Sustaining California's Food Production Through Integated Water and Energy Management

Climate-change driven shifts in precipitation and water storage in the Sierra Nevada, a mountain range that provides over 50% of California's water supply, are stressing one of the nation's main food-producing regions. CA produces over a third of the nation's vegetables and two-thirds of the country's fruits and nuts. The region's water resources and energy infrastructure, developed to supply water and energy during a more-stable climate, is now facing alarming and unprecedented deficiencies in meeting the demands of agriculture, cities and the environment. These deficiencies include reductions in seasonal surface-water storage, continued groundwater overdraft, reduced hydropower, more-intense storm runoff, and growing competition for water and energy. Taken together, they present a unique challenge for the future of irrigated agriculture. Recognizing the need for a sustainable future, CA is advancing both requirements and incentives for improvement of water and energy management. Through analysis of the food-energy-water system comprised of connected wildland-storage-cropland subsystems this research will analyze how different climate-adaption pathways affect resilience, vulnerability, and sustainability of CA's food-energy-water system nexus. Management and alternative future scenarios will be analyzed using a Coupled Human and Natural System framework that fully integrates biophysical, engineering, socioeconomic, and human decision-making processes and feedbacks.