Investments in water-related data and information platforms have the potential for large payoffs by helping entities make more informed decisions. Unfortunately, despite the clear importance for practical decision making, a persistent lack of appropriate water accounting information hinders analysis of likely outcomes of water policy choices. By narrowing crucial information gaps, agencies may improve prospects for agriculture, ecosystems, and underrepresented communities as they confront less reliable and potentially lower overall, water supply allocations in the future . Better and timely monitoring and measurement at the watershed level will also provide a clearer picture of how actions in one part of a watershed may impact other parts of the watershed thereby providing policy makers with a more complete understanding of the consequences and trade-offs of any particular action within the watershed. Universities and other institutions have long supported productivity growth and improved environmental performance of agriculture in California and elsewhere with research and outreach . R&D has contributed improved varieties, irrigation, and drainage technology and improved farm practices that have saved resources and improved environmental outcomes. Progress may come from better integrating social and biophysical sciences for socially just adaptations that value farmers’ knowledge and experience to assist in transitioning to more resilient systems. Developing a coherent research agenda to better integrate climate projections, pest/disease forecasting, soil ecosystems, new genotypes, black plant pots plastic and system designs into agricultural management is needed. More and better organized and documented openaccess water data and models can make further significant contributions to informing policy and decision-making.
The high costs of water transactions, including among farmers, service areas and regions, and for groundwater recharge makes adaptation to climate change more difficult. During 2023, California facilitated some recharge efforts to take advantage of the extreme wet conditions and rebuild groundwater storage. Unfortunately, such measures fell far short of their potential. In addition to infrastructure limitations, permitting delays and other institutional constraints limited the extent of recharge. California’s adaptation to climate extremes would benefit from agile state and local regulation and coordination to facilitate recharge. More integrated water and climate policy will follow from early coordinated and collaborative management and governance to exchange ideas and understand impacts of a wide and inclusive set of scenarios . Careful planning across the policy landscape could foster climate smart policies that leverage current incentives for GHG reductions and offsets to promote adaptation.Like many agricultural regions worldwide, California is facing extreme climate challenges, including increases in water scarcity and water supply variability. Growing competition for water to better support ecosystems and added regulatory oversight will continue to demand innovations to incentivize farms to produce more value with fewer resources. Innovations are often motivated by scarcity and high costs of resources, such as labor, land, and water. Moving forward, more innovation will need to be devoted to reconciling agriculture with ecosystem health, in the context of evolving knowledge and changing climate. External costs and benefits, along with third party impacts, are likely to connect with global food market forces, to drive the direction of agricultural responses. The increased economic, ecological, and community benefits associated with enhanced knowledge of these connections will require significant efforts and commitments on the part of governments and institutions to be realized.
California can enhance climate resilience stewardship by adopting policies and practices to reduce vulnerabilities to climate extremes. Irrigation practices and technology of the recent past, such as those that ignore the importance of groundwater recharge and return flows, and adoption of permanent crops that have minimal year-to-year flexibility in water demand, are increasingly recognized as costly and risky. California is recognizing the value of more flexible water use, both temporally in terms of reservoir storage and carryover rules and spatially in terms of water trading. Moving toward more flexible irrigation water use with smaller negative impacts on rural communities and the environment . Water markets can better direct water to the most valuable social uses by considering third-party impacts water reallocation. Though climate change presents a more variable and uncertain future, it provides opportunities to adapt agricultural landscapes to better steward the environment. Bold measures are urgently needed as water availability limits have already been exceeded and adaptation pathways adequate to address these challenges require faster interventions than current trends . Approaches that decrease exposures to stress, reduce vulnerabilities, and enhance stress resistance and recovery, are important for California to address its climate change challenges. These measures include i) developing a capacity to integrate climate projections, pest/disease forecasting, new genotypes, and system designs into agricultural management, ii) reducing and redistributing irrigation water to recognize the value of ecosystem services, iii) improving prevention, monitoring, and surveillance of droughts and floods, and iv) leveraging GHG reduction and offset policies to promoting biodiversity, and ecosystem resilience. Effective adaptations must go beyond managing the conventionally measured impacts of water variability and toward food systems that address the market and social and ecological drivers . Investing in transdisciplinary research and education to support context-specific adaptations is especially relevant to address the potential social, environmental, and economic tradeoffs.
