Caught between climate change and multi-year droughts, California communities are tapping groundwater and siphoning surface water at unsustainable rates.
As this year's below-average rainfall accentuates the problem, a public-private partnership in the Monterey/Salinas region has created a novel water recycling program that could serve as a model for parched communities everywhere.As Stanford civil engineers report in the journal Water, this now urbanized region, still known for farming and fishing, has used water from four sources — urban stormwater runoff, irrigation drainage, food processing water and traditional municipal wastewater — and treated it so that this recycled water now supplies one-third of all drinking water on
