California’s Adjudicated Groundwater Basins: History, Current Conditions, Potential Reforms

Abstract:

Groundwater adjudications are one approach to managing a groundwater basin in California. While the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) established new management requirements for 127 high and medium priority groundwater basins, it exempted all 26 of the state’s adjudicated groundwater basins from the Act. The State Water Resources Control Board prioritized the evaluation of these adjudicated basins to assist in aligning the processes and outcomes of adjudication with SGMA’s goals for the sustainable management of groundwater. Working with the Board, our research evaluated the history and current condition of all of California’s adjudicated basins along with potential future improvements to the adjudication process. Our presentation will provide a summary of our findings and highlight some successful features of the adjudication process along with the challenges adjudicated basins face to achieve long-term sustainable groundwater management. Our discussion will include a review of: whether most adjudications result in groundwater extractions at or near a basins’ designated safe yield; whether overdraft conditions are reduced or eliminated over the long term; and the degree of collaboration and inclusion of community stakeholders in the adjudication process. In addition to this overview, we will highlight 3-4 basins with particularly interesting management challenges and solutions. For each of these basins, we will describe the problem that precipitated the need for the adjudication and how adjudication outcomes were influenced by: how the judgment defined and distributed water rights; the management structure and strategies to manage the basin; how safe yield and overdraft are defined and determined; and, importantly, the effectiveness of the adjudication in halting or reversing groundwater overdraft.