Full article published and available newsecuritybeat.org on June 09, 2017
Pray for rain. Mega-drought. Winter salmon run nearly extinguished. Sierra snowpack dismal. These were just some of the headlines in California newspapers over the last five years during a historic drought that elevated water security to the top of everyone’s minds.
California’s relationship to water is unique in the United States, often becoming a major part of state and local power struggles. But even by those standards, water has become a greater concern in California politics over the past few years, a development that may be a harbinger of things to come for much of the world.
With about two-thirds of its precipitation falling in the north and roughly two-thirds of its population residing in the south, California relies on an intricately plumbed network of reservoirs, aqueducts, pipelines, and pumps as well as out-of-state imports to supply many different kinds of water users, including major urban centers, agriculture, and industry. A major earthquake or failure of a dam or levee could have a profound impact on the water supply to regions hundreds of miles away. In addition, both of the two major sources that feed the aqueduct systems, the Colorado River and Northern Sierras, are themselves strained by climate change, causing swings in their annual reliability.