Building strong and inclusive networks for research, knowledge sharing, and planning is critical to reduce mistakes and scale up the most effective measures that mitigate and adapt to a changing climate.Initiatives to offer more organic, local, or fairly traded foods on the nation’s colleges and universities are spreading throughout the country. These efforts, often called “farm-to-college” or “farm-to-university”, aim to utilize institutional purchasing power to support local growers and principles of sustainable food systems, while providing fresh and healthy food to the campus community. Farm-to-college programs are part of a larger effort to change the food systems in the institutional food service sector, including schools, hospitals, and prisons. Such programs could be a lifeline for small-scale farmers struggling to stay afloat, and would improve the eating habits of millions of Americans. Moreover, if institutional food buyers embrace sustainably produced goods, such as organic or fair-trade products, the environmental and social gains would be significant. The health, economic, and sustainability potential of farm-to-college programs is intertwined with their ability to meet the needs of the campus communities they serve. Knowing the interests and needs of their customers will enable program managers to better gauge “effective demand” and develop programs consonant with the desires of their customer base. To date, while there are a few studies about farm-to-college programs, there has been no research on the preferences and perspectives of campus consumers. Since the success of farm-to-college programs involves their ability to meet the needs of campus consumers, we undertook a study of our local campus, the University of California, Santa Cruz, large plastic pots for plants to learn about the perspectives and preferences of campus food consumers. This research brief reports the results of that study and discusses their implications for the development of farm-to-college programs. The study was conducted in collaboration with groups at UC Santa Cruz working to improve the campus food system. These groups include the UC Santa Cruz Food Systems Working Group, UC Santa Cruz Dining Services, the Community Agroecology Network, and the Students for Sustainability . The questionnaire was developed by Jan Perez, Patricia Allen, and Phil Howard at the UC Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, in consultation with representatives from the groups mentioned above. An online survey was designed to elicit responses on food-related concerns, interests, and level of support for specific food criteria. In addition, questions were included to assess how food concerns rank compared to other national issues, and preferred methods for people to learn about their food. In November 2005, UCSC students, staff and faculty were contacted via email and invited to take the survey online. The survey was available online for people to take until mid January, 2006, and 4 followup emails were sent. There were 36 emails that bounced back, and 464 people completed at least a portion of the survey, resulting in a 25% response rate.UC Santa Cruz is a mid-sized university located on the west coast of California. The campus community tends to be relatively liberal on economic and political issues and enjoys a mild climate that makes possible a diverse supply of fresh fruits and vegetables for most months of the year. Table 1 shows the distribution of respondents in terms of gender , ethnicity , age, and grade level. The table also shows the percentage of students , staff , and faculty who responded to the survey.
These proportions closely approximate those in the campus community: 77% students, 16% staff, and 7% faculty or academic staff. Although food issues are inevitably bundled with general environmental, economic, and social issues, we wanted to get a sense of their importance relative to “non-food” issues, such as strengthening the nation’s economy and terrorism, which have been ranked as top priorities in national opinion polls . Respondents were asked to rank a set of issues on a Likert scale ranging from 4 to 1 . As shown in table 2, food issues were comparatively important to survey respondents. Combining categories of top priority and important, only one issue, protecting the environment, ranked higher than the food issue of access for low-income people . Other important food issues had to do with environment and health—food safety and pesticides in the food system —and working conditions . Food issues that were the least important to respondents were developing local food systems and limiting genetic engineering of foods , which ranked only slightly above protecting the country from terrorism.We also wanted to get a sense of the relative level of interest in specific food system issues to the UCSC community. To gauge this, we asked respondents to rank their level of interest in a series of topics on a scale of 1 to 10 . The topics in which people are most interested are personal—the safety and nutrition of their food, both of which ranked, on average, greater than 8 . Working conditions of workers and environmental impacts of food were of next highest interest, both with an average ranking of 8. Next in line are the wages of workers and the treatment of animals, with an average ranking of 7.71 and 7.65, respectively. This was closely followed by the influence of large corporations . The topic in which people were least interested by a significant margin was the distance food travels from its point of production, at an average ranking of 5.94. Inferences about preferred food qualities can be made from the issues in which respondents are most interested. However, a more direct way of assessing the qualities that people would like to see in their campus food is to determine their level of interest in existing labels that promote different food qualities. We asked respondents to rate their level of interest in purchasing food with the following labels: fair trade, certified organic, locally produced, water quality protection, humane treatment of animals, U.S. grown, and union. The percent of respondents with a “strong interest” in the label , was high, above 50%, for organic, humane treatment, water quality, fair trade, and locally grown . Although the percent with strong interests varies , the differences between the levels of interest in these five labels are not statistically significant. However, interest in U.S. grown and a union label was much lower, and was statistically different than interest in the top five labels. It is perplexing that interest in a union label is significantly lower than in a Fair Trade label, since both deal with providing fair wages and fair working conditions or rules. The negative publicity towards unions in an age where free market principles dominate has likely played a role in these results. In addition, people may have been personally affected by union labor actions such as teacher and bus driver strikes and may have had conflicted reactions as to the merits of such activities. The Fair Trade label, on the other hand, is a relatively new initiative. This newness allows a greater focus on principles and less on the difficult issues that develop when ideals are put into practice. Understanding more about the differential support for unions and fair trade would be worthwhile to explore in future research.