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Building Drought Resilience in California’s Cities and Suburbs
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Building Drought Resilience in California’s Cities and Suburbs
Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) | June 1, 2017...
Summary
Droughts are a recurring feature of California’s climate. Major droughts provide an opportunity to review management responses and derive policy lessons that can...
Droughts are a recurring feature of California’s climate. Major droughts provide an opportunity to review management responses and derive policy lessons that can better prepare society for the next one. Here we take stock of how California’s cities and suburbs have responded to recent droughts, review the state’s evolving role in urban drought management, and recommend actions to increase urban areas’ drought resilience.

California’s urban water supply system is complex and highly decentralized, with 400-plus utilities serving more than 90 percent of the state’s residents. Following the hard lessons learned from the 1976–77 and 1987–92 droughts, these utilities made substantial investments in drought resilience. This included diversifying supplies with new surface and underground storage, interconnections with neighboring suppliers, recycled wastewater, and water transfer agreements, as well as freeing up supplies by reducing indoor water use. Consequently, urban water suppliers generally believed they were prepared as the state entered a five-year drought in 2012.

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Changes in water consumption linked to heavy news media coverage of extreme climatic events

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Changes in water consumption linked to heavy news media coverage of extreme climatic events
Science Magazine, American Association for the Advancement of Science | October 25, 2017...
Summary
Public awareness of water- and drought-related issues is an important yet relatively unexplored component of water use behavior. To examine this relationship, we...

Public awareness of water- and drought-related issues is an important yet relatively unexplored component of water use behavior. To examine this relationship, we first quantified news media coverage of drought in California from 2005 to 2015, a period with two distinct droughts; the later drought received unprecedentedly high media coverage, whereas the earlier drought did not, as the United States was experiencing an economic downturn coinciding with a historic presidential election. Comparing this coverage to Google search frequency confirmed that public attention followed news media trends. We then modeled single-family residential water consumption in 20 service areas in the San Francisco Bay Area during the same period using geospatially explicit data and including news media coverage as a covariate. Model outputs revealed the factors affecting water use for populations of varying demographics. Importantly, the models estimated that an increase of 100 drought-related articles in a bimonthly period was associated with an 11 to 18% reduction in water use. Then, we evaluated high-resolution water consumption data from smart meters, known as advanced metering infrastructure, in one of the previously modeled service areas to evaluate breakpoints in water use trends. Results demonstrated that whereas nonresidential commercial irrigation customers responded to changes in climate, single-family residential customers decreased water use at the fastest rate following heavy drought-related news media coverage. These results highlight the need for water resource planners and decision makers to further consider the importance of effective, internally and externally driven, public awareness and education in water demand behavior and management.

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Defining urban resilience: A review

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Defining urban resilience: A review
Landscape and Urban Planing, Elsevier | March 1, 2016...
Summary
Fostering resilience in the face of environmental, socioeconomic, and political uncertainty and risk has captured the attention of academics and decision makers across...
Fostering resilience in the face of environmental, socioeconomic, and political uncertainty and risk has captured the attention of academics and decision makers across disciplines, sectors, and scales. Resilience has become an important goal for cities, particularly in the face of climate change. Urban areas house the majority of the world's population, and, in addition to functioning as nodes of resource consumption and as sites for innovation, have become laboratories for resilience, both in theory and in practice. This paper reviews the scholarly literature on urban resilience and concludes that the term has not been well defined. Existing definitions are inconsistent and underdeveloped with respect to incorporation of crucial concepts found in both resilience theory and urban theory. Based on this literature review, and aided by bibliometric analysis, the paper identifies six conceptual tensions fundamental to urban resilience: (1) definition of ‘urban’; (2) understanding of system equilibrium; (3) positive vs. neutral (or negative) conceptualizations of resilience; (4) mechanisms for system change; (5) adaptation versus general adaptability; and (6) timescale of action. To advance this burgeoning field, more conceptual clarity is needed. This paper, therefore, proposes a new definition of urban resilience. This definition takes explicit positions on these tensions, but remains inclusive and flexible enough to enable uptake by, and collaboration among, varying disciplines. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the definition might serve as a boundary object, with the acknowledgement that applying resilience in different contexts requires answering: Resilience for whom and to what? When? Where? And why?

