Access for sale? Overlying rights, land transactions, and groundwater in California.

Climate change intensifies longstanding tensions over groundwater sustainability and equity of access among users. Though private land ownership is a primary mechanism for accessing groundwater in many regions, few studies have systematically examined the extent to which farmland markets transform groundwater access patterns over time. This study begins to fill this gap by examining farmland transactions overlying groundwater from 2003-17 in California. We construct a novel dataset that downscales well construction behavior to the parcel level, and we use it to characterize changes in groundwater access patterns by buyer type on newly transacted parcels in the San Joaquin Valley groundwater basin during the 2011-17 drought. Our results demonstrate large-scale transitions in farmland ownership, with 21.1% of overlying agricultural acreage statewide sold at least once during the study period and with the highest rates of turnover occurring in critically overdrafted basins. By 2017, annual individual farmland acquisitions had halved, while acquisitions by limited liability companies increased to one-third of all overlying acres purchased. Together, these trends signal increasing corporate farmland acquisitions; new corporate farmland owners are associated with the construction, on comparable parcels, of agricultural wells 77-81 feet deeper than those drilled by new individual landowners. We discuss the implications of our findings for near-term governance of groundwater, and their relevance for understanding structural inequities in exposure to future groundwater level declines.

Representation of Indigenous peoples in climate change reporting.

This article examines how newspapers reporting on climate change have covered and framed Indigenous peoples. Focusing on eight newspapers in Canada, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand, we examine articles published from 1995 to 2015, and analyze them using content and framing analyses. The impacts of climate change are portrayed as having severe ecological, sociocultural, and health/safety impacts for Indigenous peoples, who are often framed as victims and "harbingers" of climate change. There is a strong focus on stories reporting on the Arctic. The lack of substantive discussion of colonialism or marginalization in the reviewed stories limits media portrayal of the structural roots of vulnerability, rendering climate change as a problem for, rather than of society. Indigenous and traditional knowledge is widely discussed, but principally as a means of corroborating scientific knowledge, or in accordance with romanticized portrayals of Indigenous peoples. Widespread disparities in the volume, content, and framing of coverage are also observed across the four nations.