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The San Joaquin Valley—California’s largest farming region—has the largest groundwater overdraft in the state. This makes the valley ground zero for implementing the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). PPIC has done extensive work on what SGMA means for this region, including analyzing promising solutions to bring basins into balance.

We recently reviewed the 36 new groundwater sustainability plans (GSPs) in the region’s 11 critically overdrafted basins. Our goal is to help build shared understanding of how well these plans tackle several core objectives: assessing the extent of groundwater overdraft; developing a realistic portfolio of projects and management actions to close this gap by 2040; and effectively addressing undesirable results of overdraft, with a focus on dry drinking water wells and land subsidence.