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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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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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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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Moving Toward a Multi-Benefit Approach for Water Management

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Moving Toward a Multi-Benefit Approach for Water Management
Pacific Institute | April 11, 2019...
Summary
There is broad recognition that adapting to climate change, coupled with the need to address aging infrastructure, population growth, and degraded ecosystems, will require rethinking programs and...
There is broad recognition that adapting to climate change, coupled with the need to address aging infrastructure, population growth, and degraded ecosystems, will require rethinking programs and policies and investing in our natural and built water systems. There are a variety of strategies for addressing water challenges, from watershed restoration and efficiency improvements to vegetated swales and green roofs. Because water is deeply linked with economic, environmental, and community wellbeing, many of these strategies can also provide other benefits, such as reducing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, providing wildlife habitat, and enhancing community livability.

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Shifting landscapes: decoupled urban irrigation and greenness patterns during severe drought

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Shifting landscapes: decoupled urban irrigation and greenness patterns during severe drought
Environmental Research Letters | June 7, 2019...
Summary
Urban outdoor water conservation and efficiency offer high potential for demand-side management, but irrigation, greenness, and climate interlinks must be better understood to design...
Urban outdoor water conservation and efficiency offer high potential for demand-side management, but irrigation, greenness, and climate interlinks must be better understood to design optimal policies.

To identify paired transitions during drought, we matched parcel-level water use data from smart, dedicated irrigation meters with high-spatial resolution, multispectral aerial imagery. We examined changes across 72 non-residential parcels using potable or recycled water for large landscape irrigation over four biennial summers (2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016) that encompassed a historic drought in California. We found that despite little change in irrigation levels during the first few years of the drought, parcel greenness deteriorated. Between summers 2010 and 2014, average parcel greenness decreased−61% for potable water irrigators and−56% for recycled water irrigators, providing evidence that vegetation could not reach its vigor from wetter, cooler years as the drought intensified with abnormally high temperatures. Between summers 2014–2016 as drought severity lessened, irrigation rates decreased significantly in line with high drought saliency, but greenness rebounded ubiquitously, on average+110% for potable water irrigators and+62% for recycled water irrigators, demonstrating climate-driven vegetation recovery as evaporation and plant evapotranspiration rates decreased. Transitions were similar for customers with both potable and recycled water; vegetation changes were dominated by the overarching climatic regime.

As irrigation cannot always overcome drought conditions, which will become more severe under climate change, to maintain vegetation health, utilities and urban planners should consider the tradeoffs between providing green spaces and water scarcity. This includes evaluating the roles of climate-appropriate landscaping and adaptive reallocation of potable and recycled water resources to enhance water security. By addressing emerging themes in urban water management through analysis of data from forthcoming water metering and aerial imagery technologies, this research provides a unique perspective on water use, greenness, and drought linkages.

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Sustainable Landscapes on Commercial and Industrial Properties in the Santa Ana River Watershed

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Sustainable Landscapes on Commercial and Industrial Properties in the Santa Ana River Watershed
Pacific Institute | February 14, 2019...
Summary
Pressures on water resources are intensifying due to aging infrastructure, population growth, climate change, and other factors. Marked by vast expanses of thirsty lawns...

Pressures on water resources are intensifying due to aging infrastructure, population growth, climate change, and other factors. Marked by vast expanses of thirsty lawns and impermeable pavement, California’s urban and suburban communities are ill-equipped to handle these pressures. Outdoor use represents about half of all water used in urbanized areas, and even more in the hottest, driest parts of the state.1,2 Runoff from lawns carries fertilizers and pesticides into waterways. Similarly, impermeable pavement impedes groundwater recharge; contributes to higher peak flows; warms the urban environment; and carries oils, metals, and other toxins into rivers, estuaries, and the ocean.

The good news is that there are more sustainable options for California communities. Replacing lawns with climate-appropriate plants that are irrigated efficiently can save water and reduce vulnerability to drought. When integrated with bioswales, rain gardens, and other green infrastructure, these projects can boost local water supplies, reduce flooding, and improve water quality. These practices can also save energy, provide habitat, sequester carbon, improve air quality, boost property values, enhance community livability, and increase resilience to climate change.

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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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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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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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Moving Toward a Multi-Benefit Approach for Water Management

Moving Toward a Multi-Benefit Approach for Water Management

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Shifting landscapes: decoupled urban irrigation and greenness patterns during severe drought

Shifting landscapes: decoupled urban irrigation and greenness patterns during severe drought

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Sustainable Landscapes on Commercial and Industrial Properties in the Santa Ana River Watershed

Sustainable Landscapes on Commercial and Industrial Properties in the Santa Ana River Watershed

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