Water Resources

Rising sea levels, as well as droughts and earthquakes, threaten the levees protecting the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta, which supplies 25 million Californians with fresh water. But the state’s solution isn’t to build higher but lower—150 ft below the earth.

Here are 20 ideas that could fix L.A. ... 12. Exhume our creeks.

“Keep navigable waters clean.” It sounds straightforward, but in practice it’s anything but. For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency has struggled with that task, after the Clean Water Act in 1972 gave them the authority to regulate “navigable waters.” But “navigable” doesn’t cover small streams and wetlands, and water in those areas has a habit of flowing downhill into other, larger bodies of water. Whether the EPA could regulate all that water before it reached someplace navigable was never clear.

From sessions on climate action and solid waste to ocean acidification and green infrastructure, the 2017 Maine Sustainability & Water Conference on Thursday, March 30 at the Augusta Civic Center will feature an expanded agenda on urgent topics affecting Maine, New England, the country, and the globe.

Environmental regulations save our country money, provide jobs, and ensure the health of all animals, plants and the humans who see clean air, water and soil as an American right. The EPA needs a leader who will defend that right, write Dianne Kopec and Fellow Aram Calhoun.

The 2016 White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and State of California Water Data Challenge announced FlowWest’s Sustainable Floodplain Habitat Finder application as the winner of the data challenge. The data challenge was a first of its kind collaboration between the White House CEQ and three California state agencies; Natural Resources Agency, Environmental Protection Agency, and the Government Operations Agency.

The passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) in 2014 has launched an unprecedented, locally driven process to form hundreds of new public agencies that will play a critical role in managing the state’s groundwater resources for decades to come. Under this landmark legislation, new Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) must be formed in high- and medium-priority groundwater basins before June 30, 2017 in order to avoid state intervention.

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