Even if you’ve never set foot in Los Angeles, you’re likely familiar with the Los Angeles River without realizing it. This massive concrete channel, a favorite filming location for Hollywood’s car races, chase scenes, and countless commercials, doesn’t quite resemble a traditional river.
Following devastating floods nearly a century ago, most of the river’s 51 miles (82 kilometers) were encased in concrete. The river was transformed into a gray channel with a singular purpose: to swiftly carry rainwater from the mountains to the sea.
Yet, three segments of the river couldn’t be concreted. In these areas, nature returned unexpectedly. Poplars and willows reappeared, alongside herons, egrets, and the endangered Santa Ana sucker fish. People also returned, turning the river into a neighborhood park for cycling and kayaking.
The river presents two contrasting realities. While the concrete channel serves a singular, costly function, the natural sections offer multiple benefits such as flood protection, habitat improvement, public health enhancement, recreation, water quality improvement, and local temperature reduction. The river runs through neighborhoods where nearly a million residents live within a mile (1.6 kilometers). Fortunately for Los Angeles residents, the river is undergoing a restoration that aims to revive many of the river’s multiple benefits, including habitat restoration, cleaner air, and green spaces in the city. This project also aims to improve water quality, reduce erosion, and maintain, or even enhance, flood risk management.
The restoration of the Los Angeles River exemplifies a nature-based solution. These solutions work with nature to adapt to challenging environmental conditions, contrasting with the costly and less beneficial gray infrastructure (concrete). Nature-based solutions are often more cost-effective, addressing issues more naturally while offering numerous positive side effects.
This article marks the beginning of a series on how nature-based solutions can benefit California. You can read our Guide on Nature-Based Solutions here. You can also watch our first video on Instagram:
Climate Whiplash
Many public health and environmental issues in California and globally stem from unsustainable natural resource management, exacerbated by climate change. Extreme events swinging from one extreme to another are becoming the new normal.
Gray infrastructure was initially designed to control nature instead of sustainably working with the environment, as practiced by many Indigenous communities worldwide. As climate and conditions change, rigid concrete infrastructure often fails to adapt. Its low adaptability, combined with climate change, increases the frequency and cost of destruction, prompting reactive rather than preventive responses. California spends billions on post-fire, flood, and drought impacts, which is far costlier than prevention. Every dollar not invested in resilience today is estimated to cost about six times more in the near future.
These costs are not distributed equitably. Everyone contributes to disaster and emergency aid through taxes, but frontline communities with limited infrastructure also pay with their health, well-being, and quality of life.
Preparing California for future challenges requires more than just additional gray infrastructure. Concrete dams, levees, and storm drains are expensive, fragile, and built to fight rather than cooperate with nature.
Nature-based solutions offer a better and more economical way to address these challenges.
Nature-Based Solutions and Farmland Reuse in Agricultural Regions
In Merced, California, located in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, agriculture is a major economic driver and a central part of many residents’ identity. However, agriculture in California has been unsustainable for over a century, primarily due to inadequate water management and poor agricultural practices, such as dry land plowing, excessive pesticide use, monocropping, and irrigating marginal lands—issues worsened by climate change. Part of my work is to understand this system and find solutions that don’t create new problems. With a passion for agriculture and the environment, and many friends living in farming communities, I’ve been considering nature-based solutions for agricultural regions for years.
My focus is on farmland reuse to achieve a just transition of land. California’s current water law requires local agencies to manage groundwater sustainably and avoid “undesirable results” like dry wells, land subsidence, and seawater intrusion. This legal framework holds transformative potential to change a system that doesn’t work for everyone. To achieve water sustainability, California might need to reuse about a million acres (approximately 400,000 hectares) of irrigated agriculture to reduce our water footprint.
Although this is a significant task, it presents a tremendous opportunity to address a century-old legacy of problems while adapting to climate change, adopting sustainable agricultural practices, and managing public resources sustainably. Nature-based solutions can address water sustainability in various ways, including aquifer recharge, floodplain restoration, and sustainable agricultural practices. They can also address public health issues such as flood prevention, erosion control, dust prevention, pollution reduction, lack of green spaces, and extreme heat. Nature-based solutions can generate local employment during their construction, maintenance, or even through tourism and other new ideas. However, they are not a universal solution, and we need to create pathways for fostering non-extractive local economies that bring complete sustainability to agricultural regions. We call this a Just Land Transition, and along with partners like Allensworth Progressive Association, Community Water Center, and Environmental Defense Fund, and agencies like the California Department of Conservation, we are supporting science-based policies and actions to bring sustainability to California’s agricultural regions.
This series will showcase the potential of nature-based solutions as the best tools for addressing farmland reuse and tackling climate justice in agricultural areas.
For more information, you can read our guide: Nature-Based Solutions for Building Resilience in California’s Agricultural Regions. Additionally, if you want to learn more about best practices in land reuse for a just land transition beyond nature-based solutions, visit the UCS website (in English but with multiple Spanish resources) Guiding California’s Land Transitions Toward Justice and Equity.
California possesses the tools, intellectual knowledge, and funding to make this better decision a reality. Proposition 4, the Climate Bond, will allocate billions of dollars to climate resilience and land reuse, and nature-based solutions can be one of the best ways to invest taxpayers’ money to create sustainability and transform the system to work for everyone.
