Felicia Marcus, Water in the West
Today's guest is Felicia Marcus, the Williams C. Landreth visiting fellow at Stanford University's Water in the West program.
Felicia is also an attorney, consultant, and member of the Water Policy Group. She most recently served as Chair of the California State Water Resources Control Board, where she implemented laws regarding drinking water, water quality and state's water rights, as well as heard regional board water quality appeals, settled disputes, and provided financial assistance to communities to upgrade water infrastructure. Before her appointment to the Water Board, she also served in positions in government, the non-profit and private sector. In government, Felicia served as the regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Pacific Southwest region during the Clinton Administration, where she was known for her work in bringing unlikely allies together for environmental progress and for making the agency more responsive to the communities it serves, particularly Indian Tribes, communities of color, local government and agricultural and business interests.
Water is often considered an untold climate story. From water scarcity and drought to extreme flooding and rising sea level, the impacts of our changing climate on this critical resource demand our attention. In this episode, Jason and Felicia dig deep into her background and have a great discussion about the intersection of water and climate, what the biggest risks are, how much those risks are factored in today, what some of the barriers are to properly factor in those risks, and from a solution standpoint, what we can do about it.
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Episode recorded on October 3, 2022.
In this episode, we cover:
[2:55] Felicia's background
[6:26] Why water matters generally and in the context of climate change
[15:44] The human right to water movement
[21:41] How the playbook for managing water needs to change in response to the changing climate
[29:05] The business case for improving and increasing water recycling
[36:57] The role of conservation and efficiency in urban landscapes
[40:55] How location may impact the approach to water management
[44:58] Water and corporate risks
[50:41] The regulatory environment for water
[59:19] The need for a mindset change to accelerate our progress around water
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Jason Jacobs:
Hello, everyone, this is Jason Jacobs.
Cody Simms:
And I'm Cody Simms.
Jason Jacobs:
Welcome to My Climate Journey. This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms:
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Jason Jacobs:
We appreciate you tuning in, sharing this episode, and if you feel like it, leaving us a review to help more people find out about us so they can figure out where they fit in addressing the problem of climate change.
Today's guest is Felicia Marcus. Felicia is the Williams C. Landreth visiting fellow at Stanford University's Water in the West program. She's also an attorney, consultant, and member of the Water Policy Group. She most recently served as Chair of the California State Water Resources Control Board, implementing laws regarding drinking water and water quality and state's water rights, hearing regional board water quality appeals, settling disputes, and providing financial assistance to communities to upgrade water infrastructure.
I was excited for this one because I've heard countless times as I've navigated my climate journey over the last four years that water is an undertold climate story. No one's better to really double click on that than Felicia. In this episode, we dig deep into her background and journey, what led Felicia to working on water to begin with, and then we have a great discussion about the intersection of water and climate, what the biggest risks are, how much those risks are factored in today, what some of the barriers are to properly factor in those risks, and from a solution standpoint, what we can do about it. At any rate, I really enjoy this one and I think you will as well.
Felicia, welcome to the show.
Felicia Marcus:
Thank you. Really happy to be here.
Jason Jacobs:
Happy to have you. I've got my trusty new microphone. It's made in Voyage, so hopefully I'm wowing you with my sound quality today.
Felicia Marcus:
Mm-hmm. It's a thing of beauty.
Jason Jacobs:
But anyway, really excited for this discussion. What I've heard in my travels, and we talked a little bit before we started recording, but just that water is just such an under-talked about climate story. You are a water expert, and I don't even know how to put you in a box because you've looked at waters through so many different perspectives, but I think it's important for me to understand better, and it's also just important for people that care about climate change to understand better, so really thankful to be able to ask lots of questions and learn more about it during this show.
Felicia Marcus:
Thanks.
Jason Jacobs:
Well, for starters, Felicia, maybe just give an overview of your background and how you spend your professional portfolio of time.
Felicia Marcus:
Sure. Well, my background's a little insane. I mean, it's sort of an accidental career. I started out as a public interest lawyer after being an Asian studies major and deciding that wasn't probably the right career choice. I fell into environmental work and then to law, because law was pretty critical for that. I started out as a public interest lawyer in Los Angeles and got almost immediately drawn into giant fights around sewage treatment by the City of Los Angeles and the County of Los Angeles ultimately in terms of discharging not fully treated sewage into Santa Monica Bay and the environment. My whole life revolved around sewage for a while, so I always say sewage was my entry drug. And it's absolutely fascinating. If you haven't gotten into sewage, you really should. It's just really pretty interesting. We created a group which I was the lawyer for, called Heal the Bay, which went from being six of us in a living room to being a pretty powerful force, not just in Los Angeles but beyond.
But then in a weird quirk of fate, without getting into a very long story, and after winning some pretty important battles based on a combination of, I think, very good organizing and very good people-connecting politics, but some good lawyering, we succeeded in turning the City of LA around and we're implementing a what's known as a consent decree to clean the whole thing up. To make a very long story short, in a strange moment in time, we had a very unusual deputy mayor who talked to Mayor Bradley, one of the greatest mayors LA's ever had, into actually, I'm making a long story short, putting me in charge of the whole Public Works Department, not just the wastewater program. So I had this Václav Havel kind of moment that I was leery of accepting because it seemed a bit too good to be true, but went because you got to put yourself where your mouth is when you get the chance.
And so, then I ran that Public Works Department, which a lot more issues, ended up going to EPA and the Clinton administration as the EPA Regional Administrator for the Pacific Southwest, which made sense because I had been an environmental activist and lawyer, but I'd also been a discharger who knew what it felt like to be regulated. So went and had amazing experience there. Then went back into the nonprofit world at the Trust for Public Land and the Natural Resources Defense Council altogether for about a decade. And then Governor Brown asked me to chair the State Water Resources Control Board. And that's one of those be careful what you wish for because then we went into what was then the worst drought in modern history. So I spent seven years there.
