by Robin Meadows
The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta seems like one of the most scrutinized places on Earth, with decades of data on everything from fish populations to water flows, temperatures and salinity. But key indicators of the region’s health are missing. The Delta, like many estuarine areas, is a lived-in landscape yet little is known about the well-being and priorities of the people living there.
A new survey of Delta residents is a first step toward filling this social science data gap. The findings illuminate resident’s concerns and attitudes on the biggest environmental issues in the region, which could help decision-makers enhance the quality of life for local people.
California asks a lot of the Delta, a lovely place where 1,100 miles of waterways wind around 55 levee-encircled islands. The state’s two longest rivers—the Sacramento and the San Joaquin—meet here and flow into the San Francisco Bay, creating the largest estuary on the West Coast. The Delta provides a home for hundreds of native species as well as a migratory corridor for salmon and birds, and serves as a water hub that supplies two-thirds of the state’s population and millions of acres of farmland.
The Delta is also a place where people live, work and play, and the 2009 Delta Reform Act’s coequal goals for the region mandate safeguarding both its social and ecological health. Specifically, the California Water Code delineates these goals as “providing a more reliable water supply for California and protecting, restoring, and enhancing the Delta ecosystem. The coequal goals shall be achieved in a manner that protects and enhances the unique cultural, recreational, natural resource, and agricultural values of the Delta as an evolving place.”
Taking the pulse of local people is critical to meeting these coequal goals equitably and effectively. Delta residents impact and are impacted by the surrounding ecosystem, and their support is vital to implementing regional restoration and resilience efforts.
The 2023 Delta Residents Survey aims to understand local well-being and perspectives on social and environmental issues. The survey was designed by a team of social scientists, with funding from the Delta Stewardship Council and support from an advisory group of state and local agencies and community group representatives; the survey was available in English and Spanish in print and online, and included 43 multiple choice and short response questions. Sacramento State’s Institute for Social Research coordinated logistics from mailing to data processing.
Invitations to participate in the survey were mailed to 82,000 households in and adjacent to the Delta, which is bordered by cities including Sacramento and Stockton. More than 2,200 households replied, which is roughly double the typical response rate for such surveys and suggests a high level of local engagement.
The survey offers insights including Delta residents’ sense of place and well-being as well as their perceptions of environmental changes and governance in the region. To learn more about these indicators of social health and what they mean for managing the Delta, Robin Meadows spoke with survey coordinator Jessica Rudnick, an environmental social scientist with California Sea Grant and the Delta Stewardship Council.
What inspired the Delta Residents Survey?
The Delta Science Program and the Delta Independent Science Board articulated human well-being in the Estuary as a gap in science, and the Delta Stewardship Council set a goal of integrating social science into environmental management in the region. They didn’t know where to start so they asked what are the best practices out there— how do other complex environments around the U.S. manage and understand the people embedded there?
We learned from surveys like the Puget Sound Partnership’s Human Well-being Vital Signs, which is geared in part toward understanding the roles people play in ecosystem recovery, and the Chesapeake Bay Stewardship Indicators, which tracks how people’s actions impact the environment.
What are the survey’s key findings?
It’s a rich data set so there’s more to come, but takeaways at this point include that there are some common threads to Delta identity that are shared by rural and urban residents alike. There’s a strong sense that the Delta is important as a water hub and critical ecosystem, and for agriculture, recreation and history. It’s really cool to see that shared appreciation across such a diverse population. There’s also shared concern over threats to the region including climate change and aging infrastructure such as levees and transportation networks.
Another commonality is high levels of trust in community groups and scientists to act in the best interests of the Delta, and low trust levels for government agencies. Respondents reported their low level of confidence that policymakers will find viable solutions to the complex challenges of the Delta.
The Delta has tons of geographic diversity—you can go 10 minutes from Sacramento to a place that feels like another world—and there are also differences between what rural and urban residents reported valuing about the Delta, as well as their concerns and priorities for the region.
Urban residents appreciate the Delta a lot more for recreational value. Rural residents, many of whom are a lot happier with their quality of life, appreciate the Delta for its quietness and scenic value They’re also more concerned about levees, the Delta Conveyance Project, and continuing to protect the Delta “way of life.”
Do any of the findings stand out as surprising or unexpected?
The Delta also has a lot of demographic diversity, and some people are doing very well while others struggle to make ends meet. More than 25% of respondents reported their household income as less than $50,000 per year, and said affordability of basic needs like housing and food is a major challenge to their quality of life.
Another surprising nugget is that climate change is a widely-shared concern across the region. Rural and urban residents alike, across demographics and political ideology, report high levels of concern. A lot of people in the Delta are very connected to the land and have seen changes over time, such as increased algal blooms and extreme heat events, and worsening air quality.
And while the Delta is dominated by water, two-thirds of respondents report recreating on land, including hiking, bird watching and camping. This is good to know so decision-makers can protect what people value and use.
How can the survey help decision-makers advance the coequal goals for the Delta?
Takeaways for state agencies, including the Delta Stewardship Council, include self-reflecting on whether their public participation processes represent the vast spread of perspectives the diverse Delta residents are likely to hold.
In other words, are all impacted parties and perspectives being heard, or is it just those who have the time or resources to show up whose voices are taken into account? The survey provides a tool for evaluating how representative those who show up are.
The survey can also help decision-makers focus more on human well-being and equity across demographic groups. The survey measures what matters to different groups so the state can track how different communities in the Delta are impacted by environmental management decisions.
Which communities are doing well, which are struggling and why, and will state actions help or hurt these communities? The goal is to see the well-being of everyone in the Delta increasing over time.
What’s next for the Delta Residents Survey?
An anonymized dataset will be publicly available in early 2024, and we’re building an interactive tool to make the data more useable to a bigger audience. People can explore the results on their own time,
searching by geography and demographics to get specific answers they are interested in. For example, a city planner in Oakley could find out how residents in their city are thinking about issues like climate change and recreation. Survey datasets, interactive data viewing tools, and reports will be available here.
We’ll also develop single page fact sheets and infographics on key takeaways and share them with the survey respondents. We don’t want to just take their information, we want to show them “here’s what you said.”
Going forward, we hope the survey is repeated and recommend doing it every four to five years, which is a time interval likely to capture some social change while not being too burdensome on respondents. We also hope to see continued funding for more social science research across the region, and to see the federal, state and local agencies using the new information generated to inform their environmental decisions.
