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california Water Today 133 Strengths and Weaknesses in Today’s Water System California’s water system today has both impressive assets and significant vulnerabilities. A major asset is the sophisticated physical infrastructure that enables water to be delivered to urban and agricultural demand centers and successfully protects residents from frequent floods. Vulnerabilities in this infrastructure—which threaten water supplies and increase flood risk—include a fragile water supply conveyance hub in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, deteriorating flood control structures, chronic overdraft in some major ground- water basins, and increasing problems of water salinity and other contaminants. Another major asset is the resilience of California’s economy, which has shown an ability to adapt and continue to grow, despite increasing water scar- city. Continued adaptation seems possible, with suitable management and policy changes, given the economy’s decreasing reliance on water as a direct input into production, the sizable proportion of agricultural water still allocated to low-value crops, and the large share of urban water now used for landscape irrigation. However, economic adaptation potential is limited by regional eco- nomic concerns (which can make agricultural communities reluctant to sell or divert water from lower-value crops) and difficulties of reducing outdoor water use by millions of California households and businesses. For all their complexity, California’s diverse water management institutions also have some strong positive features that can serve the state well in confront- ing the challenges it faces. The state has many dedicated, highly trained staff working on all aspects of its water system, and their decentralized governance means that water managers are quite responsive to local water user needs. However, this system will fail to satisfy the broader needs of the economy and the environment without better coordination that aligns management oversight with the appropriate geographical scale (e.g., basins and watersheds) and that connects activities across different functional areas to benefit water supply, flood protection, water quality, and ecosystems. Similar challenges of coordination exist among state and federal agencies, which also face resource constraints and limits on their authority. Inadequate technical information and scientific capacity is a particular weakness in California’s current institutional landscape. Decentralization, fragmentation, and limited resources to collect and analyze information on water use and to support solution-oriented science by major state and federal agencies have hobbled the state’s ability to address the major