California’s Megadrought: A Call for Sustainable Solutions
The megadrought in California seems never-ending, mirroring the Mojave Desert in its severity. With extreme heat and escalating wildfires, the state is facing some of the most severe impacts of climate change. While California leads in clean energy policies to address these impacts, water management remains a real issue—for everyone in the country.
The United States relies on California as its main agricultural producer. However, agro-industries have worsened pesticide contamination while depleting the state’s water supply. Agriculture accounts for about 80% of California’s water usage, which is unsustainable.
Nevertheless, there are solutions that involve strategic land use planning and reuse to address California’s social, ecological, and water challenges, especially for the most disadvantaged communities.
Angel S. Fernández-Bou, a bilingual senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, has dedicated part of his career to studying the issues facing California’s land, including agriculture, farmworkers, and communities. He has devised several solutions that can protect people and help them thrive. These solutions start, he says, with listening to and respecting local and indigenous knowledge. Angel and UCS analyst Erin Woolley recently published a guide called “Nature-Based Solutions to Build Resilience in California Agricultural Regions,” detailing these plans and sharing case studies where communities are already thriving by implementing them.
PauC: What concerns you most about California’s environmental future?
Angel S. Fernández-Bou: My greatest concern is the intersection of multiple crises: groundwater depletion, worsening air quality, and intensifying climate extremes, especially how they affect vulnerable communities, farmers, and the environment.
The San Joaquin Valley has the country’s worst air quality, and we are depleting groundwater reserves faster than they can be replenished.
If we do not act now, we may lose the opportunity to transform California into a global model of agricultural sustainability and socio-environmental justice.
PauC: What is your new guide about?
Angel S. Fernández-Bou: This guide presents a variety of nature-based solutions with multiple benefits to address socio-environmental and water challenges in California. It shows how we can work with nature—and not against it—to create more resilient agricultural systems, protect vulnerable rural communities, ensure water security, and achieve social, environmental, and economic sustainability for the future. Additionally, nature-based infrastructure is often more cost-effective and resilient than so-called “gray infrastructure,” i.e., concrete infrastructure.
The central focus of nature-based infrastructure is to combine strategic land reuse with other multi-benefit projects that can include aquifer recharge, wildlife corridors, solar energy, and buffer zones around disadvantaged communities. These projects reduce unsustainable water use, improve air quality, create higher-paying jobs, and generate new economic opportunities, all while protecting the health of rural communities.
This guide is based on our recent publication “Farmland Reuse as a Tool for Water Sustainability and a Just Land Transition in California: Review and Best Practices,” where we present a framework informed by those working on this and affected groups—communities, farmers, farmworkers, the environment, the economy—to guide best practices in land transition implementation.
PauC: How do you envision your recommendations being implemented in different geographical areas of California?
Angel S. Fernández-Bou: Implementation must adapt to specific local challenges using different types of nature-based solutions:
For example, floodplain restoration projects can be implemented in areas experiencing flooding, ecosystem imbalance, lack of parks and recreation, or upstream of communities needing natural flood protection. Places like Stockton, California, can benefit from flood protection thanks to the restored floodplain of Dos Rios, California’s newest state park. Floodplain restoration reconnects rivers to their historic floodplains, allowing natural river processes to safely accommodate floods while infiltrating water to replenish aquifers and maintain more consistent river flows over extended periods.
Another solution is rainwater catchment basins, which can be turned into parks with multiple benefits that collect rainwater after intense rains in the wet season while providing recreation in the dry season as green spaces. Places like Fairmead, where I assisted with a multi-benefit rainwater catchment basin project, can benefit from this type of project.
We also have multi-benefit aquifer recharge projects, which replenish overexploited aquifers to increase groundwater levels and achieve water security, ideal for regions facing groundwater depletion, especially if they have clean sandy soils and are near rivers or canals. These projects balance water pumping and replenishment while achieving other benefits, such as flood control, creation of green spaces and recreation, improved drinking water quality, ecosystem restoration, and support for other activities like clean energy generation in solar farms or birdwatching tourism. Places like Teviston in Tulare County, which have excellent recharge potential due to their soil quality and have experienced well failures, are perfect candidates.
