blog post Ensuring Safe Drinking Water for California’s Native American Communities By Joy Collins, Caitrin Chappelle Jun 22, 2021 California’s tribes frequently lack access to safe drinking water—and lack the funds to fix aging infrastructure. A new state program may help improve the situation.
Fact Sheet Paying for California’s Water System By Caitrin Chappelle, Ellen Hanak, Annabelle Rosser May 26, 2021 Most funding for California’s water system comes from local water bills and taxes. During droughts and recessions, revenues decline, making it harder for water agencies to keep up with needed investments.
blog post Video: Is California Ready for Drought? By Lori Pottinger May 10, 2021 Drought brings greater risks to some sectors and communities. At this virtual event, experts discussed the latest drought, and how to reduce its impacts to vulnerable sectors.
blog post Anticipating and Addressing the Impacts of the Drought By Alvar Escriva-Bou, Ellen Hanak, Jeffrey Mount May 4, 2021 With the latest drought off to a strong start, what lessons can we learn from the last major dry period—and what actions can we take to manage it?
blog post California’s Latest Drought in 4 Charts By Alvar Escriva-Bou, Jeffrey Mount, Michael Dettinger May 3, 2021 California is in drought again. Knowing what’s different and what’s similar compared to the past major drought can help us better prepare the most vulnerable sectors.
blog post Why Is It Taking So Long to Restore the Sediment-Choked Elk River? By Lori Pottinger Apr 5, 2021 The Elk River was damaged by landslides from logged land more than 20 years ago, which harmed fisheries and drinking water supplies. Darren Mierau of CalTrout talks about ongoing efforts to restore the river.
blog post Commentary: As Drought Alarms Sound, Don’t Ignore the Environment By Jeffrey Mount, Caitrin Chappelle Mar 29, 2021 The last major drought caused unprecedented stress to California’s freshwater ecosystems and pushed many native species to the brink. Are we ready this time to better manage ecosystems through another drought?
blog post Operating Dams to Better Manage Big Storms Can Build Resiliency to Climate Extremes By Lori Pottinger Mar 8, 2021 California’s reservoirs are operated using outdated assumptions about climate. Advances in weather forecasting can improve how they manage big storms. We talked to Martin Ralph of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography about this approach.
blog post Smoothing the Bumps in the Road to Ecosystem Restoration By Lori Pottinger Feb 22, 2021 California’s environmental permitting system was developed to prevent bad things from happening to ecosystems, but it often slows efforts to do good things, too. We talked with a group of experts about how to make the process more efficient and effective.
blog post Accounting for a Decade of Headwater Forest Management By Henry McCann, Mingfei Xiong Feb 8, 2021 As California accelerates management of headwater forests to reduce wildfire risk, understanding past efforts is useful. Yet data on such work is lacking. PPIC did a basic accounting of the past decade of forest management, which has lessons for going forward.
