Dr. Famiglietti the Godfather of Groundwater Sustainability

Last week I read a very interesting Opinion piece in the NewYork Times by Jay Famiglietti who is one of the more important groundwater scientists of our time. It was a thought piece addressing what will happen if we don't protect our groundwater and it continues to disappear, will we need to move water to where our food is currently grown?  Dr Famiglietti was not really arguing for pumping the great lakes to California he was trying to highlight the coming water crisis and our need to take action.

Dr Famiglietti is currently a Global Futures Professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University and serves as the Director of Science for the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative. He is Professor Emeritus from the University of Saskatchewan, where he was Executive Director of the Global Institute for Water Security. He was the founding Chief Scientist of the Silicon Valley startup, Waterplan. Before that he served as the Senior Water Scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. From 2013 through 2018, he was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown to the California State Water Boards in the Santa Ana and Los Angeles regions.

I know his work best from when Dr. Famiglietti was a professor of Earth System Science and of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, (2001 to 2016)  where he was the Founding Director of the UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling. Before that Dr Famiglietti was on the faculty of the Geological Sciences Department at the University of Texas at Austin, where he and his research team including Matt Rodell developed the way to use satellites to track changing water availability around the world. They pioneered the methods to detect groundwater depletion from space using the NASA GRACE mission. 

Dr Famiglietti also has a water podcast “What About Water.” It’s good you, too, should be a listener.  Jay Famiglietti | Global Futures Professor, ASU; Podcast host, "What About Water"

I would like to quote some of the highlights of Dr. Famiglietti’s comment on groundwater.  “For over a century, America’s farmers have overpumped groundwater, and now, as the world warms and the Southwest becomes drier, the situation is only growing more dire. Rivers are slowing to a trickle, water tables are falling, land is sinking, and wells are drying up.”

Our climate has changed and will continue to change. The fantasy of renewable energy and electrification of everything stopping climate change from happening was just that a fantasy. The climate will continue to change because we have failed in both our understand and action.

On Earth Day in 2016 196 countries officially signed the Paris Climate Accord that was intended to put the nations on a course to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels. The Paris Agreement aims to limit global temperature increase to well below 2°C above preindustrial levels and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C by each nation committing to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Even if every nation met their current pledge to reduce carbon dioxide emissions made in the Paris Climate Accord and its updates, the reductions promised are not enough to even maintain global temperatures within 2 °C above pre-industrial levels; and the nations are not meeting those pledges.  The United States currently represents less than 14% of global carbon emissions. There is virtually nothing we as a nation can do (at this point) to stop the climate from changing. We need to adapt to the future we will face and move to a sustainable path.

As Dr Famiglietti points out: “States are aware there is a problem — many are trying to sustainably manage their groundwater. But it’s not clear how successful these efforts have been. His research team has found that groundwater depletion is accelerating in the Central Valley, in spite of California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act.”

In the best studied area of groundwater depletion attempts to regulate and manage it appear to be failing. The regulatory schemes so far in use appear to have failed. The groundwater management area of Virginia in the Potomac Aquifer is only doing a little better.  There will likely not be enough groundwater to accommodate future growth in the region without additional permit reductions or increasing supply through large-scale, long-term water projects.

Beyond the next few years, though, sustainability is tenuous and can easily be tipped out of balance. Potential growth in both unpermitted and permitted withdrawals can easily push demand in excess of supply, leading again to unsustainable use. Changes in the hydraulic cycle from the changing climate with impact sustainability and management of groundwater resources.

 “If we want to sustain groundwater supplies for future generations, we will need reliable estimates of what’s available in key aquifers, how its quality changes with depth and how much can be safely pumped without risk of running dry. That means we must prioritize the systematic exploration and evaluation of what’s in the ground and make a plan to end or dramatically reduce groundwater depletion.” In addition to the information needs pointed out by Dr. Famiglietti we need to further understand the use of groundwater and in the east we need to fully understand recharge and the impact of land use changes on groundwater recharge and surface water.

I encourage you to explore Dr Famiglietti’s podcasts. They are well worth your time.