And then now I'm at Stanford working on Water in the West issues, which are all touched by climate change. We can talk about that a little bit more, focusing on urban issues but also on fish and wildlife issues and nature-based solutions. I'm sort of a practitioner brought into the academy to do my own work but also to help other academics and students bring policy reality into the work they're doing.
Jason Jacobs:
When you think about water, to a layman like me, maybe just talk a little bit about both why water matters, and I'm sure there's some obvious pieces to that, but I'm going to ask it anyways because I'm sure there are also some unobvious ones, and also why it matters in the context of climate change and what's happening at the intersection of the two.
Felicia Marcus:
Sure. Well, it goes without saying that water's essential for life. I can't remember what percentage of our bodies are water. I have to say doing this work makes you want to drink more water, although sometimes that's a chore. I don't know what it is, 90-something percent or 89% of our body is just water. So it's essential for life, but clean water is essential for public health, for sanitation. It's also essential for the economy, for growing crops, and producing goods. It's far more essential for the ecosystem than people realize. This is one of my most deeply-held issues and most painful ones, which is that in many places in the arid west in particular, we've diverted so much water out of our water courses that ecosystems are plummeting.
And even if you can't pin the tail on the donkey or on the fish, molecule for molecule, it's absolutely true. We actually do have substantial science to prove it, but it's very hard for us to actually add water back in once we've diverted it. So for the whole ecosystem that we depend on and that depends on us, we're dropping the ball. It's also important in a climate context in ways that tie into the fact that people do take water for granted. If you think about it in a historical context, never in human history have so many people been able to take water for granted and take it for granted that clean, safe, affordable water is going to come out their tap, that they're going to have enough for their yards and landscapes. Water's just always there, and a part of it is because our urban infrastructure in particular has done such a good job of bringing water across vast distances. We can talk about the difference between the east and the west because the east has issues too related to climate and to water scarcity that most people don't realize it.
And so, as a result, people take it for granted, it's not valued quite as much, and that's something that engineers are proud of, and rightly so. I mean, it's kind of this noble pride of being able to provide something for life that's so essential and to have people be able to take it for granted, which people in small rural communities and most of the world do not. They know where the water comes from, and they don't take it for granted because they're not sure that it's clean, safe, and certainly not affordable. The problem is we have to turn that around now, because now we have to ask people to invest more for a couple of reasons, and that's because whatever the massive planning and the public works and other things that we've done over the past number of decades, really the past century or so, there's been a revolution in the provision of clean, safe, and affordable water, we have to do more. We have to do more both because we recognize the human right to water and that there are many of people in our midst and particularly in small communities dependent on groundwater that don't take it for granted and don't turn the tap and get clean, safe, and affordable water, that's number one.
Number two, all those planning measures that we've used over time, both to get water to people and to protect against flooding, which is a whole nother side of the water picture, are out the window with climate change. They're out the window with climate change because of temperature rise. I mean, there are other things that happen, but just a few degrees temperature rise turns the whole system into disarray on a number of fronts. One is that system I was talking about, there's a massive system of storage and conveyance that makes modern California possible, where we store water in reservoirs and we convey it across long distances. I mean, over half the California population is hundreds of miles from where their water comes from, it comes from multiple sources, and we can talk about that more specifically in a minute. And it's a mix of sources, right? So you've got groundwater or surface water and surface water from multiple sources. And so, we're dependent on storage because we have a variable hydrology where it doesn't rain or snow every year and where it doesn't rain and snow in the places where the water's most used, and it doesn't rain and snow in the seasons when it's most used.
And so, storage really is essential, and people have huge fights over a given dam, which isn't the scale we're talking about. Here are the challenges that snowpack is fully 30% of storage in California an average year, as it provides a timing function where the water melts out slowly, replenishes those reservoirs. Reservoirs aren't just fill-it-once-and-done for the season, they're refilled by snow melt. It replenishes the streams that goes down, and it also ends up refilling groundwater basins. So you end up with the whole system thrown into disarray with just a few degrees or even one, it seems, a Fahrenheit temperature rise, where more precipitation, even the same amount of precipitation falls as rain rather than snow.
So you end up with more flooding in the winter and the spring and less of that reserve to back up your initial filling of your reservoirs and what ran down your streams into local areas and into groundwater basins. And so, that's an enormous jolt to a system and the assumptions on which the system is based. What we found in the current drought, which was a very hot drought, so it came on fast and it's the kind of drought where we're going to see more of, where we're going to have drier dries and more frequent dries, is that a lot of the precipitation didn't even make it to the ground, and when it did make it to the ground, it evaporated up out of the ground or it got soaked into the ground so quickly that the actual runoff was substantially less from the same amount of precipitation as all of the models suggested. Now, is that predictable? Yeah, but it wasn't expected. So that's really big.
Then on the other side of the coin, in the flood world, we tend to build towards what we call a 100-year protection or 200-year protection in certain cases. So we build our levees and our sea walls and things like that based on what we've seen over the past 100 years or so. We're going to end up seeing much bigger flooding. We're going to end up with sea level rise, which ends up making the flooding worse and the storm surges worse. The scale of climate change is going to make that more unpredictable and also impossible to defend against at the extremes. The conversation's been about sustainability, but we have to move more to resilience, where we not only are looking at a broader range of impacts, but where we're going to have to recover from disruption and disaster because there's just no way that we can build large enough holding basins or tanks or sea walls or anything.
