In the US West, water stories are often aqueduct stories, narratives of moving the vital resource from one place to another. This paper, in contrast, explores nascent efforts to keep the water still, in the name of helping buffer cities from the anticipated impacts of climate change. Scripted as potential holding sites for an urban water reserve, aquifers and the task of filling them now orient a range of policies and material investments across Southern California. Building on writings that explore the multi-scalar politics of storing and stockpiling vaccines, resources, and lively or uncooperative commodities, this analysis approaches storage as a key moment within circulation, a dynamic, constitutive stillness that conditions flows. Three early-stage subterranean water stockpiling projects connected to the City of Los Angeles are explored, and used to demonstrate how the pursuit of storage is remaking material and political relationships within and between urban jurisdictions, while complicating long-fraught urban–rural relations within the region's waterscape. These shifts suggest the value of reorienting the notion of the urbanization of nature to better attend to the geographies of resource storage, in addition to those of resource flows and circulations.

Rapid urbanization, aging infrastructure, and climate change impacts have put a strain on existing stormwater drainage systems. One commonly acknowledged solution to relieve such stress is Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI). Interest in GSI technology has been growing. However, the level of implementation in many areas around the world lags behind the interest level. This study aims to critically review the body of literature from the last decade to determine the main barriers to wide adoption and the offered solutions to overcome them. Based on a review of 92 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2012 and 2022, we classify barriers and solutions into six categories: socio-cultural, financial, institutional and governance, legislative and regulatory, technical, and biophysical. Based on observations and conclusions from the reviewed articles, we recommend the following pillars and considerations for more GSI adoption: increasing awareness and outreach programs; enhancing knowledge and data co-production and dissemination; acknowledging interdependency and context-specificity of many of the challenges and solutions; prioritizing integrated and participatory watershed planning; overcoming institutional path-dependencies; prioritizing innovative solutions; giving specific consideration to maintenance protocols; considering the role of public entities; and actively engaging with communities.

Climate change and its impact on hydrological dynamics have become key topics of concern among water managers and policy makers in many parts of the world. Yet while practitioners often frame adaptation to a climate‐changed future as a novel issue, ideas about future environments have long influenced systems of water management. Reviewing ethnographic and historical accounts of waterscapes across the globe, this article examines the relationship between imagined environmental futures and the policies, practices, infrastructures of water management and legal frameworks. We show, first, how conflicting ideas about environmental stasis and perturbation have been built into water networks across space and time. In some cases, notions of radical landscape change have underpinned these systems, as in programs dedicated to land “reclamation” or interbasin water transfer schemes. In other contexts, water systems have developed based on visions of long‐term sociohydrological stability. Second, we highlight how contrasting notions of human capacity to change environmental outcomes have played into water management systems. In some cases, there has been an assumption of the potential for and desirability of full human control; in others, there has been more recognition of the limits of such mastery. Exploring the wide range of environmental imaginaries mobilized through water management, we contextualize contemporary efforts to build resilient, “climate proof” waterscapes. WIREs Water 2018, 5:e1274. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1274 This article is categorized under: Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented Science of Water > Water Quality

In Los Angeles, water managers and environmentalist NGOs champion green infrastructure retrofits, installations intended to maximize the water-absorbing capacity of the urban landscape. In such arrangements, the work of water management is necessarily spread among a more-than-human community, including (but certainly not limited to) humans, plants, soils, and gravels. This article analyzes the human labor within these collaborations, tracking when and how this work gets enrolled in networks of water management and circuits of value. I develop the term ecosystem duties to characterize these exertions and as a useful analytic for assessing emergent dynamics of environmental justice. K E Y W O R D Secological labor, ecosystem services, environmental justice, infrastructure, water management ResumenEn Los Ángeles, los administradores de agua y las ONGs ambientalistas, abogan por la actualización del diseño de la infraestructura verde, instalaciones destinadas a maximizar la capacidad de absorber agua del paisaje urbano. En tales arreglos, el trabajo del manejo del agua está necesariamente distribuido entre una comunidad más que humana, incluyendo (pero ciertamente no limitada a) humanos, plantas, suelos y gravillas. Este artículo analiza el trabajo humano dentro de estas colaboraciones, siguiendo cuándo y cómo este trabajo se inscribe en las redes de manejo y circuitos de valor.Desarrollo el término deberes ecosistémicos para caracterizar estos esfuerzos y como información útil para evaluar la dinámica emergente de justicia ambiental. [trabajo ecológico, servicios ecosistémicos, infraestructura, manejo de aguas, justicia ambiental]

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