From California Agriculture:
For most of its history, California treated groundwater and surface water as legally distinct. Unlike surface water diversions, groundwater pumping was largely unrestricted until 2014 when the state passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which requires the parts of the state where groundwater is pumped more quickly than it is replenished to set limits on current and future groundwater pumping. In the San Joaquin Valley alone, pumping exceeded replenishment by 2 million acre-feet per year for the three decades prior to 2014. To meet the goals of SGMA in the San Joaquin Valley, it is estimated that more than 500,000 acres of irrigated agricultural land will need to be retired by 2040 (Hanak et al. 2023).
Repurposing land at this scale is a daunting challenge that requires strategic planning and tactical implementation. Without doing so, the negative aspects of abandoned or fallowed lands — such as worsening air quality, economic losses to farmers, and uninhabitable lands — are likely to be more severe, and we could miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to restore wildlife habitat in the valley. The good news is that conservation organizations, water agencies, local communities, and others have been planning and preparing for this transition — and our early efforts to demonstrate how land can be repurposed strategically and at scale to support groundwater sustainability and the recovery of imperiled species are bearing fruit.
