California’s tremendous thirst for water poses a grave challenge to its future, from an everyday perspective and in the longer battle of combating climate change — and is a bellwether for the rest of America and the world. At
CLEE is Berkeley Law’s hub for energy and environmental law and policy, with four main spheres of focus: climate, water, oceans, and land use. Drawing on experts across the UC Berkeley campus, the center crafts pragmatic, creative policy solutions to build a more resilient and sustainable world. “We made a mess of this system,” Kiparsky says. “In order to manage groundwater better, you can do two things: Pump less of it, or add more water to the ground. Really, both are necessary.”The idea of adding water back, known as enhanced aquifer recharge, isn’t new, but many questions remain. Among the uncertainties are what to use for the water supply, how to match the best physical techniques to local conditions, and how to navigate the legalities of water storage.
“It’s an opportunity to take recharge to a different scale,” he says. “And it lets us do one of the things we do best: synthesis and integration, and the context-specific blending across disciplines that’s targeted at real-world impact.” If you’re across the road from another farmer who participates in a recharge program, there’s nothing stopping you from drawing off some of that new water and benefiting from your neighbor’s efforts. So it’s hard to figure out how to generate incentives for property owners, Kiparsky says.
Even so, recharge is “a pragmatic and promising solution to an enormous problem,” says UC College of the Law, San Francisco Professor Dave Owen ’02, a researcher on the EPA grant, CLEE board member, and former editor in chief of the student-run Ecology Law Quarterly. Storing more water in the ground isn’t a complete solution to longstanding management problems, he says, but it could really help — and, at least for now, it’s not polarizing.
kiparsky '... highly treated wastewater has been tested in parts of California but also presents potential drawbacks.' Do you happen to know where I can read more about those drawbacks?