Mitigating Climate Risk and Adapting to Climate Change

October 18, 2024
By Ken Jenkins, Chief Water Resource Sustainability Officer

Climate change-related events continue to impact the lives of Californians in 2024, including a destructive fire season, extreme heatwaves, and more intense atmospheric rivers affecting the state. Cal Water is committed to mitigating climate change while also adapting to climate change impacts, and we have been implementing programs designed to meet these challenges.

Mitigating climate change risk includes reducing emissions throughout our operations. We are proud of our commitment to a science-aligned target to reduce absolute Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 63% by 2035 from a 2021 base year, and in 2023, we reported a 27.9% decrease in these emissions.

To help reach our emissions reduction goals, we are making intentional investments across operations, such as adding electric and hybrid vehicles to our fleet. We also enrolled in an electric utility green tariff program, which enabled us to achieve a 13.9% renewable energy consumption rate in 2023. Further, we are increasingly utilizing renewable energy sources and identified two more of our facilities for onsite solar installations, which we aim to complete by the end of 2026.

Beyond efforts to meet our decarbonization goals, a key pillar of Cal Water’s sustainability efforts is climate adaptation, which includes investing in infrastructure to reliably deliver safe, clean water to our customers. These investments include projects and upgrades to prevent power loss at critical facilities, protect worker safety, and increase the reliability of our systems. We have also completed more than 20 projects to enhance infrastructure resiliency, augment water availability for firefighting, and provide backup power in areas exposed to wildfire risks.

Crucial to carrying out these projects is our triennial Infrastructure Improvement Plan, which provides the framework and capital needed to responsibly maintain and upgrade our infrastructure. We filed our latest Infrastructure Improvement Plan earlier this year, which allocates $1.6 billion to capital investments. These investments include equipment to help withstand power outages and shutoffs; solar installation projects to help reduce Cal Water’s electric power grid dependency; water supply initiatives and Advanced Metering Infrastructure to improve water reliability, sustainability, and conservation; infrastructure replacements; and more.

Water conservation is also a critical part of our climate adaptation efforts, and continuing to lead in this area is central to our environmental stewardship. In 2023, we invested more than $4.4 million in our conservation and rebates programs to encourage customers to save water every day. Through these programs, we estimate that customers saved 95 million gallons of water in 2023 and will save 890 million gallons of water over the life of these programs. We also delivered over 2.6 billion gallons of recycled water for landscaping, irrigation, and industrial uses—water that didn’t need to be used from potable supplies.

Cal Water strives to mitigate and adapt to climate change risks by implementing solutions that protect our planet and will help us to deliver safe, reliable water service to our customers, both now and for generations to come.