Southern Californians Saying Goodbye to Their Lawns and Lawnmowers

For southern California, the future is more people and less water. In the next ten years hundreds of thousands more folks are expected to make San Diego County their home. The populations of other areas in southern California are also expected to increase as well. All the while our supply of water is diminishing.

            In San Diego we get about half of our water from the Colorado River. The flow of the river has been diminishing for years. Because of global warming, this diminishing trend is expected to continue.[i] We get most of the rest of our water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River delta. A great deal of the flow of the river delta comes from the melting of the Sierra Mountains snowpack. The Sierra snowpack has declined in the last twenty years and, as with the Colorado River, is expected to diminish further due to climate change. The reductions may be as great as 30 to 70 percent from historic levels.[ii]

            Water is precious here. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at the place. We southern Californians go through water like crazy. The average American uses about 90 gallons of water a day for drinking, cooking, cleaning, and other purposes. The average San Diegan uses about 150 gallons of water a day. That extra 60 gallons of water that we use goes outside to keep our lawns and landscaping green. We like the weeks and weeks—months actually—of clear blue skies, but we also want to have nice lush lawns and other greenery around our houses and neighborhoods.

 

Google Earth image of northern San Diego County neighborhood. Note the native coastal sage scrub on the right next to the lush green lawns and trees around the houses. Making the landscape green on the left takes a lot of water.

As this article in the LA Times points out, many of the municipalities of the Southwest are giving residents incentives to restrict the watering of their lawns. By offering $1.4 million in incentives to residents to convert their lawns to native plants, xeriscaping, or artificial turf, Los Angeles has removed over one million square feet of lawn-watered grass from the yards of the city in less than five years.

            There are ways of maintaining some green and grass around homes, such as harvesting rainwater with rain barrels, and some municipalities, such as San Diego, are loosening the restrictions on the use of grey water, the water left over from washing machines, hand basins, showers, and baths, for use in watering lawns and landscaping. Anyway around it, things are changing water wise for San Diego and the rest of southern California.

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[i] Tootle, G., and T. Piechota. "Forecasting of Lower Colorado River Basin Streamflow Using Pacific Ocean Sea Surface Temperatures and ENSO". Proceedings of the 2004 World Water and Environmental Resources Congress: Critical Transitions in Water and Environmental Resources Management (2004): 234-47.

[ii] Hayhoe, K., et al. "Emissions Pathways, Climate Change, and Impacts on California." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U S A 101.34 (2004): 12422-27.