Partnerships between water utilities, irrigation districts and other stakeholders in California will play a critical role in funding new infrastructure under the Water Resilience Portfolio Initiative announced in 2020 by Gov. Gavin Newsom, but a new study warns that benefits might not be evenly distributed without a proper structure to the partnership agreements.
California’s initiative is a multi-billion dollar effort that encourages different water utilities and irrigation districts to work together to build shared infrastructure to reduce the effects of droughts, but a number of questions remain regarding how best to structure these agreements.
In a new research article published March 15 in the journal Earth’s Future, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Cornell University explored partnership agreements in the context of the Friant-Kern Canal, which delivers water to irrigation districts and municipal utilities in the southern Central Valley of California.
Read more at Cornell University
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