MANAGEMENT ASPECTS OF CYCLIC STORAGE OF WATER IN AQUIFER SYSTEMS1

ABSTRACT: Most of California's precipitation falls at the wrong place in the wrong season in relation to the water needs. Redistribution and regulation are essential. Aquifer systems – groundwater basins – can provide a share of the future cyclic storage regulation. There are some differences in management concepts in using a full basin in comparison with a partially dewatered basin. Legal, water quality, and physical impacts on aquifer systems, including subsidence, are concerns. Storage may be for the benefit of overlying water users or for distant areas. Extraction during dry periods or recharge methods will require careful planning. Existing rights and uses and equitable treatment of all parties must be assured. Financial compensation may be involved. Changes in methods of operation or degree of self-determination by affected water agencies will require committed watermanship to resolve. Legislation or amendments to organic acts may be needed but much can be accomplished within existing statutes. Environmental impacts which can be avoided by not using large surface storage sites are important. Energy for pumping will be a key consideration. About 40 percent of California is underlain by aquifer systems. This resource offers major potential in overcoming the maldistribution of natural water resources.     

Obligations to animals are not necessarily based on rights

I offer a very qualified argument to the effect that rights are grounded in a certain sort of prejudice that privileges individualistic and perhaps masculinist ways of thinking about moral life. I also propose that we look carefully at other conceptions of social ontology and moral life, including the much discussed care conception.     

Efficient and Practical Approaches to Ground‐Water Right Transfers Under the Prior Appropriation Doctrine and the Snake River Example1

Abstract: Water right transfers are one of the basic means of implementing changes in water use in the highly appropriated water resource systems of the western United States. Many of these systems are governed by the Prior Appropriation Doctrine, which was not originally intended for application to ground‐water pumping and the conjunctive management of ground water and surface water, and thus creates an administrative challenge. That challenge results from the fact that ground‐water pumping can affect all interconnected surface‐water bodies and the effects may be immeasurably small relative to surface water discharge and greatly attenuated in time. Although we may have the ability to calculate the effects of ground‐water pumping and transfers of pumping location on surface‐water bodies, mitigating for all the impacts of each individual transfer is sufficiently inefficient that it impedes the transfer process, frustrates water users, and consequently inhibits economic development. A more holistic approach to ground‐water right transfers, such as a ground‐water accounting or banking scheme, may adequately control transfer third‐party effects while reducing mitigation requirements on individual transfers. Acceptance of an accounting scheme can accelerate the transfer process, and possibly reduce the administrative burden.     

Indigenous benefits and carbon offset schemes: An Australian case study

The nexus between human rights and the environment is a key issue for climate policymakers and Indigenous peoples around the world. We combine national spatial, social and biological datasets from Australia to describe where Indigenous carbon projects are happening, why Indigenous people are participating, and how effective these schemes might be at marrying Indigenous co-benefit, biodiversity and carbon emission mitigation goals. Our study shows that many Indigenous people engage in carbon offset schemes as part of their broader cultural responsibility for landscapes, and that they seek to grow the relationship between social and ecological benefits. It also highlights the challenges associated with designing carbon offset schemes that address the impacts of climate change and respond to Indigenous peoples’ world views about what is required to sustain cultural-social-ecological systems.     

Variable Irrigation District Action in Water Trading

Irrigation districts (IDs) in the American west are highly diverse in their economic attributes and local water scarcity circumstances. This diversity may affect reallocative action via water transactions as scarcity rises. The institutional background defining and constraining IDs is described here. For a Texas study region the progress of permanent water right transfers involving IDs is documented and examined. An econometric analysis of multiple decades of ID water transfer activities in the Lower Rio Grande Valley finds that IDs with larger initial water right holdings and higher populations in nearby cities are more likely to participate in agricultural‐to‐municipal water transfer activities. The findings suggest that consolidation of smaller water right holding IDs may be an avenue for quickening the pace of reallocation, especially in more populated areas.     

