S4E13 - Can Groundwater Trading help California save $580 million per year?
with 🎙️ Ellen Bruno, Extension Economist @ UC Berkeley
💧 The Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley leads research and outreach on economic and policy issues relevant to California’s agriculture and natural resources.
What we covered:
🌱 How the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act is a challenge and an opportunity for all the Californian water users
🧮 How when reducing water allowances, some approaches are more efficient than others
💰 How the price of Water influences its uses - and to which extent
🧮 What the price elasticity of water demand actually is, and how of inelastic good water is
🍏 How water trading and groundwater markets could better market failures and smoothen the transition towards water restrictions
🍏 How markets are not perfect, yet can be the best tool in a given context
🧮 How if you've invested in a crop, a bottom-line calculation enables you to determine the threshold at which it's profitable to stop watering it and let it die
🔬 How research happening in universities shall be leveraged into practical knowledge
🤔 Which levers can influence a water market, and how pertinent that influence actually is in the Californian example
🚰 How the groundwater tariffs in place in Coachella enable to artificially replenish the water table
🚜 How agricultural and urban users have slightly different behaviors when it comes to water and how to leverage it
🍏 How water market experiments are rolled out, and who shall best be participating in this trading
🍏 How to measure the (positive) impact of a water market compared with the status quo
🎤 The specificities of Water Management in Coachella, resemblances, and differences with Israel & Australia, farmers doing what's best for business, why groundwater is better suited to trading than surface water... and much more!
🔥 ... and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 🔥
➡️ Get the Full Story (including an infographic and full transcript)
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