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90 Part i california Water Figure 2.9 Gross per capita urban water use is now declining sOURcE: Authors’ calculations using data from California Water Plan Update (california department of Water Resources, various years). NOTEs: Water use is shown in gallons per capita per day (gpcd). Outdoor water use is much higher in inland areas because of hotter temperatures and larger lot sizes (hanak and davis 2006). The low-desert colorado River region, including areas such as Palm springs, has especially high per capita use from golf-based tourism. higher-value crops have considerably increased the real dollar value per acre- foot of irrigation water.12 Although comparable trends in environmental water allocations are not available, it is likely that new environmental water dedications play some role in the tightening of overall supplies available for agricultural and urban use in recent decades.13 During this time, California’s population and economy have both increased, reflecting a substantial decoupling of economic prosperity from the availability of abundant water supplies. Having more water is no longer as fundamentally important as when California’s economy was based largely on irrigated agriculture or mining. The declining trends in gross agricultural and urban water use may have accelerated in the late 2000s, as a multiyear drought and new restrictions on 12. From 1972 to 1995, the real economic value of output per acre-foot of applied irrigation water increased by 19.3 percent when using the Gross Domestic Product deflator to measure inflation, and by 92.6 percent when deflated using U.S. Department of Agriculture index of prices received by farmers (Brunke, Howitt, and Sumner 2005). 13. For example, since 1993, the federal Central Valley Project Improvement Act has restricted supplies to some agricultural contractors south of the Delta (Chapter 2). Overall pumping through the Delta continued to increase during the late 1990s and early 2000 as State Water Project contractors increased their draw (Figure 2.4), but much of the additional water went to storage for dry years in groundwater banks and Metropolitan Water District of Southern California’s new surface reservoir, Diamond Valley Lake. Since the 1990s, Los Angeles has cut its diversions from the Mono Lake and Owens Valley region in response to environmental rulings. Inland Inland (without the Colorado River) California Coastal Gross water use (gpcd)20001995199019851980197219671960 2005 350 300 250 200 150 400 100