Groundwater Management in California: A Survey of Planning Interventions

Borrego Springs, an International Dark Sky Community and the gateway to scenic Anza-Borrego State Park, is a rural desert community in Southern California. It is dependent on groundwater as its only water resource, and for the past 50 years, agriculture and golf resort development in the area has led to a precipitate decline in aquifer elevation. In order to curb this trend and maintain this special community, local stakeholders formed the Borrego Water Coalition.

For my graduate thesis at University of California, Irvine, I worked with the Borrego Water Coalition to review dozens of groundwater management across California and identify potential technical and behavioral interventions that could be applied to curb groundwater overdraft. To evaluate the effectiveness of these interventions, I mapped groundwater quality and elevation data for all aquifers in the state, using data from University of California, Riverside, as well as AECOM. From my research, I concluded that reduction in use (behavior interventions) have more impact on restoring the groundwater table than technical interventions such as water recycling and banking.