The recent rain show­ers will not solve the long-last­ing drought that has put most of California under severe water stress.

According to the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), the multi-year megadrought affect­ing much of the west­ern United States has made 2020 and 2021 the worst two-year period in decades.

The result has been reduced water avail­abil­ity, lower crop yields and ris­ing costs for farm­ers. The PPIC fore­casts also show that in 2022 things are poised to get even worse.

The PPIC experts believe that cli­mate change is the cause of the ​“ increas­ingly dra­matic swings between dry and wet con­di­tions,” also known as ​“ pre­cip­i­ta­tion whiplash.” The last two years have been close to the dri­est since records began in 1895, sec­ond only to the 1976 to 1977 drought.

On top of this, PPIC esti­mates that ​“ unusu­ally warm tem­per­a­tures in 2021, nearly 3.5 ºF (1.9 ºC) above the 20th-cen­tury aver­age, cre­ated an addi­tional three to four inches of evap­o­ra­tive demand, or about an 8 per­cent increase in crop water demands.”

In 2021, the eco­nomic impact of the drought was con­sid­ered mod­est, with the excep­tion of Sacramento and the North Coast regions. Still, in 2022, the PPIC fore­casts dry con­di­tions to per­sist and the eco­nomic bur­den for farm­ing activ­i­ties to increase.

According to the United States Drought Monitor, almost 96 per­cent of California is now under severe drought con­di­tions, which means that the wild­fire sea­son is longer and trees are under stress.

The severe drought has become extreme in about 47 per­cent of the state. In such con­di­tions, reser­voirs run very low, hydropower is affected and water avail­abil­ity becomes insuf­fi­cient for agri­cul­ture.

Cary Fox of the United States Bureau of Reclamation told Wired mag­a­zine that California power plants’ reser­voirs are run­ning low. As a result, instal­la­tions such as Shasta Powerplant will be able to pro­duce around half of their full poten­tial up to next fall, with rain­fall expected to replen­ish the reser­voirs only next win­ter.

“ If it does not rain or snow in the win­ter, that’s it. We kind of have one sea­son… This year, it didn’t hap­pen,” Fox said.

The lat­est PPIC pol­icy brief under­lined how California agri­cul­ture relies heav­ily on irri­ga­tion and how low water avail­abil­ity might be a game-changer even if irri­ga­tion effi­ciency has gen­er­ally improved.

“ Climatic and reg­u­la­tory con­straints have lim­ited sur­face water in recent decades,” the pol­icy brief said. ​“ Chronic over­pump­ing of ground­wa­ter has dried up wells and dam­aged infra­struc­ture, prompt­ing the enact­ment of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) in 2014.”

In 2021, California farms expe­ri­enced a reduced sur­face water deliv­ery due to low stor­age lev­els and water rights cur­tail­ments, with ​“ allo­ca­tions from the Central Valley Project and State Water Project dropped to zero for some grow­ers.”

According to the PPIC, total deliv­er­ies for Central Valley and North Coast farms dropped by about 5.5 mil­lion acre-feet (680,000 hectare-meters) in 2021, 41 per­cent below the 2002 to 2016 aver­age.

That sit­u­a­tion led many farm­ers to pump more water, even though there were insuf­fi­cient quan­ti­ties to com­pen­sate. While not all farm­ers have ground­wa­ter access, those who did still faced ris­ing pro­duc­tion costs, up to $184 mil­lion (€175 mil­lion) in higher energy bills due to pump­ing.

The effects of reduced water avail­abil­ity on farm­ing include leav­ing some irri­gated crop­land unplanted and focus­ing only on highly prof­itable crops. Other irri­gated lands were also idled to sell that water to other users.

As hap­pens in many other parts of the world, local farm­ers are also get­ting used to deficit irri­ga­tion, which con­sists of adjust­ing to reduced water vol­umes while opti­miz­ing yields. Still, the PPIC experts warned that cur­tailed irri­ga­tion ​“ can lower crop yields.”

An exam­ple is the Russian River Basin, where wild­fires and reduced irri­ga­tion caused a 24 per­cent drop in rev­enue.

“ Across impacted regions, crop rev­enue losses and increased pump­ing costs were esti­mated at $1.1 bil­lion (€1.05 bil­lion), with roughly 8,700 full- and part-time jobs lost,” the PPIC said.

Including other parts of the econ­omy that have devel­oped around the state’s agri­cul­ture sec­tor, such as goods pro­duc­tion and ser­vices, the PPIC esti­mates $1.7 bil­lion (€1.6 bil­lion) in rev­enue losses due to drought, with 14,600 jobs lost.

Given this sce­nario, the PPIC’s pol­icy brief pro­posed sev­eral mit­i­ga­tion strate­gies, such as lim­it­ing pump­ing while plan­ning new invest­ments in mod­ern­iza­tion, reduc­ing farm depen­dence on water, build­ing on flex­i­bil­ity in water demand dur­ing drought, facil­i­tat­ing water trad­ing and improv­ing water stor­age.

The PPIC empha­sized how these mea­sures should be con­sid­ered essen­tial given that California’s agri­cul­tural sec­tor gen­er­ates more than $50 bil­lion (€48 bil­lion) in rev­enue yearly while also employ­ing more than 420,000 peo­ple.

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