California Drought-Fighters Turn to Australians for Help - Bloomberg Business

California Drought-Fighters Turn to Australians for Help - Bloomberg Business: "Australian farms and cities manage almost every drop of available water to make the most of supplies on the driest inhabited continent. No wonder California is looking Down Under for help with its record drought.
Four years of historic water loss have left the most-populous U.S. state with depleted reservoirs, fallow farmland and billions of dollars in emergency spending to keep faucets open. Unlike Australia, where water is tightly regulated and tracked by meters, usage in parts of California is unmonitored, urban supply remains cheap, and aquifers can be tapped by almost any landowner with a permit to drill a well.
“We are very, very inefficient as a society on how we use water,” said Felicia Marcus, chair of the State Water Resources Control Board, which regulates supplies for 39 million residents in California, the nation’s biggest water user and top agricultural producer.
While the state is a long way from copying a foreign system with different property-rights laws and the world’s only large-scale market for trading water, Marcus and about a dozen other state officials met in Sacramento with an Australian delegation in December to cherry-pick ideas. Some, like mandated monitoring and conservation, were among the emergency measures imposed by Governor Jerry Brown this month that included an order for cities and towns to reduce consumption by 25 percent."



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