I'm getting to the punchline so that I don't just start with dismay here in terms of what's coming, is that you do have a movement that recognizes, A, we need to adapt and we should come back to talking about adaptation versus mitigation or adaptation and mitigation in the climate arena, but where people see that some of the more resilient systems are the natural systems, and that as opposed to building higher walls, we need to take the walls out and let flood forces dissipate across the landscape, which has the benefit of environmental benefits but also has the benefit of then allowing the water to sink into the groundwater so it's there for us during the coming dry year. So there's a lot we can talk about in all of that parcel of things, but the bottom line is that water is the bleeding edge of climate change. It is where the impacts are felt first and where it's felt in more ratification, drier dries and more frequent dries, but also more frequent flooding. So we get hit with a double whammy, all of which revolves around temperature.
I mean, the weird bright spot in that is that the climate predictions are that at least in California, we're going to end up with those wet years too that we have to prepare for. Certain parts of the world are just going to get drier, and they're not going to get those periodic [inaudible 00:14:57] that are capturable at some scale, and those areas are going to be in a world hurt. Sorry that was a long answer, but I think about this a lot.
Jason Jacobs:
No, it's a good foundation for a substantive discussion. I want to go back to something you said earlier around the fact that more people than ever before are benefiting from or are in a privileged position to take advantage of the fact that they have clean, safe, affordable water. I might not have gotten that wording exactly right, but my question is... And you also said that we did a lot of things right to enable that. What did we do to enable that? And since I tend to ask questions in twos, what is preventing us from getting that to everybody else?
Felicia Marcus:
Well, I think we did it through a lot of investment in large public works projects and small systems. I think particularly in... well, not just in the urban areas, in the urban and rural areas. In the rural areas, a lot of those facilities were built to make agriculture bloom, which is also a miracle in some sense. Both the urban and the agricultural development has had a negative impact on the environment because a lot of those public works were built before we had modern environmental sensibilities, and that is part of the challenge of resting at least some of that, a small portion of that water back to go back into the environment.
And so, it just became an article of faith in modern development that certainly in the west we needed to do waterworks in order to create both more sustained agriculture and urban development. In the smaller rural communities dependent upon shallow wells, and this is true even in urban California and small communities, not so much because those communities didn't have the same level of resources or the same level of attention. This is true across the world, but in the last 10 years or so in California, there's been the human right to water movement that has elevated in a really important way this glaring distinction between these massive modern water works and these poor communities frequently filled with farm workers who are working on those farms that have brought in this pure clean water from the mountains, added chemicals and fertilizers, and then they go home to a shallow well that may run dry but also is contaminated with those same pesticides and fertilizers.
It's one of those, I want to say, dirty little secrets of the legacy of agriculture. Again, not a good or bad thing, just an externality of a social good of growing food but without owning its impacts on smaller communities. And so, the human right to water movement in California, following on the international movement, is led by some amazing organizers. In fact, I think the best ones I've seen since Heal the Bay and even better than we were at trying to figure out what do you want to do and how do you find your allies in government and in the private sector and agriculture, how do you figure out how to raise your issue but then allow people to join you in solving the problem?
They got the first human right to water statute in the US passed in 1982. I think they're celebrating its birthday tomorrow or next week at the State Water Board. And then what we did at the Water Board is we actually did some reports that highlighted how many people were actually dependent in whole or part on nitrogen-contaminated groundwater. Our estimates were up to a million people, which ended up being a headline that between our reports and our putting it out there whenever we could and the phenomenal activists doing their work really elevated the issue. The last 10 years have been a story of successive pieces of legislation to give the State Water Board the tools to try and solve this problem and hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, to help consolidate systems, build systems, and the right both for water and sanitation.
It's not done, but it's definitely made a tremendous amount of progress, and certainly by the end of the next decade, if not earlier, we should be able to provide water to Californians at much higher percentages if not 100%. It's a really important movement worldwide and something where California is in the lead of trying to do something even though it still has a long way to go.
Jason Jacobs:
What I'm hearing it sounds like is that there was already a water access problem where water infrastructure, for whatever reason, whether it's economics or funding, but it was generally getting built where there were more people to serve, which meant that there's a long tail of people that live in smaller communities all over the place who weren't getting the same access. It sounds like now that's getting exacerbated by climate change because the dry is getting drier, the wet is getting wetter, it's leading to droughts, it's leading to flooding, it's leading to sea level rise. Did I get that right? Did I miss any...
Felicia Marcus:
No, that's exactly right. The threats are to everyone, in the urban as well as the rural community, but the issues in the rural communities are more extreme because you have shallow wells running dry and you have shallow wells that are contaminated and undrinkable. So it's a double whammy for those communities. Also, the thing is in a drought, big farms turn their pumps on higher or put in new wells, and that draws down the shallow wells that small rural communities rely on even more. So they end up running out of water, let alone just having terrible water. It takes a lot to connect folks up to a more modern system that can actually treat water to the level that we need to with this witches brew of chemicals, some of which are naturally occurring as well from arsenic and other things. It's basically a matter, I think, of critical importance and actually one that illustrates who we are as a people. If we can make good on the human right to water, that is a big step forward for civilization. If we can't, shame on us.
Jason Jacobs:
When you think about making right on it, how much of the playbook is just what we've already been doing since you said we've done so much good and just doing more of it versus the playbook itself actually needing to change as you start factoring in what's happening with climate change?
Felicia Marcus:
That's such a great question. I think the whole playbook has to change, because I think right now the way we manage water is very inefficient and very siloed. There's a great movement happening to deal with that that I'm very excited about, particularly in LA, but even in upper watersheds and other places in an impressive way, which is, we've seen this over the past 100 or so years specialization where we've dealt with flood control in one set of agencies, we've dealt with drinking water and another set of agencies, we've dealt with waste water treatment in another set of agencies with their professions and their language and their high priests and priestess so to speak. And it's incredibly inefficient.
