Center News and Notes
The West’s fires and floods of recent years share two common features beyond their immediate harms: they are disasters exacerbated by climate change, and they have wrought havoc with the insurance industry’s barriers against homeowner losses.
- Happenings
Stanford News Service writer Melissa De Witte reflects on her experience scouting trails for and hiking the 22-mile route of "Stanford to the Sea," an annual Bill Lane Center tradition. Except this year, we didn't quite make it to the sea. "Without…
On May 22, a tentative deal to reduce water use by entities drawing from the Colorado River was reached, averting near-term potential disaster and predictions that the river could all but stop. While still pending federal approval, the deal marks a…
Sycamore Street in the Mission Fields neighborhood of Carmel in January 1995. Orville Myers/The Monterey Herald
- & the West
The floods driven by winter storms are nothing new in Monterey County, but the early March catastrophe that swelled the Pajaro and Salinas rivers and drowned farmworker communities exposes the extreme inequality built into flood-control systems.
The Colorado River basin supplies water to over 40 million people and five million acres of farmland across two countries, seven U.S. states, and up to 30 federally recognized Native American Tribes. Since 2000, consumptive uses and losses of the…