Today national environmental organization Food & Water Watch released a report compiling new data that demonstrates how periods of exceptional drought and flooding events have become more common in the past few years, like in drought ravaged areas like California, and offers recommendations on how federal and state governments can help stop egregious water abuses.

Few areas in the U.S. have experienced the whiplash effects of increasing drought and flooding more than California. Following the driest 22-year period in 1,200 years, Californians are now experiencing catastrophic floods from snow melt. In April 2023, heavy rains flooded thousands of acres of Central Valley farmlands, and the slowly melting snowpack — which was up to 400 percent of its historic average size — threatened to increase the flood’s size three times over.

The flood resurrected the long-dry Lake Tulare, which had been converted to cropland and residential land, and future flooding will likely bring billions in losses to farmers and surrounding communities. As of May 2023, in addition to residents evacuating their homes, dairy farmers in California’s Central Valley had to relocate more than 100,000 head of cattle due to flooding. And due to the intensity of the flooding, industry executives admitted an inability to focus on preventing manure from contaminating nearby waters, instead focusing on saving the animals.  

Furthermore, a nearby industrial compost facility that holds thousands of tons of sewage sludge from Los Angeles County is at risk of contaminating the floodwaters and nearby groundwater, streams, and rivers with toxic metals and other contaminants. Like flooding elsewhere, many of the residents most impacted by the floods are Latinx and low-income Californians — many of whom lost access to running water during the severe drought just the year before. Finally, research shows that a “mega-storm,” accelerated by climate change, could be coming for California in the near future.  

These trends and forecasts highlight the need to address the climate crisis and its threat to water resilience. Food & Water Watch offers the following recommendations to state and federal governments:  

1. End the reliance on fossil fuels and move our food system away from the current factory farm model by banning new factory farms and fossil fuel extraction.
2. Support the resilience of water utilities across the country by investing in public drinking water and wastewater systems through legislation such as the Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity, and Reliability (WATER) Act. 
3. Prioritize environmental justice communities, as people of color and low-income communities face the biggest threats to water resilience and other harms caused by climate change.  

The report can be found here.