Last winter, El Nino-driven storms dumped much-needed snow and rain over California, boosting reservoir levels and fueling hopes the parched state's four-year drought might end. But despite the brief respite, experts say the record drought is here to stay.
The El Nino weather phenomenon -- caused when a rise in the Pacific Ocean's temperature triggers intense precipitation -- has provided only "a band-aid on a gaping wound," says Julien Emile-Geay, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Southern California. In fact, restoring the state's water supplies to their pre-drought levels would require several years of intense rain and snowfall. The water level barely equaled the average in the state's north this winter. In the south, levels failed to rise enough to fill dried-out rivers and aquifers.
The drought crisis -- which has caused wildfires, decimated forests, threatened animal species and deprived thousands of homes of access to clean water -- is far from over, and the authorities of this vast West Coast state say its 39 million residents had better get used to the new reality of climate change. A quarter of the Sierra Nevada Mountains' snow cover -- essential for feeding rivers and maintaining groundwater levels -- will disappear by 2050, California's Department of Water Resources (DWR) predicts on its website. Half will vanish by the turn of the century.
The authorities must employ financial incentives to encourage adoption of more efficient toilets and appliances -- otherwise drastically increase the price of water used after a certain limit is reached, experts say. In a region where most urban consumption comes from watering gardens, maintaining green lawns could become an unaffordable luxury. Among other failures, Californians do nothing to collect their rainwater.
California must accelerate recycling, desalination, and generally "reflect" about its system of water rights, which Emile-Geay criticizes as inequitable, archaic and encouraging of "more use than needed." Farmers, who consume some 40 percent of California's water, are also coming under fire. Wholesale water rationing for many has done little to discourage irrigation because revenues from agriculture have stayed level and even reached record levels in 2014, chiefly thanks to soaring commodity prices.