For example, in Los Angeles where a tremendous percentage of the water is imported, Southern California, Northern California or the Bay Area, both equally dependent on imported water from a long way away. I mean, the Bay Area may be a little bit more actually than Southern California, but with more senior water rights, so a little less interruptable but nonetheless vulnerable. But you've got all this water coming in that takes incredible amount of energy to get here. Then we use it fairly profligately by putting green carpets in front of our houses known as lawns that we keep bright green in the middle of the summer, let alone the middle of a drought. We use it once in our homes and then flush it away where it's been treated in wastewater plants and historically just gotten out to sea. So at the same time, we're spending all this time bringing in money and energy, bringing this water in and treating it to a very high standard, we then use it pretty recklessly and unnecessarily to keep our lawns alive. We need our trees, and we need landscaping, we don't need green carpets everywhere. We need it for playing fields and we need it... a little kid you want to play ball with. Still doesn't have to be bright green in the middle of the summer.
And then we use it once and we spend a lot to treat it, and we send it out. The real answer and the movement that I'm excited about and where I've been spending my time my whole career but in particular since the Water Board, is on a multi-benefit approach to how you use each drop of water a little more mindfully. And so, there's been a whole movement. I would give credit for it in LA over the decades to Andy Lipkis at TreePeople and Dorothy Green of Heal the Bay and a bunch of other groups for sparking what is a whole movement of many wonderful people to try and figure out how to change that.
So what you have in LA large, not just the City of LA, is a massive effort to at least recycle that water once it gets here. LA's goal is 100% recycling by 2035, and they've embarked on what will be the largest recycling project in the world. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves over half the population of California, is also doing a large project, not quite as big, but still bigger than the largest one currently, with the LA County Sanitation Department where they're going to be finally recycling water at these large coastal plants. They've been doing it inland for quite a long time. Orange County, currently the largest in the world at 130 million gallons a day as compared to the 150 and 214 of the other two projects, is going to finish recycling 100% of Orange County's wastewater this year. So you've got that piece of it.
The other piece which is going to take, I think, longer but is even more exciting in some ways is this massive movement to do multi-benefit urban greening projects where you get flood control, urban greening, water supply by letting water slow the flow over these green spaces and in holding basins to get into the groundwater basins so you can use it later. The stuff that flows across and then flows out to the bay gets cleaned by what we scientifically refer to as the magic touch of nature, where somehow rolling through greenery and soil actually does clean those urban hydrocarbons and other things that run off streets before it runs into the bay and the harbor. So you actually get a [inaudible 00:26:03] for doing it, but it's massive challenge. But the voters in LA County voted to raise 300 million a year to be doing these projects. So you'll see the face of LA County transform over the next decade.
And so, that's just the urban version of it. You see it up in the upper watersheds. Just finished a paper on the synergy between state climate policies and nature-based solutions that yield multiple benefits, including for water supply and water quality across the whole Colorado basin. There's amazing work also happening in doing ecological forest restoration in the upper watershed, which will prevent the massive wildfires that are outsized because we haven't managed our forest and outsized because of the additional temperature from climate change, and they are now producing more carbon emissions than fossil fuels.
Now, that doesn't mean to do that instead of stopping fossil fuels, it means we've got to put our pedal to the metal on both of those at the same time. With the nature-based solutions, you get this added benefit for water quality and water supply, especially if you add meadow restoration. There's an exciting possibility for us to actually work with nature rather than trying to be so single-issue siloed, but there is an enormous human challenge to doing that.
Jason Jacobs:
We're going to take a short break so our partner, Yin, can talk about the MCJ Membership option.
Yin:
Hey, folks, Yin here, our partner at MCJ Collective. Want to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ Membership community, which was borne out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019 and have since then grown to 2,000 members globally. Each week we're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and perspectives. And while those perspectives are different, what we all share in common is a deep curiosity to learn and bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change. Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community. A number of founding teams I've met. Nonprofits have been established. a bunch of hiring has been done. Many early stage investments have been made as well as ongoing events and programming like monthly Women in Climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, Climate Book Club, art workshops, and more.
So whether you've been in climate for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and then click on the members tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
Jason Jacobs:
Back to the show. And so, the two things that I heard you say are impactful levers for shoring up our infrastructure, if you will, one is recycling more, so water reuse, and the other is urban greening. For each of those, what is the business case? I get the social case, but what is the business case for each of those, and also, what are the biggest barriers holding it back? Maybe we can take them each individually.
Felicia Marcus:
That's great. Remind me of the second question if I forget. I mean, no, I think there is a business case to be made, but one of the things we need to do is do better quantification to make that case. That's a big part of my paper in the upper watershed in particular. In LA [inaudible 00:29:18], that's actually where Andy Lipkis started. I mean, he found somebody from Silicon Valley, this is couple decades ago, who created a model where he looked at how much were we spending to bring all this water in, how much were we spending to treat it for drinking water, how much were we spending to treat it for waste water? And looking at that total picture, and then presented it to the County of LA, the folks who tend to raise the walls of the LA River and other contributing water bodies to try and get water out because the key thing is to avoid flooding.
They were so impressed with it that they essentially gave him what became around $100 million dollars a budget to retrofit homes. There's a whole neighborhood, and there are other places too, a whole neighborhood called Elmer Avenue where he did things like retrofit a house with cisterns that would take water from the gutters, French drains to allow water not to be running off the pavement into the street. Took out the sidewalks, created the swales and the like. Even the fire department came and would do a hose on the top of the house and they could measure how much less actually ended up going out and running into the streets from a stormwater pollution standpoint.
It led to the city of LA doing a half a billion dollar measure measured in the last decade and ultimately underpinned this current $300 million a year effort. He started with the dollars and cents of that, but it requires people to think collectively of the total good. That same is true in recycling projects, where if you just look at it at its cost per acre foot, if, for example, you're comparing your cost of water recycling to the current cost of imported water or even with a escalator in it, it looks pretty expensive. But if you look at it economically in terms of the cost of disruption if that water's just not there either because of climate change, necessary environmental regulations or earthquakes, then the cost is astronomical. So you have to look at the business case in terms of how much is that water worth if it's not there as opposed to dollar per acre foot.
