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While it may be inevitable that the world’s water resources will continue to be developed to meet growing economic and consumptive needs, it is not inevitable that further development need come at the expense of aquatic ecosystems. At least in theory.
NHI is devising concepts on how to embed environmental restoration components into major water infrastructure construction, water transfers, or other supply augmentation schemes. For example, by creating additional flexibility in how water is stored and released, it should be possible to create opportunities for environmental restoration, including creating more natural flow patterns in developed rivers, as NHI’s conjunctive water management work seeks to do. The next step will be the implementation of pilot projects to demonstrate the feasibility of these concepts.
This work will devise and employ the next generation of market transactions for meeting environmental water requirements. Beyond the creation and acquisition of instream flows, NHI will design transactions involving reservoir storage rights, groundwater banking rights, infrastructure reoperation rights, flood inundation rights, water transfers with an environmental component, and a myriad of other devices, most of which now exist only in theory. For instance, riparian farmlands are often a choke point constraining the potential to restore seasonal inundation of floodplains, a characteristic of dynamic and unimpaired river systems. It may be essential to negotiate rights (easements) allowing flooding of these lands, not necessarily because of the inherent biodiversity value of those particular parcels, but because they are the linchpin to restoring high biodiversity values in an entire river reach above or below them.
Another example of essential water supply improvements opening the door to broad-scale ecosystem improvements is found in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where NHI is working to address seismic vulnerability of the water supply while restoring vast tracts of wetland.
NHI is focusing on demonstrations in California, since there is great potential to propagate successes from this “learning laboratory” elsewhere in the United States and internationally. We recognize that this model of integrating restoration into water supply planning will be more difficult to promote in countries where environmental amenities are still regarded as a luxury good. However, we believe that successful demonstrations from locales such as California will help accelerate the pace of this model’s adoption world-wide.
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