The morality behind sustainability

The concepts of sustainable agriculture, organic agriculture, regenerative agriculture, and alternative agriculture are receiving increasing attention in the academic and popular literature on present trends and future directions of agriculture. Whatever the reasons for this interest, there nevertheless remain differences of opinion concerning what counts as a sustainable agriculture. One of the reasons for these differences is that the moral underpinnings of a policy of sustainability are not clear. By understanding the moral obligatoriness of sustainability, we can come to understand precisely what must be sustained, and by implication, how. This article discusses the arguments that can be advanced for sustaining anything and initially concludes that our obligations to future generations entail sustaining more than just sufficient food production or an adequate resource base. Indeed, a tradition of care and community must underlie whatever agricultural and resource strategies we are to develop under the rubric of sustainability. A consideration of the larger social and environmental system in which agriculture operates and the constraints this system places on agriculture forces us to recognize that sustainability has to do with larger institutional issues, including our ability to incorporate our common morality democratically into our institutions, practices, and technologies.     

Animal Rights: Autonomy and Redundancy

Even if animal liberation were to be adopted, would rights for animals be redundant – or even deleterious? Such an objection, most prominently voiced by L. W. Sumner and Paul W. Taylor, is misguided, risks an anthropocentric and anthropomorphic conception of autonomy and freedom, overly agent-centered rights conceptions, and an overlooking of the likely harmful consequences of positing rights for humans but not for nonhuman animals. The objection in question also stems from an overly pessimistic construal of autonomy-infringements thought to result from extending rights to animals, and also, of confusions that supposedly may ensue from ascribing animal rights. Whether or not a case for animal liberation and/or animal rights can cogently be made, the redundancy-or-worse objection to animal rights need pose no barrier.     

线性工程切割耕地的权属调整方法及系统实现——以保阜高速顺平段沿线土地整治项目为例

论文以高速公路切割的耕地地块为研究对象,根据权属调整的不同方向,将权属调整分为所有权置换和使用权流转两种类型,并将权属调整的方法分为面积法和价值法;在GIS服务软件SuperMap iServer支持下,建立了一个交互式权属调整应用系统,以保阜高速顺平段沿线的高于铺镇、腰山镇土地整治项目区中的切割耕地为案例,应用系统生成了项目区高速公路沿线切割耕地的权属调整方案。研究结果表明,线性工程切割耕地需进行权属调整以保障农业生产,研究采用的权属调整方法符合当地实际情况,利用权属调整系统可以自动生成推荐权属调整方案,并可以根据用户需求进行调整,同时系统可以对权属调整相关数据进行动态管理。     

Integrating justice in Nature-Based Solutions to avoid nature-enabled dispossession

Heavily featured over the last few years in global research and policy agreements, Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) remain however exposed to much debate over the ways their current design and ability to achieve both environmental goals and social needs. As they become mainstream climate mitigation and adaptation options, their capacity to deliver expected benefits, especially when contemplating equity and justice, is at least uncertain. Through a critical review of existing debates and perspectives on NBS, this paper questions their uptake and points at the frequent embeddedness of NBS in speculative and elite-based development paths in both urban and rural areas. We present an alternative, justice-oriented approach to NBS so that projects can avoid nature-enable dispossession and instead build nature-inspired justice that prioritizes the needs, identities, and livelihoods of the most ecologically and socially vulnerable residents.     

流域管理:权力产权的外部性问题

水资源的自然、经济和社会属性要求政府对流域的开发和利用进行管理,以解决个体使用者的外部性问题.但实际上由于政府并不是只有单一目标的统一组织,在分权体制下,不同区域、部门的政府单元掌握着实际权力.由于权力也存在外部性,各管理区域、部门之间存在利益冲突,导致政府的管理失效.解决政府权力外部性的办法:一是要转变政府职能,改变政府的激励机制;二是严格界定各政府单元的权力界限,对流域进行统一管理.