And so, people are starting to look at that and looking at the multiple benefits that you can achieve, which we don't have great calculators for. It's one of the things we need to do a lot more work on because so many groups have specialized so much. The Pacific Institute, a gentleman named Gregg Brill and his team, Cora Kammeyer and others, are working on a multi-benefit calculator for watershed protection that looks at water and climate benefits together in addition to some other benefits. They're doing it internationally in concert with a lot of the international corporations who are pushing for net zero or net water positive indicators to help them figure out both where to invest, but also how to make sure the investments that they're making in upper watersheds as part of their branding business model, maybe good Samaritan work in some cases, actually adds up as opposed to just being greenwashing.
So in the international arena, there's a movement to do some of this. At the local level, we have to do a lot more of it. The barriers, the barriers to that are multiple. One is financial because this can be very expensive investments, but again, priceless if you take the long view. But you've got to then cobble together funding from very disparate sources. And the funding at whether it's the state or the local or the national level tends to be siloed. It's siloed in the appropriations committees, it's siloed in the agencies, et cetera. What we need to do is really to have a more holistic budgeting process and come up with some indicators that give public policy makers a bit of comfort in making these decisions.
But even before you get there, you have to get over what Gillian Tett in a book called The Silo Effect calls the silo effect, where folks are just looking at a problem through the narrow prism of their particular responsibilities. And that's a human thing to want to do because it's easier, it's hard enough to do whatever it is you have to do, but in order to really meet the climate challenge and to deal with all of the disruption that it's going to cause, and we've only touched on even a fraction of it in the water sphere, we've got to act very differently, and we've got to reward collaboration. That's increasingly starting to happen in some places. It takes a big effort, it's a lot of human effort of translation and handholding, and that's the kind of thing that folks don't tend to invest in as much as the technological advances. But we need them too for sensing and measurement and monitoring and all of that and treatment. But we need to invest a lot more in what I call the challenge of egosystem management, not ecosystem management, which is recognizing the people in a space, community people, government people at different levels, people in the private sector, people in agriculture, where we just talk past each other and don't really put the time in to really understand people's true hopes and dreams but also their challenges and their fears.
In the places where you can humanize that and you can see this greater good, you see really big things happening across the country. In a project that I did for EPA with this amazing team of folks on water recycling and the challenge of doing multi-agency agreements, which is what you need in order to do these projects, a couple of things stood out along what you were saying, both the economics and the mindset. One is that you have to grow the problem, and you've got to look for an economy of scope. If you look bigger rather than more narrowly, you can actually see where there are these societal but also agency-wide potential benefits, but it's complicated and a little scary.
The other thing is you have to think about the rate payers who are paying for it, not just as the ones on your bill, but the ones in your community as a whole. And that's what one of my colleagues referred to it as different pockets, same pants. The places where we've seen really important breakthroughs are where you had leaders who could see the value to the community as a whole. And in those cases, they're saving billions of dollars by doing things in a multi-agency, multi-stakeholder way, in Virginia, in Philadelphia, in DC, and in communities all over the country.
Jason Jacobs:
If you look at, and I'm going to oversimplify here, but you look at the supply and the sources of water and you look at the demand, the uses of water, and then you look at, say, adaptation or resilience or ability to make sure that from a system standpoint we can keep things up and running as the water landscape continues to change. For every dollar that's going towards water improvement today, how much of it is allocated in each of those buckets? And then directionally, how much should it be allocated in each of those buckets as you look forward?
Felicia Marcus:
Gosh, that's a good question. I really don't know. I think whatever we're allocating, it's definitely not enough. But the one piece that we didn't talk about as much as we should is the role of conservation and efficiency in the urban landscape, because that is the cheapest, smartest, fastest way to extend our water resources, with lawns and leaks being the prime target. That's something where the money spent is in some cases hardware, like the vast array of smart meters and companies that have come to the fore both in energy and in water like Flume. I mean, there's a whole bunch of them. With the City of LA is giving out, I think, heavy discounts on the Flume device, so just announced last week, that if you get people to use less water, then you don't have to... Recycling costs money and energy too. You're going to be extending your water resource. You've got recycling and capturing storm water, but conservation first and foremost.
That means transitioning out of lawn, which are a luxury, not essential to modern living in most places. It requires a lot of public education, which is something people tend to think of as fluffy, but is absolutely essential. We've shown that with smart public engagement, the public will respond. During the last drought, we had mandatory conservation rules, and the public saved 24% in relatively short order. Part of it was mandatory, but part of it was just a lot of communication. The public, I have a lot of faith in, will rise to the occasion, just as they did during the heat wave we had a few weeks ago when we all got a text message that the grid was at risk and we needed to use less energy. The public saved like 25% within an hour.
So, if we figure out how to communicate directly with the public better, we can certainly conserve a lot. It's important to also help them because it's expensive to take out your lawn and replant something else, native plants. And certainly, we need more trees to deal with the heat of climate change. But also leaks. I mean, we've got 10, 20 and 30% leaks in a lot of urban communities where there are now new sensors and technologies for being able to spot where the leaks are, sort of listening above ground to the pipes below where you can fix where the leaks are without having to replace hundreds or thousands of miles of pipes on a schedule. That can save a lot of water in addition to these Flume and other... I don't mean to plug Flume, there are other devices, that's just the name that's coming to mind, but it's good, where people can figure out in their homes themselves where they might have a leak in their house or indoors or outdoors and then deal with it. That's also a lot of water. And that's just scratching the surface of efficiency.