Wildlife corridors and habitat restoration can connect fragmented ecosystems, enhance biodiversity, provide natural pest control for agriculture, and create buffer zones around disadvantaged communities exposed to pesticide drift. I love going to the Merced National Wildlife Refuge near where I live, and there is currently an effort to create wildlife corridors to connect it with the Sierra Nevada foothills near Yosemite.
Agrivoltaic systems—which combine solar energy production and agriculture (i.e., crops or livestock) simultaneously on the same land—work well in areas with high solar potential, where farmers need income diversification, or where land reuse from agriculture is necessary due to water limitations. These allow for continuous agricultural production while generating clean energy. People can learn more from our fact sheet on agrivoltaics and solar farms.
The agricultural transition to agroecological practices can be implemented where soil health is degraded, the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides is excessive, or communities are experiencing health impacts from conventional agriculture—helping to create better-paid and safer agricultural jobs. Some examples of agroecological practices include no-till farming, pesticide-free farming, cover crops, mulching, sustainable livestock integration, and composting, all while respecting field workers and the environment. Our friends in Allensworth (Tulare County) are implementing this vision.
These and other solutions can address specific local challenges while creating multiple benefits for communities, agriculture, and the environment.
PauC: How can people access resources to implement your guide?
Angel S. Fernández-Bou: There are several sources of funding for projects. My colleague and co-author Erin Woolley is our in-house expert.
There are some federal funds available. The Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act provide historic opportunities for climate and environmental justice projects. There are also state programs in California like the Farmland Reuse Program, funds from the Strategic Growth Council, and other resources for disadvantaged communities. Lastly, there are public-private partnerships through which businesses can invest in renewable energy and clean industry projects that benefit local communities.
PauC: What obstacles could the implementation of these solutions in California face?
Angel S. Fernández-Bou: My main concern for implementation is the inertia of the status quo (the “business as usual” in English). We have the solutions, we have examples of successes, and we have amazing people working on this. What we need is the political will to provide more funding and incentives, and the social drive to advocate for the best solutions as informed by the local people who are firsthand affected by these changes. Community knowledge and needs first, along with farmers’ perspectives, are the best ways to strengthen local economies and restore our environmental health.
The key is to develop specific plans with strong local leadership—as we see in Allensworth—and seek technical assistance to navigate the funding application processes.
PauC: Can you share some success stories of these nature-based solutions you are proposing?
Angel S. Fernández-Bou: Yes, we are seeing promising examples of success:
Allensworth is an inspiring example where the Allensworth Progressive Association is developing an agroecology center that will create local jobs, improve food security, create a safety buffer zone, and revitalize the economy.
Multi-benefit aquifer recharge projects have shown that we can effectively store water during wet years for use in drought. There is a good example in Okieville that we explain in the guide, but multi-benefit aquifer recharge is a very promising solution generating a lot of interest.
Agrivoltaic systems are also a hot topic these days. Prominent scientists, like Professor Sarah Kurtz from UC Merced, are delving into this work, and many farmers are starting to see how these systems can benefit them.
The Dos Rios floodplain restoration has been the largest floodplain restoration in California so far, transitioning around 2,000 acres from a dairy farm into a very beautiful state park honoring indigenous peoples with a 3-acre indigenous garden.
These pilot projects are providing the scientific and economic evidence needed to scale solutions regionally.
PauC: If readers only take away one message from your guide, what should it be?
Angel S. Fernández-Bou: Working with nature is environmentally sound, economically smart, and socially just.
This guide demonstrates that we can create better-paying jobs, stronger economies, and healthier communities while restoring our ecosystems and securing water for the future. We do not have to choose between economic prosperity and environmental health—we can have both if we do things right.
California’s future depends on our ability to reimagine how we use land and water to be sustainable. The solutions exist, many communities are ready, farmers know they need them, and funding is available. That is our job now.
As we have learned from past civilizations, preserving the natural resilience of the land is what allows societies to thrive for millennia. California can be the example for the world of how to build a socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable future.
