2022 Water Outlook: Reliable, But Keep Conserving

            It is only February, and a good portion of the wet season is still ahead of us. But it is not too early to assess Southern California’s water outlook for this year and take some lessons from the past.

           The bottom line is that a return to dry conditions - even a severe drought that some are predicting - will not result in water shortages for the region this year, thanks to the large amounts of water Metropolitan has captured in reservoirs, groundwater banks and other storage in recent years. What’s remarkable, even historic, is both how much water we have managed to store away for droughts and the conservation water ethic that has taken hold throughout Southern California.

One achievement has a lot to do with the other. The more that we all use water wisely each and every day, regardless of the weather, the better we are prepared for a dry cycle.

To explain this success story will require some numbers. Let’s start with a recent dry year, 2014. That year was single worst drought year in recorded history, with 2014 registering as the hottest year in California in 1,200 years, according to the National Weather Service. Metropolitan received just 5 percent of its water supply from the State Water Project due to the paltry snowpack in the Sierra Nevada.

Fortunately, that year like this year, Metropolitan had large reserves on hand. The district took 1.1 million acre-feet of water from reservoirs and other reserves to meet the demands of our 26 member agencies and their 19 million residents and businesses. That amounted to about half of the total amount of water Metropolitan delivered that year.  

It was the next year, 2015, when then-Gov. Jerry Brown, amid another dry season, required all urban communities in California to reduce residential water use by 25 percent. Southern Californians responded to the challenge including many who took advantage of Metropolitan’s $350 million turf removal program and eliminated 172 million square-feet of lawns. (That’s nearly enough grass to cover 3,000 football fields)

Then when the rains finally returned, Southern Californians did something pretty remarkable – they kept conserving. Overall water demands on Metropolitan have stayed lower than 2014 ever since.

Fast forward to this year.

At the moment, the California Department of Water Resources, operator of the State Water Project, is advising Metropolitan and other agencies that this year’s allocation of water from Northern California may be as low as 10 percent. Of course, that number should increase some with more rains, but now is the time to prepare for a small water supply this year from the north.

Thanks to all that conservation over the last five years – and a few wet winters – Metropolitan has managed to accumulate the highest storage reserves in our history - more than 3 million acre-feet.

Our “worst case” scenario – a 10 percent supply from Northern California, coupled with our supplies from the Colorado River – would require a withdrawal from our local reserves of just about 400,000 acre-feet. That’s a fraction of what we needed from reserves in a similarly dry year back in 2014.

What’s the difference? Consumer demand. Thanks to millions of Southern Californians who are being more careful with their indoor and outdoor water use, we expect demand for Metropolitan’s deliveries to be about 600,000 acre-feet less than 2014. That’s almost enough water to run a city the size of Los Angeles for a year. That is a lot of water we simply don’t expect to need, thanks to conservation.

This good news hardly means that our water worries are over. Both our Colorado and Sierra water supplies face tremendous reliability challenges due to climate change and environmental concerns.  Local sources are not immune to challenges, like emerging water quality concerns. Our future water security requires a whole new generation of partnerships and reinvestments in these systems to secure our imported sources and aggressively develop new local supplies.

Yet recent history has shown that Southern California benefits when we all stay vigilant about wise water use and lowering demands. Conservation has become a powerful and effective tool for managing water, especially in times of droughts. Even with as much progress as we’ve made, each of us likely sees more ways that water can be used even more efficiently at home, at work, and in our communities.

The dry start to this year should be a reminder that even as we work hard to secure our supply sources, our future also depends on using water as efficiently as we can.