I think in agricultural regions, we also can use recycling, and where there's a wastewater facility nearby, that's happening a lot in the central valley. We can also be more efficient with our irrigation, but we also need to be more mindful of recharge during the wet time. So oddly in agricultural reasons, we're going to need to employ both flood and drip in the same fields for different purposes, to use less water. Laser leveling, you can get efficient with flood, but not everybody has the equipment to do laser leveling. And then we have the facilities to do targeted strategic managed aquifer recharge in the wet time. So everything has to become more precision and more tightened up. But right now we're particularly propagate with water, so there's a lot of low hanging fruit.
Jason Jacobs:
I mean, the most efficient way to bring about change is across many regions or even many countries. But at the same time, the landscape as it relates to natural resources and water in particular, I would imagine, is so different from place to place. I mean, are there any elements that are one-size-fits-all or is it literally just a customer approach is needed for each and every region around the globe?
Felicia Marcus:
Well, that's a good question. It's a both and kind of an answer in the sense that every place can become more efficient and you can invest to become more efficient, more precise, you can use technology to predict Atmospheric river so you can hold more water and reservoirs and let it go when the storm is coming as opposed to just letting it go every January or every June depending on what hemisphere you're in to create flood space, which is what we had done historically. So there's a need for more precision management almost everywhere.
I think in arid regions there's obviously more of an edge on figuring out how to be efficient all the time as opposed to some of the time. And in other areas that are wetter and hurricane, there's obviously a reason to focus more on flood control. But many places are going to have both of them. I do think that thinking more consciously about how to enable more nature-based approaches is going to be important in more places. In more rural communities, they haven't forgotten those things. In some ways, we've gotten stupid somehow in the last 100, 150 years and forgotten what everybody else has known through history about the way water plays across the land in flood and drought time. So recovering some of that, not just traditional ecological knowledge, but also the knowledge that everybody had and everybody still has in more rural communities, I think is pretty important.
I do think there are areas in particular where we're going to have to constrain ourselves. It's not like it's all technology based. In many parts of the west, we've created another miracle of modern food and fiber, but we've done it by outstripping what nature can provide. even with the droughts to come, which are going to be tougher, we've both withdrawn too much water from our surface waters and we've robbed our groundwaters of both recharge and we've over pumped it to the tune of over two million acre feet a year to produce this incredible bounty of fruits, vegetables, nuts, food, and fiber that gives the nation 90% of its salad in the winter and 25% of all of its agricultural goods during the rest of the year.
We don't have to eliminate it, but it's going to have to shrink a little bit to live more within the means of what nature provides. That's happening big time, particularly in the Central Valley with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in California, conversations are happening throughout the southwest with the incredible crisis and mega drought on the Colorado River. So you'll see a bit of a shrinkage of agriculture to live within its means. It now uses between 70 and 80% of the water we withdraw from the environment. Some prefer to say 40%, leave 50% in the environment, but a lot of that is just flood waters that could never have been captured. Even that modest constraint requires a lot of thought to help people transition into other economic uses and to protect those vulnerable communities who are dependent on those farm jobs. So we've got a big job in front of us.
Jason Jacobs:
When you look at the capital markets more generally, how much is water risk properly factored in? And to the extent that it's not, where are some of the biggest areas of exposure?
Felicia Marcus:
That definitely varies around the country. Areas in the east, for example, are vulnerable or water shortage as well, because with sea level rise and a combination of that and over pumping, you can have seawater intrusion into your groundwater basins. And anywhere you over pump a groundwater basin, you can have land subside, and so big issues. Although, many of, for example, their recycling and stormwater programs are driven by nutrient pollution into estuaries like the Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere. But we have those issues everywhere.
I think we're starting to see more consideration of the risk, and we're starting to see people move into water markets, although I'll put a caveat on that that that's a term that's used loosely to mean a bunch of different things in different places. I think the folks have moved in to try and buy farmland for the water rights to either sell to farmers, because you can transfer water, or sell it to urban communities. That's very controversial particularly in places like Colorado and Arizona at the moment. It doesn't mean it won't happen, but it's at the moment.
I think in the corporate world you have a much stronger... excuse me... sense of corporate risk than I've seen in the past decade, and that's why you're seeing on the part of some corporations a push for net zero water impact or net positive water impact. Now, a lot of those are industries where they have some brand vulnerability that's true in tech and it's true in the beverage and food industry where you're seeing, for example, in the beverage and some of the other tech industry like Google has made a pledge to be 120% net water positive where they're going to actually make the watersheds they're in 20% better than they would be if they weren't there. They're pledging to do it through a combination not just of efficiency and recycling in their own facilities, but investing in human right to water and watershed protection and wetlands creation and other benefits in the community to really be a good member of those watershed.
Some of the other tech firms are doing something similar. The beverage industry have made various pledges of being net water positive or net zero, some of them talking just about the water in their finished product, which I don't think is enough, others talking about the entire water use of their production system. They're also thinking about where do they place their facilities as opposed to putting your facility in a place that's water short, putting it in places that are more water secure, but not abandoning places in, for example, the arid west, but thinking more carefully about how they can be, again, a steward of that particular watershed. Because large corporations can come in, and they have enough money to buy water and buy water rights, but you're not going to be a popular member of your community if you just stand on your water rights while the rest of your community is seeing their wells go dry or their facilities shuttered.
And so, you have a much more sophisticated effort happening in some industries, and that's actually helping push the quantification and the nature-based solutions movement in an important way. It really varies on where you are, but it's really important for the private sector to recognize that places are different. If they're a member of those communities, they need to think about their own risk, but they also need to think about being a member of that community. Water agencies in many places are not enough yet, but hopefully more and more all the time are starting to do that. I profiled Yuba Water in particular, and really investing in being a steward of the watershed along with the Native American tribe, community groups, State Air Resources Board, Resources Agency, private sector investors like Blue Forest Conservation who are figuring out with agreements with the Forest Service how to treat four or more times as much acreage as the agency could do themselves.
