One Planet Podcast · Climate Change, Politics, Sustainability, Environmental Solutions, Renewable Energy, Activism, Biodiversity, Carbon Footprint, Wildlife, Regenerative Agriculture, Circular Economy, Extinction, Net-Zero Highlights - Jay Famiglietti - Exec. Director - Global Institute for Water Security, Host of “What About Water?” Podcast
"So we're not at the point in the United States of telling farmers what they can grow and can't grow. We probably will get there, but we're not there yet. And one of the things that we have focused on instead, and I think California's a great example with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which has broken down the state into a number of different groundwater sustainability agencies. Each one has a plan to basically minimize groundwater losses or at least to manage them and stretch out groundwater losses over a long period of time. And so that's a slightly different approach in that what's being managed at the groundwater level and what's not happening is – we're not telling farmers you can grow this or you can grow that.
So we'll see how that works. It has a term implementation horizon, like 20 more years, which is a little slow, but there's a question on the table about will this be either state or national policy. Will we get to the point where we start saying we don't have enough water. Let's think nationally about food security and what crops do we actually need for the health of people in the United States first, and go that way. And what can we grow where, given water availability and how we set up our food system. So we have a tremendous amount of work to do on this topic. My fear is that we're being reactive rather than proactive."
Jay Famiglietti is a hydrologist, a professor and the Executive Director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, where he holds the Canada 150 Research Chair in Hydrology and Remote Sensing. He is also the Chief Scientist of the Silicon Valley tech startup, Waterplan. Before moving to Saskatchewan, 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. He has appeared on CBS News 60 Minutes, on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, as a featured expert in water documentaries including Day Zero and Last Call at the Oasis, and across a host of international news media. He is the host of the podcast What About Water?
What About Water? podcast with Jay Famiglietti
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