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Estimation of residential outdoor water use in Los Angeles, California

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Estimation of residential outdoor water use in Los Angeles, California
Landscape and Urban Planing, Elsevier | July 1, 2014...
Summary
The current study analyzes existing methods for estimating outdoor use and landscape irrigation in highly developed residential areas across Los Angeles. Outdoor use...
The current study analyzes existing methods for estimating outdoor use and landscape irrigation in highly developed residential areas across Los Angeles. Outdoor use was estimated using three methods: two methods described by the Pacific Institute and a third approach that utilizes remotely sensed vegetation and water billing data. Monthly individual water use records were provided by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) for 2000–2010. This period includes voluntary and mandatory restrictions due to drought conditions across the state. Records were aggregated to the census tract level to protect customer privacy. The two Pacific Institute methods, which are based on water billing data, generally underestimate outdoor use due to assumptions that the lowest water consumption month represents indoor use, which is likely not the case in Los Angeles. The remote-sensing model developed between single-family water use and the Landsat normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) surplus performed well in greener areas of the city and indicates that landscape irrigation use represents 54% of total single-family water use. The model also predicts an average decrease in landscaping irrigation of 6% and by 35% during voluntary and mandatory restrictions, respectively. Voluntary conservation and mandatory waste restrictions were less effective for higher income groups in the city, while more stringent pricing and non-pricing mandatory restrictions in FY2010 had similar effects across income groups. Study results contribute to a better understanding of the partitioning of Los Angeles residential water use and can be utilized to evaluate pricing structures and target water conservation efforts.

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Evaluating the Effects of Turf-Replacement Programs in Los Angeles County
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Evaluating the Effects of Turf-Replacement Programs in Los Angeles County
UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, UCLA Geography Department, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department, University of Utah | August 4, 2017...
Summary
In 2014, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) undertook an unprecedented investment to incentive turf replacement throughout Southern California in response...
In 2014, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) undertook an unprecedented investment to incentive turf replacement throughout Southern California in response to the state’s serious drought. MWD devoted $350 million to the program, resulting in more than 46,000 rebate payments to remove 165 million square feet of turf. The funding boost served as a tremendous natural experiment to better understand the effects turf replacement programs.

As part of an evaluation of this program, UCLA and the University of Utah examined socio-economic and demographic characteristics of program participation and assessed changes in vegetation and landscapes of front yards resulting from turf replacement. We examined address-level records of 24,921 participants who applied for turf replacement rebates between February 2014 and April 2016 in Los Angeles (LA) County. We analyzed the socioeconomic and spatial determinants of program participation. Further, we used Google Earth Street View to characterize the landscapes and plants resulting from turf replacement based on a set of randomly selected participating properties. We ascertained the types of turf replacements that were installed and developed a classification system for landscape design types.

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Evapotranspiration of urban landscapes in Los Angeles, California at the municipal scale

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Evapotranspiration of urban landscapes in Los Angeles, California at the municipal scale
American Geophysical Union (AGU) | May 24, 2017...
Summary
Evapotranspiration (ET), an essential process in biosphere-atmosphere interactions, is highly uncertain in cities that maintain cultivated and irrigated landscapes. We estimated ET of irrigated...
Evapotranspiration (ET), an essential process in biosphere-atmosphere interactions, is highly uncertain in cities that maintain cultivated and irrigated landscapes. We estimated ET of irrigated landscapes in Los Angeles by combining empirical models of turfgrass ET and tree transpiration derived from in situ measurements with previously developed remotely sensed estimates of vegetation cover and ground-based vegetation surveys. We modeled irrigated landscapes as a two-component system comprised of trees and turfgrass to assess annual and spatial patterns of ET. Annual ET from vegetated landscapes (ET_veg) was 11106 53 mm/yr and ET from the whole city (vegetated and nonvegetated areas, ET_land) was three times smaller, reflecting the fractional vegetation cover. With the exception of May and June, monthly ET_landwas significantly higher than predicted by the North American Land Data Assimilation System. ET_veg was close to potential ET, indicating abundant irrigation inputs. Monthly averaged ET_vegvaried from 1.560.1 mm/d (December) to 4.360.2 mm/d (June). Turfgrass was responsible for 70% of ET_veg. For trees, angiosperm species (71% of all trees) contributed over 90% to total tree transpiration, while coniferous and palm species made very small contributions. ET_landwas linearly correlated with median household income across the city, confirming the importance of social factors in determining spatial distribution of urban vegetation. These estimates have important implications for constraining the municipal water budget of Los Angeles and improving regional-scale hydrologic models, as well as for developing water-saving practices. The methodology used in this study is also transferable to other semiarid regions for quantification of urban landscape ET.

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History and Sources of Co-Occurring Pesticides in an Abstraction Well Unraveled by Age Distributions of Depth-Specific Groundwater Samples

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History and Sources of Co-Occurring Pesticides in an Abstraction Well Unraveled by Age Distributions of Depth-Specific Groundwater Samples
American Chemical Society (ACS) | November 24, 2019...
Summary
When groundwater-based drinking water supply becomes contaminated, the timing and source of contamination are obvious questions. However, contaminants often have diffuse sources and...
When groundwater-based drinking water supply becomes contaminated, the timing and source of contamination are obvious questions. However, contaminants often have diffuse sources and different contaminants may have different sources even in a single groundwater well, making these questions complicated to answer. Age dating of groundwater has been used to reconstruct contaminant travel times to wells; however, critics have highlighted that groundwater flow is often complex with mixing of groundwater of different ages. In drinking water wells, where water is typically abstracted from a large depth interval, such mixing is even more problematic. We present a way to overcome some of the obstacles in identifying the source and age of contaminants in drinking water wells by combining depth-specific sampling with age tracer modeling, particle tracking simulations, geological characterization, and contaminant properties. This multitool approach was applied to a drinking water well, where bentazon and dichlorprop contamination was found to have different pollutant sources and release histories, even though both pesticides can be associated with the same land use. Bentazon was derived from recent application to a golf course, while dichlorprop was derived from agricultural use more than 30 years ago. The advantages, limitations, and pitfalls of the proposed course of action are then further discussed.

