DDBA 8522 Week 3 Transition Burden Analysis Example

Balance by 2042, but Who Pays Until Then? A Burden Analysis of an Overdrafted Groundwater Basin Cutting Agricultural Pumping on a Twenty-Year Schedule, Following the Groups That Bear the Cost While the Water Table Is Still Falling

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Walden University

DDBA 8522: Seminar in Sustainability

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Balance by 2042, but Who Pays Until Then? A Burden Analysis of an Overdrafted Groundwater Basin Cutting Agricultural Pumping on a Twenty-Year Schedule, Following the Groups That Bear the Cost While the Water Table Is Still Falling

The Plan and Its Promise

A composite groundwater basin in California's San Joaquin Valley has been pumped faster than it recharges for decades. Under the state's groundwater sustainability law, the local agency adopted a plan in 2022 to bring pumping into balance with recharge by 2042, a twenty-year schedule. The plan cuts allowable agricultural pumping in stages: 10 percent by 2027, 25 percent by 2032 and about 40 percent by 2042, mainly by fallowing farmland. It promises a stable water table by the end of the schedule. Famiglietti (2014) described groundwater depletion as a global crisis largely invisible until wells fail, and this plan is a serious response. But plans of this kind focus on the end state. This analysis asks who pays during the twenty years when cuts are phased in and the water table is still falling.

Why the Water Table Keeps Falling

Because cuts are phased, pumping continues to exceed recharge for most of the period. The plan's own projections show the water table dropping about another 30 feet by 2032 before it begins to level off. Shallow wells will go dry during those years even though the plan is succeeding on its own terms.

Who Pays

Four groups bear most of the cost during the transition.

Households on shallow domestic wells, mostly in small unincorporated communities, lose water first. About 1,400 domestic wells in the basin are shallower than the water table is projected to reach by 2032. Deepening a well or connecting to a public system costs $20,000 to $60,000, and many of these households earn well below the county median.

Farmworkers lose work as land is fallowed. Fallowing 25 percent of irrigated acreage by 2032 would remove an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 seasonal jobs, depending on which crops are idled.

Small farms with junior or limited pumping allocations face proportionally larger cuts and have less capital to adjust by switching crops or buying water.

Local governments and schools lose property tax and spending as fallowed land and lost jobs ripple through small towns.

Large farms bear costs too, but they have more ways to absorb them: buying allocations from others, shifting to higher-value crops or drilling deeper.

Why the Timing Matters

Bansal and DesJardine (2014) argued that sustainability is fundamentally about time, about the tradeoffs between present and future. Slawinski and Bansal (2015) showed how organizations handle tensions between short-term and long-term goals, and how some favor short-term predictability over long-term outcomes. The basin plan makes a long-term promise, but its costs fall in the short and medium term, and they fall on groups with the least capacity to bear them and the least voice in the agency that wrote the plan. A plan can be sustainable by its end date and unjust along the way.

What Would Spread the Burden

Three measures would shift some cost away from those least able to bear it. A domestic well mitigation fund, financed by a per-acre-foot fee on pumping, could pay to deepen or replace wells that go dry. Fallowing could prioritize land whose owners are paid to idle it, with payments partly shared with farmworkers through a transition fund. And the agency could set aside allocations for small farms during the early stages.

Who Decided, and Who Was in the Room

The groundwater agency's board has five members: three appointed by the largest irrigation districts, one by the county and one by the cities. No board seat represents domestic well owners or farmworkers, and public comment on the plan came mainly from growers and water districts. The plan's analysis of impacts on domestic wells appears in an appendix and was revised only after a legal aid organization submitted comments. The distribution of costs over time is partly a result of who designed the schedule.

What the Agency Could Measure

The agency already monitors groundwater levels at about 140 wells. It could add a simple annual report on the number of domestic wells that went dry, the acres fallowed by farm size and the number of seasonal farm jobs in the basin. Those figures would make the transition's costs visible each year rather than only at the end, and would let the board adjust the schedule or the mitigation fund if costs fall harder than projected.

Limits

The analysis uses the plan's projections, which may prove optimistic or pessimistic. The job and well estimates are approximate and should be refined with county data.

References

Bansal, P., & DesJardine, M. R. (2014). Business sustainability: It is about time. Strategic Organization, 12(1), 70-78. https://doi.org/10.1177/1476127013520265

Famiglietti, J. S. (2014). The global groundwater crisis. Nature Climate Change, 4(11), 945-948. https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2425

Slawinski, N., & Bansal, P. (2015). Short on time: Intertemporal tensions in business sustainability. Organization Science, 26(2), 531-549. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2014.0960