in Littleton, Colorado, Ellie is a Master’s student at Stanford studying agroecology and microbial ecology. This past summer, Ellie traveled to Fresno during the peak of the summer heat wave to collect soil and water samples from farms with Dr. Aidee Guzman. Dr. Guzman has been collaborating with farmers of small to mid-scale monoculture and polyculture farms in the area to investigate how polycultural farming practices (rooted in agroecology and cultural practices from immigrant farmers) can promote healthier soil microbial communities. Ellie hopes that she can apply her knowledge and passion for soil microbiology and agroecology to support broader environmental justice efforts in future work. As a starting point with this project, she hopes to better understand how agricultural groundwater use is impacting disadvantaged communities in the Central Valley. Ellie also hopes to learn more about grassroots organizing and policymaking related to water justice in the Central Valley to learn how she could potentially better support these communities.
Sources:
Bostic, D., Mendez-Barrientos, L., Pauloo, R. et al. Thousands of domestic and public supply wells face failure despite groundwater sustainability reform in California’s Central Valley. Sci Rep 13, 14797 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-41379-9
California State Water Resources Control Board. (2023, July 19). The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. State Water Resources Control Board. https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/gmp/about_sgma.html
Chappelle, C., N. Atume, J.P. Ortiz-Partida, E.J. Remson, M.M. Rohde. 2023. Achieving Groundwater Access for All: Why Groundwater Sustainability Plans Are Failing Many Users. Groundwater Leadership Forum.
Community Water Center. (2023). Sustainable Groundwater Management act. https://www.communitywatercenter.org/sgma
Fernandez-Bou, Angel Santiago, José M. Rodríguez-Flores, Alexander Guzman, J. Pablo Ortiz-Partida, Leticia M. Classen-Rodriguez, Pedro A. Sánchez-Pérez, Jorge Valero-Fandiño, et al. 2023. “Water, Environment, and Socioeconomic Justice in California: A Multibenefit Cropland Repurposing Framework.” Science of the Total Environment 858: 159963. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.159963
Food & Water Watch. (2023, March 22). Big AG, Big Oil, and the California Water Crisis. https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/2023/02/01/california-water-crisis/#background-water-and-drought-in-california
Moran, T., & Wendell, D. (n.d.). (rep.). THE SUSTAINABLE GROUNDWATER MANAGEMENT ACT OF 2014: Challenges and Opportunities for Implementation.
Self-Help Enterprises. (2022, November 1). About us — self-help enterprises. https://www.selfhelpenterprises.org/about-us/
Tracey, C. (2023, May 31). Can retiring farmland make California’s Central Valley more equitable? High Country News — Know the West. https://www.hcn.org/articles/south-agriculture-can-retiring-farmland-make-californias-central-valley-more-equitable
Vaughan, M., & Vera, N. (2020, December 11). Toxic drinking water stems from racist ca government policies . The Fresno Bee. https://www.fresnobee.com/fresnoland/article247571190.html