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Large Landscape Urban Irrigation: A Data‐Driven Approach to Evaluate Conservation Behavior

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Large Landscape Urban Irrigation: A Data‐Driven Approach to Evaluate Conservation Behavior
American Geophysical Union (AGU) | April 30, 2019...
Summary
Do businesses, multifamily residences, and homeowners associations irrigate differently than single‐family residences? Do customers who have recycled water irrigate differently than if they have potable...
Do businesses, multifamily residences, and homeowners associations irrigate differently than single‐family residences? Do customers who have recycled water irrigate differently than if they have potable water? How does water use change during drought and under different policy regimes? Is neighborhood affluence related to conservation behavior by nonresidential irrigation customers?

These questions are all important for water managers planning how much water they need when and where, in the present and in the future. In this paper, we statistically investigated and modeled water use in a case study service area to examine how water demand for nonresidential large landscapes changed during a historic drought. The findings of this paper can help water managers understand urban water use behavior, which is useful for supply planning, targeting conservation efforts, and optimizing infrastructure investment.

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Large Landscape Urban Irrigation: A Data‐Driven Approach to Evaluate Conservation Behavior

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Large Landscape Urban Irrigation: A Data‐Driven Approach to Evaluate Conservation Behavior
American Geophysical Union (AGU) | January 30, 2019...
Summary
Do businesses, multifamily residences, and homeowners associations irrigate differently than single‐family residences? Do customers who have recycled water irrigate differently than if they have...
Do businesses, multifamily residences, and homeowners associations

irrigate differently than single‐family residences? Do customers who have recycled water irrigate differently than if they have potable water? How does water use change during drought and under different policy

regimes? Is neighborhood affluence related to conservation behavior by nonresidential irrigation customers? These questions are all important for water managers planning how much water they need when and where, in the present and in the future. In this paper, we statistically investigated and modeled water use in a case study service area to examine how water demand for nonresidential large landscapes changed during a historic drought. The findings of this paper can help water managers understand urban water use behavior, which is useful for supply planning, targeting conservation efforts, and optimizing infrastructure investment.

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Lawns and Water Demand in California
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Lawns and Water Demand in California
Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) | June 26, 2006...
Summary
Over the next 25 years, outdoor water use will be a major factor in escalating water demand in California. The demand will be...
Over the next 25 years, outdoor water use will be a major factor in escalating water demand in California. The demand will be aggravated by the dominant land-use pattern in inland areas: single-family homes with lush lawns. Without efforts aimed specifically at reducing outdoor urban water use, the demand will pose significant financial and environmental challenges for California. In this issue of CEP, the authors analyze population growth and housing trends in the state’s major climactic regions, estimate residential lot and yard sizes, and examine the water needs of cool-season turf grass lawns. They also evaluate several outdoor water conservation programs.

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Building Drought Resilience in California’s Cities and Suburbs

Building Drought Resilience in California’s Cities and Suburbs

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Changes in water consumption linked to heavy news media coverage of extreme climatic events

Changes in water consumption linked to heavy news media coverage of extreme climatic events

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Defining urban resilience: A review

Defining urban resilience: A review

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Estimation of residential outdoor water use in Los Angeles, California

Estimation of residential outdoor water use in Los Angeles, California

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Evaluating the Effects of Turf-Replacement Programs in Los Angeles County

Evaluating the Effects of Turf-Replacement Programs in Los Angeles County

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Evapotranspiration of urban landscapes in Los Angeles, California at the municipal scale

Evapotranspiration of urban landscapes in Los Angeles, California at the municipal scale

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History and Sources of Co-Occurring Pesticides in an Abstraction Well Unraveled by Age Distributions of Depth-Specific Groundwater Samples

History and Sources of Co-Occurring Pesticides in an Abstraction Well Unraveled by Age Distributions of Depth-Specific Groundwater Samples

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Large Landscape Urban Irrigation: A Data‐Driven Approach to Evaluate Conservation Behavior

Large Landscape Urban Irrigation: A Data‐Driven Approach to Evaluate Conservation Behavior

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Large Landscape Urban Irrigation: A Data‐Driven Approach to Evaluate Conservation Behavior

Large Landscape Urban Irrigation: A Data‐Driven Approach to Evaluate Conservation Behavior

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Lawns and Water Demand in California

Lawns and Water Demand in California

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