PD Editorial: Fish report provides some encouragement

As California enters its fourth year of drought, uncertainties increase in many communities.

At times like this, we’ll take whatever good news we can get, and the state Department of Fish and Wildlife delivered a measure of it last week.

The latest North Coast salmon forecast is in, and it’s better than last year’s.

State officials have issued an “abundance forecast,” projecting 652,000 adult king salmon from the Sacramento River fall run.

Overall, the forecast calls for about an 18 percent increase from what was in the water at this time a year ago. That’s good news for fish, and that’s good news for the North Coast fishing industry.

But it’s not likely to last. Fishery experts say the effects of the drought, which created “hostile” spawning seasons in 2013 and last year, will become more apparent in the years to come.

Meanwhile, there’s little sign of hope. The snowpack in the mountains is less than one-fifth of normal. Even if that improves substantially, it would not quickly replenish aquifers, rivers and lakes. This drought was years in the making, and it will take sustained precipitation to end it. Unfortunately, the regional forecast is for continued drought, and climate scientists warn that hot and dry could be the new normal.

As a result, ecosystems are changing around us. Salmon and other wildlife compete for scarce resources.

There is a human toll, too. Last week, many Central Valley farmers learned that they will go without federal water allocations again this year. Groundwater and storage helped many of them survive drought in 2014, but those are Band-Aid solutions.

One reason agriculture does not have access to as much water as possible is because water is set aside to keep rivers and streams flowing so that salmon can reach their spawning grounds.

That does not sit well with some farmers. The president of the California Farm Bureau Federation has called on the federal government to amend laws that prioritize fish and the environment and to store more water in reserve.

Yet farmers are not the only humans with a stake in how water is allocated and how much of it goes to supporting fish and the environment.

Fishermen off the North Coast who harvest salmon rely on inland habitat to ensure adequate stock each year. A salmon is born in an inland waterway, swims to the Pacific, grows up there and returns a year or more later to spawn another generation.

Because the cycle lags inland conditions by a few years, the full effects of the drought, as noted above, have not yet reached adult salmon at seas. That will change, but at least for this year, coastal economies and the multi-million-dollar fishing industry will survive.

It’s easy, even tempting, to frame the situation as pitting one industry (fisheries) against another (agriculture). That would oversimplify a far more complex situation with many moving pieces and interested parties all competing for limited resources.

One important piece is a communal obligation to foster a healthy environment, one that we can pass on to future generations. A healthy salmon report provides some solace in a drought with no end in sight.