22. If successful, in five years the impact of our project will be…
Eighty percent of California water utilities will be implementing leading water efficiency programmatic practices to bring down the water consumption of urban areas and we are able to implement these analytics in any area of the world faced with an aridifying climate.
I was under the impression that California’s water problems are almost entirely agricultural, meaning that improving urban-area water use in particular won’t help because that’s not where the water is going. I’m not entirely sure whether that’s true—that seems like something a water—analytics organization will want to be able to tell me—but if it is true, it means your success criteria should probably be more focused on irrigation techniques rather than urban consumers. Eg “farms adopt irrigation techniques which lose less to evaporation, and rainfall-adjusted irrigation water consumption per unit of food production falls 20%”, or something like that.
I was under the impression that California’s water problems are almost entirely agricultural, meaning that improving urban-area water use in particular won’t help because that’s not where the water is going. I’m not entirely sure whether that’s true—that seems like something a water—analytics organization will want to be able to tell me—but if it is true, it means your success criteria should probably be more focused on irrigation techniques rather than urban consumers. Eg “farms adopt irrigation techniques which lose less to evaporation, and rainfall-adjusted irrigation water consumption per unit of food production falls 20%”, or something like that.
Urban and Ag not as separable as one might think. Urban areas need to eat.
Also note the way water rights are done it would take a massive political earthquake to really change some of the underlying assumptions there.
We really should be doing both/and rather than just saying “hey ag do more because you’re a bigger part of the problem.”
Here’s a good intro to the water supply picture for the EA crowd: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-doing/