So there's a lot of creativity happening in pockets, and it's got to happen in more places. I mean, I'm actually a believer in Malcolm Gladwell's popularization of the tipping point, I think somebody else came up with the term, but where you encourage the early adopters to succeed, and then those examples lead to other people picking it up rather than trying to do a top down. But I think that's the way we're going to be more successful, by replicating the successful movements and also by popularizing and publicizing those places that are actually doing a good job so they get the consumer and the employee morale benefits of being good watershed stewards.
Jason Jacobs:
I mean, to look at an adjacent area for a moment of carbon, there are people that say that essentially carbon is like pollution and it's an externality, and because it's not priced in anywhere, there's just permission to dump it into the landfill that is our atmosphere indefinitely no matter what consequences you are causing. There's some early companies that are starting to step out, like you were saying, the early adopters, and taking leadership positions on the voluntary side, whether it be the Stripes or the Microsofts or the Googles and others, but there are critics that say, "Yeah, but voluntary will only take us so far. In order to bring about widespread change, it needs to be mandated." How do you think about that as it relates to water? Does the analogy hold or is it a separate beast, and if so, how?
Felicia Marcus:
Well, it's interesting, there's similarities and differences in the sense I think our regulatory apparatus for water is much more disjointed than our regulatory apparatus for air or energy. And so, it's very fragmented, and so it becomes very hard to figure out how to regulate it. Different countries have seen it differently. Different states see it differently. It's somewhat chaotic, I think, in California where I think 17% of our utilities are investor-owned and regulated by the Public Utility Commission on a vast array of measures. The rest of them are not generally, and I have the scars from the Mandatory Conservation regulations to prove it. We're moving towards a slightly more regulatory approach, both in the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which creates new water agencies but at a local level and with state oversight, which is a longer conversation and some efficiency long-term legislation that we got past during the last drought, which will at least put a basic target for large urban water agencies that calculates a reasonable amount indoors per capita and a reasonable amount for an outdoor landscape in the climate they're in.
And it's aggregated, so they can figure out how to make their target through recycling, getting rid of lawns, whatever it is they decide, to meet the target is there. I think that helps a lot because its point was to integrate climate into that water conversation because desal and recycling take a lot of energy. And so, efficiency is better from a climate standpoint as well as a long-term economic standpoint. So it's, again, a baby step in the right direction.
I do think there's a both and there. Generally, I think we need rules against water waste in some big ways. I also think incentives can be fairly powerful if we design them correctly. And so, it's hard to know. I tend to be both and on that regulatory, voluntary. Because I think sometimes if you get the voluntary stuff to work, you show it's possible, and it becomes much easier then to regulate the laggards. It's like you're changing what the societal floor is. I'll give you one example in the water arena where in theory California has some very progressive tools. I'm doing a paper on this now with a group of folks. We have a very strong public trust doctrine, which means the public owns the water. It's used for navigation and transportation, but also for protecting the environment in the more modern era.
We also have an actual provision in the California constitution against waste and unreasonable use of water, where no matter how senior your water rights are, and we haven't talked about water rights, but that's for another day, you don't have the right to waste it. But it's not as if the State Board, for example, can wave a magic wand and Felicia can say, "I think that's unreasonable, so you can't do that anymore." But as the water situation gets tighter, it's a tool that definitely can be used. We did use it in the drought in a number of ways to underpin our mandatory conservation rules, our permanent conservation rules... well, not permanent yet, but the prohibitions on certain practices like using potable water in ornamental fountain or hosing down your driveway or the sidewalk, certain things that are really quite wasteful. But we also used it to protect fish and wildlife during the drought, that it was unreasonable for all the senior water rights holders to pull so much water out of the stream that the fish didn't even have belly bumping flows to get to their refugia.
That can become more broad over time. As the climate situation and the drought situation gets much worse, there will be practices that the state board in theory has the ability to say, "Well, that's unreasonable. You can't do that." But you can't waive magic wand. It's a long process that requires a lot of hearings, and evidentiary [inaudible 00:54:04] has an effect on people's water rights. So I'm saying there's a tool there, but it's not a very efficient or effective one. But I think if we go into a tenure drought, all bets are off, and you'll start seeing very serious conversations about allocating water, about our water rights system, about a better way to make sure that we provide for a healthy agriculture ecosystem and urban communities, which is the case. Water is more heavily regulated in the other states in the country than in California. We're probably top of the charts for water quality. We're not top of the charts for water supply.
Jason Jacobs:
When you hear people beating the drum about the forced migration that's coming, the mortgages that won't be obtainable for coastal homes, and things like that, is that type of rhetoric overblown or is that real? How widespread do you think that it will be?
Felicia Marcus:
I think it's a huge deal. I mean, it depends on your timeframe, right? So it depends if you're talking tomorrow or you're talking 10 years. We used to say it was 20, 30, 50 years in the future, now it's more like sometimes today and more likely in the next decade or two. So all of the timeframes that we were hoping for were wrong. I mean, the impacts that we're seeing on sea level rise, storms, and droughts were all predicted by the scientists in the IPCC, the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change. It's just this was at a higher end, so the numbers that we've heard in the media tend to be that middle range. But the things we're seeing were always in the range, they just weren't in that middle range we were worried about.
Everything seems to be happening faster and having a catalytic and synergistic effect with each other. I think it's not overblown. I mean, we're already starting to see it. I mean, the fact of the glaciers in the Himalayas crashing, the flooding we saw in Pakistan just a few weeks ago, the heat domes that we were seeing in Seattle and Vancouver and certainly India and other places are all things that were predicted. And now instead of talking about if the Greenland ice shelves and the Antarctic ice shelves are going to fall in our lifetime, I don't think anybody's taking bets that we're not going to see a lot worse in the next 10 to 15 years. So a lot of Kim Stanley Robinson's sci-fi books centered around climate change, and there are quite a few of them, aren't really sci-fi anymore, they're near-term predictions. It's quite frightening.
