Fearing climate-related water loss, California acts to bolster its water supplies

[Martin68]

1. Working in conservation, one of my jobs was rainwater harvesting and storage education. The

interesting thing is that some of the driest Western states have laws against capturing rooftop runoff because their historical approach has been to manage the use of surface water such as streams and rivers. People's water rights are determined by who has been historically using a particular source of water the longest, and the most recent users are the first to be cutoff from such a source during a drought. Capturing rainwater theoretical reduces the amount of water that reaches surface water, and is thus a short-circuit of the process, and therefore illegal.