California's 5-year drought has ended, even as its aftermath lingers. From 2012-2016 much or all of California was under severe drought conditions, with greatly diminished precipitation, snowpack, and streamflow and higher temperatures. Water shortages to forests, aquatic ecosystems, hydroelectric power plants, rural drinking water supplies, agriculture, and cities caused billions of dollars in economic losses, killed millions of forest trees, brought several fish species closer to extinction, and caused inconvenience and some expense to millions of households and businesses. The drought also brought innovations and improvements in water management, some of which will better prepare California for future droughts. This paper summarizes the magnitude and impacts of the 2012-2016 California drought. The paper then reviews innovations arising from the drought in the larger historical context of water management in California. Lessons for California and for modern drought management are then discussed. Droughts in modern, well-managed water systems serving globalized economies need not be economically catastrophic, but will always have impacts and challenges, particularly for native ecosystems. In California and every other water system, droughts usefully expose weaknesses and inadequate preparation in water management. In this regard for California, managers of ecosystems and small rural water supplies had the most to learn.

This article presents an entertainment education strategy used to influence Hollywood prime-time and daytime television programs to add storylines on the importance of immunizations to their shows. Rather than giving information about immunizations to show producers, directors, actors, and writers, we furnished "log lines" and true stories about immunizations that could be used to inspire scripts that included immunization themes. By working through personal contacts within the entertainment television industry's closed system of networks, we were able to gain entree and some airtime for our campaign agenda. Embedded messages aired on eight popular shows in the 1996-1997 broadcast season, with five scheduled to air in the 1997-1998 season. These efforts were evaluated qualitatively, focusing on issues of personal networks, content of aired messages, and comparative costs for paid airtime. The strategy developed can be adapted for a range of entertainment education interventions.

Formal policy analysis can aid resource management where groundwater is used intensively. Approaches for developing equitable and effective pumping allocations for drought are evaluated in the context of the 2012–2016 drought in Tulare County, California, USA. Potential economic impacts of policy alternatives on two user groups with conflicting interests are considered. Tradeoffs between losses of agricultural profit and response costs for domestic wells that run dry are estimated for various maximum groundwater depth policies. A welfare maximizing approach for identifying policies that limit depth to groundwater is evaluated and found to be ineffective because agricultural opportunity costs are much larger than domestic well costs. Adding a fee for additional drought groundwater pumping is proposed as a more impactful and balanced management policy approach. For the case study presented, a fee range of $300 to $600/acre-foot ($300–$600/1,233 m3) yielded an effective groundwater management policy for reducing domestic well impacts from drought and balancing agricultural impacts of drought with the need to replenish additional drought pumping in wetter years. Recent management policies enacted in the study area agree with this finding. These results may provide a useful perspective for analytically examining and developing groundwater management policies near the study area and elsewhere.

A sixth grade curriculum entitled "Immunization, Plus!" Was developed to promote adolescent immunization. This targeted immunization curriculum utilized contemporary learning theory and innovative teaching approaches and styles to maximize acceptability among educators. Because instructional time in school was limited, a thematic curriculum was created to embed immunization and communicable disease content within mathematics, science/health, and language arts units. The curriculum, which reflected the theory of multiple intelligences among students, offered an array of different learning formats, including linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, and bodily-kinesthetic. The curriculum was made available free of charge to school districts in California, and its evaluation was planned to track distribution, utilization, and changes in students' knowledge, attitude, and behavior.