California’s water management has made ‘limited progress’ in accounting for climate change, audit says

The state agency that manages California’s water resources has made “only limited progress” in accounting for the effects of climate change in its operations and forecasting, a state audit found this week.“Until it makes more progress, the Department of Water Resources will be less prepared than it could be to effectively manage the State’s water resources in the face of more extreme climate conditions,” the state audit concluded.The Department of Water Resources also sometimes releases water from its surface reservoirs without sufficient explanation and documentation, the state auditor reported, citing releases from Lake Oroville as an example.A state audit into the Department of Water Resources was initiated by former Assemblymember Adam Gray, D-Merced, in 2022, after the agency consistently overestimated the amount of runoff from mountains into rivers and streams in 2021, in some cases by as much as 68%.

Water supply forecasts from the Department of Water Resources are used in a variety of important ways: By farmers determining crop planting patterns, irrigation schedules and whether or not to pump groundwater; by cities and counties evaluating water supplies and the need for conservation; and by public utilities planning for hydropower electric generation.” It’s “reasonable” for the state auditor to point out the Department of Water Resources’s shortcomings in incorporating climate change, as “current forecasts almost everywhere in the world take very little mind of climate change,” said Jay Lund, director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences and an expert on water policy and management.