Dear Deeply Readers,

Welcome to the archives of Water Deeply. While we paused regular publication of the site on November 1, 2018, we are happy to serve as an ongoing public resource on water resilience. We hope you’ll enjoy the reporting and analysis that was produced by our dedicated community of editors and contributors.

We continue to produce events and special projects while we explore where the on-site journalism goes next. If you’d like to reach us with feedback or ideas for collaboration you can do so at [email protected].

BROWSE THE WATER DEEPLY ARCHIVES

Why California’s Cannabis Regulations Could Have Indirect Water Benefits

New regulations that have come with state marijuana laws could spur more effective environmental management of California’s streams, writes Kathleen Stone of U.C. Davis.

Written by Kathleen Stone Published on Read time Approx. 3 minutes
Cannabis farmer Dylan Turner applies fertilizer to a crop of plants at Sunboldt Farms, a small family farm in Humboldt County, California, in 2016.Robert GauthierLos Angeles Times via Getty Images

The external pressures for cannabis cultivation and the immediate need for water use regulation may provide opportunities for broader, long-sought environmental objectives in California. Specifically, legislation and state programs regulating water use for cannabis cultivation could produce collateral benefits for environmental instream flow and water quality management in general.

The Medical Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act included several state laws from 2015 and 2016. Of these, Assembly Bill 243 and Senate Bill 837, passed in October 2015 and June 2016, respectively, include several provisions for regulating water use for cannabis cultivation.

Assembly Bill 243 established responsibilities for state agencies to regulate the impact of medical marijuana cultivation on the environment. The bill called for several agencies, including the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the California State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB), to reduce the effects of cultivation on the environment and required the SWRCB to regulate marijuana cultivation water use and waste discharge.

The bill also has the California Department of Food and Agriculture administer a cultivation licensing system. These state agencies would coordinate with local agencies to enforce environmental cultivation regulations. Senate Bill 837 required the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and SWRCB to further develop water diversion and use standards for cannabis cultivation. The bill also requires that cultivators specify water diversion sources and report diversion amounts to the SWRCB at least annually.

This previous legislation was adopted into the Medicinal and Adult-Use Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act, enacted as Senate Bill 94 in June 2017. This bill increased regulatory authority for state agencies in permitting and required cultivators to report additional cultivation specifications.

With these laws, several state agencies were tasked with developing programs and policies to regulate and enforce cultivation water use. The table below summarizes the main state agencies involved in developing regulation and the primary purpose of each policy and program.

State agencies involved in regulating cannabis water use.

The SWRCB, working with the California Department of Food and Agriculture and California Department of Fish and Wildlife, developed the Cannabis Cultivation Policy: Principles and Guidelines for Cannabis Cultivation, released in October 2017. This policy outlines regulatory jurisdictions for state agencies regarding water quality, waste discharge, groundwater use, instream flow, monitoring, licensing and enforcement requirements for cannabis cultivation.

An exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act allowed timely development of statewide instream flow requirements. The policy establishes 14 regional boundaries for cultivation water use regulation and identifies nine priority regions with sensitive salmon migration habitats, shown below.

The immediate need for cultivation regulation and the development of these state agency programs, which call for environmentally focused regulations of water quality and flows, has provided an opportunity to expedite long-sought environmental objectives and flow regulations for streams affected by cannabis production, and perhaps environmental flow management in general.

Progress on environmental flow management often seems slow or stalemated in California. External pressures for cannabis cultivation and its regulation could bring broader progress and precedence on instream flow and water quality management.

Water policy often moves in mysterious ways. External forces sometimes are needed to innovate over the status quo. Just as a drought was needed to finally bring groundwater management to California, perhaps marijuana is needed to bring more effective environmental management to California’s streams.

This story first appeared on California WaterBlog, published by the University of California, Davis Center for Watershed Sciences.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Water Deeply.

cannabis instream flow rivers

Republish this article

Our mission is to empower stakeholders and the wider public with high quality information, insights, and analysis on critical global issues. To help achieve this, we encourage you to republish the text of any article that contains a Republish button on your own news outlet.

By copying the HTML below, you agree to adhere to our republishing guidelines.

By copying the HTML below, you agree to adhere to our republishing guidelines. Click to expand

  1. In republishing any of our articles:

    Ensure that you include a line of our HTML tracking code on every article you republish. This is a lightweight, efficient way for us to see the number of page views of each specific article published on our partners’ websites. This does not affect page layout, nor does it provide any information about your users, other web pages on your site, or any further data. By copying and pasting the HTML code in the box below, the tracking code is automatically included.

    If, for any reason, you do not copy the code prepared for you, you must paste this code snippet into the end of the article in your CMS: 

    <img src="http://ping.newsdeeply.com/pixel.gif?key=134246&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsdeeply.com%2Fwater%2Fcommunity%2F2018%2F07%2F27%2Fwhy-californias-cannabis-regulations-could-have-indirect-water-benefits" alt="" />

  2. Adhere to the guidelines below:
    • Edit our stories only to reflect references to time (e.g. "today" to "yesterday"), location (e.g. "New York" to "here") or editorial style; do not edit the wording of our articles.
    • Include all the links within the story.
    • Credit our authors and partner institutions — ideally in the byline. We prefer “Author Name, Institution”
    • Note at the top and/or bottom of the story that it originally appeared on Water Deeply. This note should include a direct link to the original article and a sentence that offers the reader the opportunity to join the Water’s mailing list. Our recommended example is:
      • This should read : “This article originally appeared on Water Deeply. You can find the original here. For important news about water issues and the American West, you can sign up to the Water email list.”
    • Do not republish a photo without our written permission. Some sources don't allow their images to be republished without permission.
    • Do not translate a story into another language without our written permission.
    • We often republish pieces from our partners. If you want to republish a partner’s story, you must credit the original partner and include a “via News Deeply” link.
    • Note that News Deeply considers the publication date to be the date marked on the story, and is not responsible for any content that you choose to repost.
    • After republication on the partner website, if you make an accompanying post on social media referencing the republished article, you must include the relevant Deeply social media handle in such post. For example, (i) for Twitter posts this means adding the appropriate @Deeply tag such as @SyriaDeeply, @WaterDeeply, or @WomensGirlsHub and (ii) for Facebook this means tagging the appropriate Deeply page in your Facebook post.
    • News Deeply material may not to be provided, in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, to third parties or affiliates for redistribution through those entities, unless you have received prior written approval from News Deeply.
    • You may not automatically or systematically republish any material from our sites; all stories must be chosen individually for republishing.
    • You may not sell our content or republish it for commercial purposes without our prior written consent.
    • We reserve the right to request that any partner ceases republication of our content, including but not limited to if the guidelines listed above not being followed.
    • If you have any questions or concerns please contact [email protected]

Suggest your story or issue.

Send

Share Your Story.

Have a story idea? Interested in adding your voice to our growing community?

Learn more
× Dismiss
We have updated our Privacy Policy with a few important changes specific to General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and our use of cookies. If you continue to use this site, you consent to our use of cookies. Read our full Privacy Policy here.
Accept