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Orchestrating Integrity
"The moral authority of science" is the high-falutin phrase water czar Steve Ritchie uses to describe what CALFED hopes to gain from its emerging science program. The program - barely on paper yet but energized by the August hire of a chief scientist - faces the daunting task of making sure those managing the state's water supplies and trying to protect its endangered fish have solid science, or at least darn good guesses, to inform their decisionmaking.
"If this is going to work, the science has to be isolated from environmental politics," says the Bay Institute's Anitra Pawley, who has worked on several aspects of the new program.
Of all the tools available, perhaps only science can budge veteran players of all stripes from their long-held positions in the water wars, and provide those investing billions of public and private dollars in what is purported to be the most ambitious water management and ecosystem restoration program ever undertaken with some way to measure success.
Most daunting among the new program's objectives, perhaps, will be creating connectivity between CALFED's myriad programs, getting entrenched research efforts to march behind a new drummer, and assuring stakeholders that the best possible science will always be available and never be ignored.
"It will provide CALFED with public transparency and accountability, so we don't get bogged down in these annual circuses over who gets what water and why," says Tim Ramirez from the office of the State's Secretary for Resources.
A tall order, even for science. But the program's interim lead chief scientist, hired to jumpstart the program over the next 18 months, is optimistic. "Science lives by rules and by debate, and we can bring those rules to the process," says Sam Luoma of the U.S. Geological Survey, a hydrologist who has worked in Bay-Delta research for over 30 years. "Science will help us move the debate continually forward, and help eliminate the train wrecks."
Luoma sees five kinds of challenges for his new program: narrowing the uncertainties about how some ecosystem processes work; "learning as we go" through adaptive management (science aimed at discovering how specific actions, such as adding a Delta cross channel, actually affect flows or fish, for example); creating regional and ecosystem scale monitoring programs to assess restoration progress; interfacing with regulators and providing them with peer review ("We'll use expert panels to target critical regulatory questions," he says); and communicating research results to the public, water managers, stakeholders, legislators and other scientists.
"We have to build a science program that's broad based enough so that when surprises come we meet them with some talent, some study and some knowledge, so we don't have to start from zero every time," says Luoma.
Though the current flurry of paperwork and meetings to launch the science program is a "positive first step" says Pawley, it's been too long coming. Proposals for the program, and for its essential arm called the CALFED Comprehensive Monitoring, Assessment and Research Program CMARP, have been the subject of countless committee meetings for years already. (Implementation of CMARP, designed to provide info needed for adaptive management, is now under the umbrella of the new science program). Pawley hopes the science program will help prioritize the long list of concepts languishing in the appendices of CMARP plans, not to mention intensify the effort to define indicators of CALFED success.
One thing the program is sure to do is coordinate with the many existing state and federal, public and private, research efforts and help them jive with CALFED's actions. As a result, some government scientists at least, may have renewed mandates, some may have to break out of their sandboxes, some may find their data used by incoming CALFED brainpower with more time and money to do analysis.
Despite the potential threat of federal oversight in the form of a federal scientist at the helm, state scientists are more hopeful than fearful. "We'll change and evolve," says Cal Fish & Game's Perry Herrgesell, also a lead manager in the decades-old Interagency Ecological Program (IEP), which has always done the lion's share of the research on flows and fish for the state and federal water projects. "We already have an impressive infrastructure, with lots of boats and lots of scientists. We have to be part of the game." Six months ago, observers say IEP wanted little to do with CALFED science management.
"Nobody wants the CALFED science program to be doing field work," says Pawley. "We just want them to help prioritize and coordinate."
Having centralized scientific oversight - CALFED is even considering a brand new one-stop science center - is bound to create some ripples, and Luoma seems the man for the job. The word on the street is that he's both a good listener and a man of action. "I took this job because I've always felt there wasn't enough good science incorporated in ecosystem restoration," he says.
"I took this job because it looks to me as if CALFED is serious about providing the funding and opportunities to give us this science."
Contact: Sam Luoma (916)653-9715
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