Submitted by Kristin Dobbin on
Nearly one million people in California don’t have access to safe, accessible drinking water. Climate change, causing more frequent severe drought across the state, stands as a major obstacle for addressing this pressing environmental justice issue and implementing the state’s Human Right to Water (AB 685). With this project, we seek to proactively identify California communities at risk of losing their water supply under a range of future climate and water management solutions. This, in turn, will support improved emergency planning for drought response as well as the development of strategies to mitigate drought vulnerabilities. We will accomplish this goal by collecting public data and information to connect the surface water sources of drinking water systems to CalSim3, the state’s water management planning tool which models how surface water is distributed across the state.
To complete this project the student researcher(s) will work closely with the PI and graduate students to do the following for a list of community water systems in California: Use online drinking water databases and internet searches to obtain needed public records; Review these records to identify the sources of water used by the system and, if applicable, the proportion of the systems supply each source represents; Record this data and sources in a shared excel sheet. Upon completion of data collection students will have the opportunity to use the full data set compiled collaboratively by the whole team to ask and answer their own research questions and conduct data analysis or to develop informational materials on one or more specific water systems.
- Strong attention to detail
- Strong organizational skills
- Self-directed learner
- Desire to learn about drinking water access and environmental justice in California
- Ability to set and meet deadlines
- Basic familiarity with excel