Christina Speed

In my role as Communications Director for the California Water Impact Network (C-WIN), I leverage all my skills as a communicator in pursuit of meaningful positive change in the state that I call home.

C-WIN is a small non-profit public advocacy group working toward equitable and sustainable water policy for California. We do most of our work in the courts. Water issues in California are notoriously complex. Offering paths to understanding these issues is challenging and extremely rewarding.

If you have even the mildest curiosity about water in California, please visit www.c-win.org.

Seven Things You May Be Surprised to Know About Water in California

1: There’s enough drinking water in the state to meet demand – even during times of drought.

The state has enough water to meet the demands of businesses, farms and private citizens—even during drought years. The problem is that a small number of industrial agribusiness interests have an outsized influence on who gets water. The state has refused to quantify water and its use because if it did, they’d have to do something about it. By doing a public trust analysis of this critical natural resource we can place a value on what’s at stake.

2: Agriculture in California is only 2% of the state economy, yet it consumes 80% of our developed water. 

Regular citizens are asked to conserve, some farmers get no water, and salmon face extinction while a small number of industrial agribusiness growers increase their acreage and profit from overusing a public resource. This inequitable imbalance is driving up costs to ratepayers, damaging the environment and ultimately hurting our economy.

3: Two-thirds of California’s developed water comes from just one source.

The California Delta is a life-giving ecosystem that includes 26 major rivers and creeks. At over 75,000 square miles, it’s the largest watershed in the state. It not only provides water to two-thirds of California’s population, it’s part of the largest migratory bird flyway in North and South America, and home to three runs of wild salmon—all of which are on the verge of extinction. The overallocation of water is unravelling this priceless ecosystem that many forms of life depend on, including us.

4: The State of California has given away rights to 5.3 times more water than exists in the Delta Watershed.

Water that exists as water-rights claims in legal documents (but not in the real world) is known as "paper water". The state has about 29 million acre-feet of surface water available for use. Based on active water-rights records, a total of 153.7 million acre-feet a year is allocated in contracts to water districts, agricultural interests and development. That’s 124.7-million-acre feet of paper water that doesn’t exist.

5: Dams are no longer a viable solution.

Dams and reservoirs are “high cost, low yield”—extremely expensive relative to how much water they capture, with California ratepayers footing the bill even when little or no water is available. The decimation of fish populations and significant methane emissions are just two items on a long list of environmental harms. Viable alternatives to dams include local storm water capture, conservation, wastewater treatment, and modern small-scale desalination.

6: Extinction of salmon in the California Delta is happening right now.

The population of all fish in the Delta watershed has declined 95% since exports of water were increased above recommended levels. It’s estimated that California’s runs of wild salmon could be completely extinct within the next few years.

7: The California State Constitution asserts that water is a public trust resource. Meaning it belongs to you.

Codified in Roman law and included in the California State Constitution, the public trust doctrine principle recognizes the public right to designated natural resources—including air, rivers, the sea and its shore—and requires the state to hold “in trust” these resources for the benefit of all citizens of the state—now and in the future.

The public trust doctrine is not new to the courts and it’s been used successfully to argue for the environmental protection of public resources. In 1983, the California Supreme Court held that the public trust doctrine applied to Los Angeles’ rights to divert water from Mono Lake’s feeder streams, limiting how much could be taken.