What’s in this for water users?
Nonstructural, self-sustaining (detention) storage!
The Rainfall to Groundwater approach offers water users two overarching promises:
- Enhance & sustain groundwater resources, and
- Reduce flooding
Enhance and Sustain Groundwater Resources
Expanding on that first promise, this approach will increase groundwater storage without the costly need to construct and maintain engineered infrastructure.
The decades-long clamor for more water storage projects in California has overlooked opportunities to restore degraded uplands detention storage functions.
See Retention vs Detention Storage
In California these opportunities are extensive. See California Case > Opportunities
Don’t believe those naysayers, like California Department of Water Resources, who say that water available for replenishment (recharge) is constrained. (Due to their surface water bias?)
Opportunities for new (restored) detention storage abound – in California and beyond.
Anywhere that historical human land management has unwittingly impacted watershed/ catchment detention functions. (Most places in the world.)
California’s historic Sustainable Groundwater Management Act would seem to mandate that we adjust our perspectives/ paradigms so that we can more clearly see such opportunities – for the benefit of all stakeholders.