 Our next speaker is Dr. David Perkey, who's also affiliated with SEI's U.S. Center, and like his two colleagues here that we've heard from here in this Ph.D. in hydrology at Cal Davis. There's a pattern here. Dr. Perkey serves as SEI's theme leader for MES, managing environmental systems, and he also leads the water work in the U.S. Center. And he has been one of the developers of the WEAP tool, which, again, is increasingly widely used. What was it, 13,000? Yeah, which is an impressive number for a special purpose tool. And his research interest also extend to such things as impacts of climate change on water resources, surface groundwater interaction, and trans-boundary flows. Dr. Perkey's presentation, what's law got to do with it? I see why Tina's here. SEI participation in the California water rights process. This is an interesting study that examines SEI's role in supporting the implementation of the Water Quality Control Plan in California's Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which is a very complex and contentious environment, both physically and legally. And he raises several provocative questions concerning the relationship between science, policy, law, and actually responsibility. So, David? So thanks for the organizers for organizing this session and for allowing me to present. Apologies to Tina Turner for sort of taking liberties with the 1980s classic What's Love Got to Do with It? The title of my talk is What's Law Got to Do with It? And we're going to talk a bit about how we're engaging with legal processes and some of the work we're doing. And at the heart of this project is this document called the Porter-Cologne Water Quality Act from the California State Water Quality Control Board, all 67 pages of the PDF of it. So as you can imagine, there's a lot of dense, verbose legal language inside of this document, some of which is pertinent, some of which is like, why did they write it? For example, Section 13,000, the legislative finding. The legislature declares a primary interest in the conservation control and utilization of the water resources of the state and that the quality of all the water of the state shall be protected. The legislature further declares that activities which affect the quality of waters of the state shall be regulated to attain the highest water quality, which is reasonable, considering all demands on those waters and the total values involved, beneficial and detrimental, economic, sociable, tangible and intangible. Section 13,240, each regional board shall formulate and adopt water quality control plans for all areas of the region. Such plans shall conform with the policy stated in Chapter 1. Section 13,241, water quality objectives. Each board shall establish such water quality objectives in its water quality control plans, as in the judgment will ensure the reasonable protection of beneficial uses and the prevention of newtons. And finally, in Section 13,242, implementation. The program of implementation for achieving water quality objectives shall include a description of the nature of actions, which may be necessary to achieve objectives, including recommendations for appropriate action by any public or private entity. Often when I read stuff like that, I think the things that you see written at the bottom there, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But this last section is very important because this is saying the state of California can impose actions on any private or public user of water resources. This means water rights, people. This means you get to use the water. You don't get to use the water because we have objectives about how the water quality control plan will be implemented. And that's real. That's livelihoods. That's economics. That's the, you know, those are real decisions that have to get made. And there are legal proceedings which are going on to do that just now. Just a brief tour of the California water system. It rains a lot in the north. It doesn't rain so much in the south. People live in the south. People don't live in the north. So we've built this huge system of pipelines and canals. It's quite heroic. If you ever have a chance to visit California, it's quite an impressive feat of engineering what we've achieved. Everything comes down to a point where the Sacramento and the San Joaquin River is joined before they flow out into the San Francisco Bay. This is called the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta. It's actually an amazing place if you ever get a chance to visit it. It's basically our Holland. It's a tidal estuary where there's mixing of saltwater and freshwater. We actually, at the northern part of the Delta, we have a canal which takes water out of the main Sacramento River and diverts it around the main channel to the ocean so that it can be pumped to that large blob at the bottom there, which is called the Banks Pumping Plant, where we export lots of water to LA and to agriculture south of the Delta. This whole transfer system keeps water from going around a whole series of Delta islands which are basically located in a tidal estuary. Like I said, it's our Holland. Some of these islands are actually below sea level, so there's levees that keep the water out of the land. And if those levees fail, the islands go underwater. There's two in a endangered and listed environment in species in the region. One is the Delta Smelt, which is endemic to the Delta. And one is the California Chinook Salmon, which actually migrates through the Delta with spawning grounds upstream. So you have this ecological consideration. The water that's exported from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta gets shipped south to service the water supply needs of the state's largest city, the whole Los Angeles metropolitan area, as well as serving as a water supply for some of the most important irrigated agricultural systems in the world in the San Joaquin Valley. So this is really the linchpin of the California water system where all the different interests and conflicts come together and where law is applied to try to resolve them. And at the current time, the State Water Resource Control Board is developing a water quality control plan for the Bay Delta system under the terms of the Portal Colon Water Quality Act. And there's an old adage that's been attributed to the great American satirist Mark Twain that in the West, whiskeys for drinking and waters for fighting. And that's definitely the case here. The State Water Resources Control Board has estimated it'll take them seven to eight years to do all the analysis and all the legal proceedings that are going to be required to set the water quality objectives for the Delta and then to modify the water rights structures for the California water system to be able to accommodate those objectives. And there will surely be lawsuits to follow once their decision is made. And we'll probably have 20 more years of lawsuits after the fact, after the decision is actually rendered by the State Board. So into this situation, we have tread. The State Water Resources Control Board has determined that a WEAP application that we've been building for the Central Valley Water System for the past 10 years is a very appropriate tool to support the analysis and decision making and deliberations which they are embarking on because of some of its functionalities. It's integrated hydrologic and systems operations modeling. It has a very flexible ability to represent regulatory regimes. It has integrated urban water demand and agricultural water demand modules. Some of the features that Merissa and Brian alluded to earlier in the way they've talked about it being applied in Columbia and in the Middle East. So the State Board has decided that this tool would be really helpful for them as they figure out how to navigate this very complex legal decision about how the water rights system in California should be modified to accommodate the water quality objectives for the Delta. And we just signed a contract to provide them technical support as they enter into this very long and protracted legal process. And the questions are somewhat rhetorical. Should we be? And they're rhetorical because we already are. I mean, we signed the contract for God's sake, so. But I think it's, these are some questions that are maybe worth pondering over the course of the next couple of days. And apart from seeking to develop the world's best water modeling software, should SCI lead efforts to deploy it in the face of critical water management challenges? Question number one. Should SCI enter into projects, the outcomes of which have a high likelihood of being contested in court, like this one, it will be. We will be asked to defend our work legally. What should SCI do to prepare itself better to respond to legal challenges that may be mounted against its work? And can SCI really achieve its mission of bridging science and policy if it shies away from the law and, God forbid, lawyers? So here's some questions for us to ponder over the next couple of days. And as an alternative response to these questions, which I'll throw out there as well, once again, taking liberties with the great Tina Turner, perhaps law is just a secondhand consideration which we really don't need to be concerned with. Thank you very much. Yes. Thank you.