Water Education Foundation
This is just one post in the Drought, Weather & Snowpack Category
Click here to view all posts

Peter Gleick: “Drought impacts on unemployment are grossly overstated”

Posted by: Maven on August 13, 2009 at 7:52 am

From Peter Gleick at the City Brights blog:

” “Drought impacts on unemployment are grossly overstated.” Thus concludes a new comprehensive assessment of the impacts of the drought on Central Valley unemployment. We’ve heard a lot of rhetoric on this issue in the past few months, mostly from a small group of self-interested farmers who would like to see the deliveries of water to their fields increased at the expense of remaining storage in reservoirs and water recently returned to natural ecosystems.

Water Number: 0.3%. In fact, this new independent assessment, from Professor Jeffrey Michael of the University of the Pacific Eberhardt School of Business Forecasting Center (which took no outside funding to do the report), concludes that of the 5.6% increase in unemployment in the San Joaquin Valley counties over the past year, only 0.3% of it comes from water shortages. More than 2.5% of the rise in unemployment comes from the drastic drop in construction employment and the rest from other economic woes caused by the financial policies of the previous administration.

Most media stories have reported that 30,000 to 90,000 jobs were lost due to water shortages. The University of the Pacific report finds that to be a gross overestimate, and concludes that job losses from water shortages were around 6,000 – certainly bad, but far, far lower than losses due to other factors. The report uses two different methods to check these results, using data from the agricultural industry. Both methods reach similar conclusions. …”

Read more from Peter Gleick at the City Brights blog by clicking here.

August 13, 2009 · Filed Under Drought, Weather & Snowpack, Energy & Water, Oceans & Beaches

Comments

Leave a Reply