Launching the PPIC Water Policy Center ten years ago was a risk. How was a small team going to have a big impact on such intractable problems? After a decade, the proof is in the pudding. We’ve done it by being interdisciplinary, seeking out facts amid controversy, and really trying to understand the challenges and opportunities in each water sector.

Despite the many difficulties and complexities of California’s water, the state has made tremendous progress on water management in the last decade, and the Water Policy Center has worked hard to support that progress with forward-looking, nonpartisan research. We follow where the facts lead, and that commitment to the facts—even if the results are not popular—has made us a trusted voice on some of the thorniest challenges in the field.

Since the center launched ten years ago, we’ve released a wide range of impactful research. Here are just four major areas of research we’ve conducted on issues that matter deeply to all Californians.

Drought resilience. Drought is a recurring fact of life in California, and with a warming climate, droughts seem to be growing longer, hotter, and more intense—which has massive implications for how the state manages its water. We’ve researched how drought impacts vary across sectors, taking in-depth looks at drought’s effects on urban and rural water systems, agriculture, forests, and freshwater ecosystems. We’ve also outlined steps the state can take to boost resilience in a changing climate. These efforts continue in the work on drought indicators that adjunct fellow Alvar Escriva-Bou is now leading at UC Davis.

Groundwater sustainability. The center was born just after the passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) in 2014. Passing SGMA was a difficult and contentious project; implementing the law remains an ongoing process. Our work has focused especially on the San Joaquin Valley, which is ground zero for the worst effects of groundwater overdraft and for implementing SGMA. We have scoped the extent of the problems associated with groundwater overdraft, placing groundwater in a regional context and looking at practical solutions that could enable a soft landing on both the water supply and demand side.

Freshwater ecosystems. The downward trajectory of freshwater fish and wildlife populations has concerned Californians for decades—and the current management approach is not working. While the state has staved off extinctions so far, the changing climate threatens to be the death knell for species hanging on by a thread. In the past ten years, our research has laid the case for a new approach to managing the state’s freshwater ecosystems. We’ve presented a suite of solutions for improving outcomes—the time for bold action is now.

Water accounting. In 2016, we published an overview of the state’s water accounting system. Adjunct fellow Greg Gartrell led more in-depth accounting work on the Delta, resulting in two reports in 2017 and 2022. This work has been really important in showing both where water is going and where we are unable to accurately track it.

In addition, our water finance work, completed just before the center’s launch, has illuminated how we pay for water in California, revealing some surprising facts and informing much of our work over the years.

And we are not done. The Water Policy Center has its work cut out for it in the next ten years, as the state grapples with the effects of a rapidly changing climate. At the top of our to-do list is looking at how to pay for needed adaptations as the climate changes. And we are tackling an issue that has bedeviled California water management for years: the lack of a modern system of accounting for the state’s water. As they say, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

In our first ten years, we made a positive impact. We introduced the first credible estimates of how many acres will need to be fallowed in the San Joaquin Valley to achieve groundwater sustainability, and we helped put groundwater recharge on the map. We’ve argued convincingly that SGMA does not spell the end of agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley. And often, we’ve been able to say the unsayable, making it okay to discuss topics that had previously been off the table. There’s still more to come, and we thank you for staying with us.