California's hopes for water turn to dust

After years of drought, the hot and dry city of Los Angeles is in the market to buy water.

But in this parched climate even its record-setting offer of up to $70m is not enough to guarantee it can find a willing seller.

"Right now it's not looking that good," said Jeffrey Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of southern California, which oversees water supply to 19m people in more than two dozen cities including Los Angeles and San Diego.

The rainy season in California is nearly over with barely anything to show for it, and city dwellers and farmers across California are bracing themselves for a fourth straight year of crippling drought.

Many are having to change how they run their homes and businesses to save water - although water experts and state officials say the reduction in water usage is not happening fast enough.

To speed things up, Governor Jerry Brown on April 1 instituted the state's first-ever mandatory water restrictions, requiring that state cities and towns cut water usage by 25 per cent by next year.

When he first declared the drought emergency last January, he asked Californians to cut water consumption by 20 per cent, but a recent report found they have cut residential use by only around 11 per cent since.

For Metropolitan, getting through the drought means finding new ways to keep reducing its water usage.

It is offering to pay $700 per acre-foot of water, its highest ever offer per unit, to farmers in wetter northern California. But the district is unlikely to find all the water it wants, so it is trying to do more with what it has. It recently increased from $60m to $100m its budget for subsidising residents who want to tear up their lawns.

"It will just have to become the status quo that you no longer have lawns in southern California," said Mr Kightlinger. "That's a behaviour change that will take some period of time."

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The state's $50bn agricultural industry has been hard hit as some farmers ran out of water. Last year a quarter of the rice fields in the Sacramento Valley were left fallow as farmers ran out of water or realised they could make more by selling it than by growing crops, said Mike Wade, executive director of the California Farm Water Coalition. Some citrus farmers in the San Joaquin Valley ripped out their groves, as did some almond farmers whose trees require constant watering to stay alive.

For many farmers, that trend will continue. "You got farmers last year on the very, very ragged edge," said Mr Wade, "though some with high-value water transfers [purchases] could squeak by."

Urban residents will not go thirsty, but the water limits restrict how they can use water outdoors and how some urban businesses can operate. Even before Governor Brown's recent announcement, Californian officials had passed new statewide regulations - the most comprehensive in the US - that, among other measures, limit the use of water outdoors and regulate how restaurants and hotels offer water and linen changes to guests.

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"There is a need to set up water conservation knowing that we don't know when the drought will end," said Doug Obegi, a staff attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Many Californians agree that the state had not been doing enough to respond to the drought. A poll on March 25 said two-thirds of Californians believe their region is not doing enough to respond to the drought.

One major challenge that remains is finding ways to encourage farmers to use less water. The new restrictions do not touch agricultural water use, which is a tougher legal and political challenge, but which also accounts for around 80 per cent of the state's water consumption.

Environmentalists and some water officials say there are ways to use water more wisely there. While many farmers have upgraded their irrigation systems or torn up fields to conserve more water, not all are, they say.

Some farmers are continuing to plant new water-intensive crops, such as almonds, in areas without sufficient water. Near Oakdale, in California's agriculture-heavy Central Valley, nut farmers have sparked controversy by planting trees on land that had bee used for cattle grazing.

With no rivers or excess irrigation water in the area, the planters are relying on pumping loosely regulated sources of groundwater, said Steve Knell, general manager of the Oakdale Irrigation District. The pumping is legal, but combined with the drought it had driven down the water table and dried up some of their neighbours' wells, he said.

"That creates a controversy in the area - is this a wise use of resources?" he said. "We don't have enough water to provide all the needs out there."

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