Salt and Salinity Management (Resource Management Strategy)

Unlike the crisis scenarios California routinely prepares for, chronic water quality problems like increasing salinity do not trigger overnight evacuations or mobilize teams of emergency personnel. Salinity generally shows up in localized areas, expands slowly, and produces incremental rather than event-based effects. Salinity impacts can be measured as yearly reduction of crop production and farmable land across an impacted region, lost jobs, higher utility rates, reduction of community growth potential, loss of habitat, premature corrosion of equipment, and lost opportunities. Salinity issues are rarely considered newsworthy until the impacts have already occurred.

Managing salt today can avoid significant cost increases. For one portion of California, a State Water Resources Control Board study found that Central Valley salinity accumulations, if unmanaged, are projected to cause a loss of $2.167 billion in California’s value of goods and services produced by 2030 (Howitt et al. 2009). Income is expected to decline by $941 million, employment by 29,270 jobs, and population by 39,440 due to the increase in commercial operating expenses incurred by water supplies that have higher salinity concentrations. The study examined the impact to irrigated agriculture, confined animal operations, food processors, and residential water users.

Potential benefits of implementing a salinity management program just in the Central Valley are estimated to be $10 billion by 2030. There have been similar studies conducted in other parts of the state and nation.

The Southern California Salinity Coalition was formed in 2002 to address the critical need to remove salt from water supplies and to preserve water resources in California (see www.socalsalinity.org/index.htm). The Multi-State Salinity Coalition addresses similar issues (see www.multi-statesalinitycoalition.com). Both groups indicate that proactive salt management through combinations of source control, treatment, storage, export, real time management with dilution and recycling, is economically beneficial.

Salinity management not only reduces salt loads that impact a region, it is also a key component of securing, maintaining, and recovering usable water supplies. Salt is ubiquitous throughout the environment and it is a conservative constituent meaning it is never destroyed, just concentrated or diluted and transported. It also means that the concentration and loads of salt within any given area will have direct impacts on most of the resource management strategies in place or currently being developed.

While there is no single solution that can be implemented to resolve increasing salinity, incremental management steps, such as those outlined in the Recommendations Section, can move the State forward to address this growing threat to the California economy.