Safe & Sustainable Water Consumption
Without Enforcement, Regulations on Water Exports are Worthless
This post originally appeared on Maven’s Notebook on April 17, 2026
Two terms are often used by legal and policy experts when discussing water consumption: safe yield[1] and sustainable yield.[2] They are sometimes used interchangeably, and they describe the same general concept: the amount of water that can be diverted from surface or groundwater without significant environmental impacts or inequitable social and economic consequences. They arose, however, from different processes.
Safe yield has its roots in property rights and the court proceedings that were employed to determine and assign them; it can apply to both surface and groundwater. It’s a legally intensive and orderly approach to water distribution, but it’s only equitable if small or minimally funded parties receive fair treatment during court proceedings to determine allocations for every water user.
In California the term sustainable yield emerged in the passage of the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). It is meant to provide a framework for long-term groundwater management that avoids the impacts associated with critically overdrafted basins, such as dry wells and land subsidence. It remains unclear, however, how well the sustainable yield benchmark will prove given SGMA has a long implementation timeline and enforcement of the act’s requirements has been limited to date.
Both “safe” and “sustained” yields have been used to propose or determine surface water allocations for the environment through legal, legislative, and regulatory mechanisms, including federal agency biological opinions for Endangered Species Act compliance, the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, wildlife refuge deliveries, environmental water accounts, and minimum instream flows proposed in the Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan.
Nevertheless, regardless of the terminology used, California’s water management rules and enforcement policies are failing to provide adequate water to sustain rivers and prevent ongoing groundwater overdraft.
We have ample science and technical knowledge to ensure our use of water is sustainable. Regrettably, there remains a lack of political will to enforce limits on unreasonable and unsustainable water use. This lack of will is most evident in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay-Delta watershed, where federal and state projects divert massive amounts of freshwater out of our rivers for corporate agricultural empires. Despite decades of environmental decline, state regulators have not updated or enforced rules to protect vulnerable ecosystems from excessive diversions; and now, at the behest of the Governor, they are moving ahead with a deregulatory scheme of “voluntary agreements” that would provide insufficient additional freshwater flows while deferring any enforcement for years.
Meanwhile on the federal side, the Trump regime has made maximizing water deliveries to a small but immensely powerful cabal of Central Valley corporate growers and Southern California developers its primary goal. Water continues to flow to money.[3] Until we change that equation, nothing changes.