We really do need to prepare for it. And again, that's why more nature-based solutions. It will cost us a lot less to start investing now in these things, especially the ones that give us multiple benefits anyway, than to wait until it hits us, claim it was an unforeseen natural disaster, and waste incredible amounts of money on big desal plants that we didn't necessarily need or on rescuing people from the coast. The folks that are talking about things like managed retreat, like the California Coastal Commission, and the discussions that are happening this week around Florida, which are the same conversations we've had after every flood in the hurricane with the barrier islands, I mean, no time like the present. And that's in an urban context. Across the world, you're going to see massive migrations of people because you can't live without water.
So you just have to look whether to the Pueblo Peoples in the southwest and their moves. Look at the Dust Bowl even in our parents or my parents, your grandparents generation to know that you can have mass migrations even in the US. So it's going to happen. Crops are going to move. Flora and fauna are going to move. So we need to be thinking about it rather than having our head in the sand. I mean, one very exciting thing happening in the sea level rise where you can have less managed retreat than you would otherwise is in San Francisco Bay. I mean, fully two-thirds of the economic damage of the entire California coast from sea level rise will be in San Francisco Bay. Which if you look at the map, is not entirely surprising because it's this large estuary or large bay that's heavily urbanized. But there the voters passed a measure that's going to provide half a billion dollars. They created an oversight restoration committee to use horizontal wetlands, terrorist wetlands rather than sea walls to deal with sea level rise, to buffer the force of the sea level rise and dissipate it across a broad area rather than creating a war of sea walls while also getting urban greening and protecting communities.
So there's some exciting things happening in California. I think California will be the epicenter of urban adaptation for sea level rise and elsewhere, although there's some amazing stuff also happening in New York City and other parts of the East Coast.
Jason Jacobs:
Felicia, if you could change one thing outside of the scope of your control that would most accelerate our progress around water, what would you change and how would you change it?
Felicia Marcus:
It would be a mindset change and an attitude change, be one of these wake up people kind of things, where in California, water in particular, there is this tendency, and I've talked about this for decades, where folks tend to repeat their talking points louder and slower past each other across the decades. And without leadership, that's allowed to happen. We've had moments in time when folks have breached the ag urban environmental divides, and right now it's particularly fraught. But I would get people to take that bigger look, that economy of scope, that sense that we really are all in this together and actually talk about some of the solutions where we can actually save ourselves. Because people get caught up, I think, in these small pitch battles to hold onto what they think they have when in fact there's this freight train of pain coming at us all with climate change in the form of worse droughts and worse floods.
And by looking bigger picture at that whole watershed, we actually can do an awful lot of good. My heart is gladdened by people who have managed to work across those divides. One of my colleagues who was in my fellowship ahead of me is leading a group in the San Joaquin Valley to try and do that, including drinking water for underserved communities, which is a great breakthrough. But we're not doing enough fast enough to avoid some of the pain that could be avoided if we did. So if I could wave magic wand, it would be a mindset magic wand. Get over yourself.
Jason Jacobs:
Is there anything I didn't ask that I should have or any additional parting words?
Felicia Marcus:
The other thing I would add that doesn't get talked about enough, and I didn't talk about it as much as I should, is the absolute devastation to the ecosystem that we have wreaked through what on the one hand is progress in agricultural and urban development done without the mindfulness about what the ecosystem we really depend on and we descend from and all of that does for us. We've decimated the commercial fishing industry. We may be the people who lead to famine going extinct. We've led to total disruption of the lifestyles and life ways of indigenous people who actually have always known how to manage the land and watch in dismay as western society or whatever you want, colonial society, settler society has come in and wreaked havoc, as it's also produced goods and services.
It wouldn't take that much in the scheme of the total amount of water to make that right, and yet we have a hard time doing it, and we don't talk about it often enough. That's something that I think we have this historical opportunity to restore and grow our humanity through protecting the ecosystem in a way that is totally within our means but somehow seems to exceed our grasp.
Jason Jacobs:
And for anyone listening who is inspired by what you've had to say and wants to learn more, is there someplace you could point them or a book to read or a talk that they should listen to or someplace that they should go to learn more about this important topic?
Felicia Marcus:
Oh, there are so many places, it's hard to know exactly. There's a lot of work on the Public Policy Institute of California's website, their water website. There are things on the State Water Board and the Department of Water Resources website. There are some really good documentaries on the web, particularly about the Colorado River, many of them with a Bram Les Garden. Brad Udall is a very good resource for the impact on climate on water. He's famously quoted as saying climate change is water change. He's very, very thoughtful. Peter Glick does a lot of really good work at the intersection of climate and water, as does the Pacific Institute in general. They can always contact me, it's easy enough, at felicia.marcus@stanford.edu, and I'll point them in a direction. I'm probably missing something incredibly obvious. Cadillac Desert is a must read for those in the west.
Jason Jacobs:
Well, thank you, Felicia. This was such a great long-form discussion. I know we didn't cover everything, but it's a good base to build from, and I know I'm going to continue to dig in this area and hopefully our listeners were inspired to do so as well. So thank you for your important work.
Felicia Marcus:
Well, thanks a lot. I mean, it's important to know we've got a huge challenge, but there are a lot of people doing some pretty exciting things that we just need to grow.
Jason Jacobs:
Thanks again for joining us on My Climate Journey podcast.
Cody Simms:
At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem-solving capacity. To do this, we focus on three main pillars: content like this podcast and our weekly newsletter, capital to fund companies that are working to address climate change, and our member community, to bring people together as Yin described earlier.
Jason Jacobs:
If you'd like to learn more about NCJ Collective, visit us at www.mcjcollective.com. And if you have guest suggestions, feel free to let us know on Twitter, @mcjpod.
Cody Simms:
Thanks and see you next episode.
