Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/22/us/colorado-river-lake-mead-water-deal-climate/index.html
Bathtub rings are seen along the banks of Lake Mead on April 3, 2023. [Will Lanzoni/CNN]
Three Southwest states announced Monday they have struck a historic deal to cut billions of gallons of Colorado River water usage over the next four years, about half of which would be completed by next year, in an effort to stave off a crisis at the nation’s largest reservoirs.
The deal between California, Arizona and Nevada agrees to cut at least 3 million acre-feet of water through 2026 – around 10% of the states’ Colorado River allocation – water that would otherwise be used to irrigate farms, generate hydropower or feed municipal drinking water systems. (A single acre-foot of water is enough to cover one acre of land a foot deep.)
The water cuts would be split up among farmers, tribes and cities who are working with the federal government on short-term payments in exchange for water savings. Most of the cuts would be compensated with at least $1 billion in federal funds from the Inflation Reduction Act. About 1.5 million acre-feet of that water is set to be cut by the end of 2024.
The plan still must be finalized after a federal environmental review, which the Department of Interior said on Monday it would begin. The four states that make up the river’s upper basin – Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico – said they supported reviewing the new plan.
The deal marks a major step after months of tense negotiations to save a crashing Colorado River system, which provides water to more than 40 million people in the West. That system has shown alarming water loss in recent years after a multiyear, climate change-fueled drought collided with decades of overuse.
Western and federal officials have scrambled to reach an agreement to boost water levels at the nation’s largest reservoirs, Lakes Mead and Powell, and prevent them from plummeting to so-called dead pools, at which point water would no longer flow through their dams.
The deal would also allow for the federal government to step in and make additional cuts should Mead and Powell levels drop further. Those cuts would be triggered if Mead fell to 1,000 feet and Powell fell to 3,500 feet – just over each reservoir’s dead-pool level.
The federal government signaled support for the lower basin deal on Monday by agreeing to withdraw a dramatic environmental analysis it outlined last month that would have forced the three states to cut nearly 2.1 million additional acre-feet of their Colorado River usage in 2024 alone. At the time of its release, top federal officials said publicly they hoped their proposal would spur discussion among states who have spent the past year sparring over cuts.
Interior Sec. Deb Haaland said in a statement that the deal was a “testament” to the Biden administration’s “commitment to working with states, Tribes and communities throughout the West to find consensus solutions in the face of climate change and sustained drought.”
President Joe Biden applauded the deal in a statement, saying the agreement “marks an important step forward in our efforts to protect the stability of the Colorado River System in the face of climate change and historic drought conditions.”
A letter from all seven basin states to the federal government emphasized that the deal has yet to be signed off on by the upper basin.
“Nothing in this letter should be construed as an Upper Basin endorsement of the Lower Basin Plan,” the letter reads, adding that all seven states support the proposal being submitted to the federal government and want more time to strike a final deal.
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Other
Historic Colorado River deal not enough to stave off long-term crisis, experts say
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/23/colorado-river-water-usage-deal-analysis
Agreement between California, Arizona and Nevada will cut water consumption by 13% but experts warn river is still in serious peril
More action is required to save the river, likely including farms remaining fallow or switching crops. Photograph: John Locher/AP
A hard-fought agreement between California, Arizona and Nevada to slash the states’ use of the shrinking Colorado River is only a temporary salve to a long-term water crisis that continues to threaten the foundations of life in the American west, experts have warned.
The deal, announced on Monday, between the three states that make up the lower portion of the sprawling Colorado basin will pare back 13% of water consumption from the beleaguered river over the next three years if adopted, averting the prospect of more stringent cuts imposed by the federal government. Backed by $1.2bn in federal funds, the bulk of the reductions are structured to encourage voluntary cuts taken by rights holders, in exchange for grant money.
Now under federal environmental review, the agreement is being hailed as a breakthrough after months of stalled negotiations and missed deadlines. But the emergency intervention will not itself be enough to head off the existential crisis faced by the Colorado River, a result of decades of over-allocation to slake the thirst of a rapidly expanding US west, and it is now caught firmly in the teeth of global heating.
The flow of the river has declined by about 20% since the turn of the century, a period defined by a “megadrought” that is the most severe the west has seen in 1,200 years. The future of a river that supports 40 million people, underpinning the existence of cities from Los Angeles to Denver, and millions of acres of cropland remains precarious.
This deal is clearly a Band-Aid solution for a short-term fix
Katharine Jacobs of the University of Arizona
“This deal is clearly a Band-Aid solution for a short-term fix,” said Katharine Jacobs, an expert in water and climate adaptation at the University of Arizona.
“It’s better than nothing, but we are just putting off a much more dramatic change needed to resolve this problem. The problem we’re trying to solve is just far greater than this. We have a significant shortfall between the river’s supply and demand.”
Jacobs said it is “almost unfortunate” that the US west was deluged by a glut of snow and rainfall over the winter that eased some of the pressure on parched farmland and puddle-like reservoirs, taking some of the onus off negotiators from the seven states – which also include Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah – that rely upon the river to agree on more ambitious cuts to confront its long-term decline.
The cuts looked like they would be much tougher last summer, when the federal government said one-third of the river’s annual average flow needed to be saved or it would step in to impose reductions itself.
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Did this winter solve the Colorado River crisis? No – but it took some pressure off, for now
Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/10/us/colorado-river-water-cuts-winter-snow-climate/index.html
The Colorado River flows through the Imperial National Wildlife Refuge in Yuma, Arizona. [Will Lanzoni/CNN]
Across the Southwest, the signs of a phenomenal winter are everywhere. Snow blankets the tops of the San Gabriel Mountains outside Los Angeles. And in downtown Phoenix, the Salt and Verde rivers are full.
After three years of record-breaking drought and plummeting water levels at Lake Mead and Lake Powell, water officials and experts across the West are now looking at more snow and water than they can handle.
While many are not ready to declare the crisis on the Colorado River solved, they feel the blockbuster winter means basin states should no longer have to cut up to 25% of the basin’s water usage that was called for last year by Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton, the river’s top federal official.
“We can probably create the protection levels with cuts not as big as what she described,” Arizona’s top water official Tom Buschatzke told CNN. “I think that might help us get to the place we need to be.”
After more than a year of contentious negotiations between Arizona, California and other Western states on how exactly to distribute those cuts, Buschatzke and other officials say the wet winter has taken some of the pressure off.
On Tuesday, the Interior Department and Bureau of Reclamation are expected to release the first installment of an environmental analysis examining what different volumes of Colorado River cuts will look like for the cities, farmers and tribes who all depend on the water.
The wet winter likely won’t be reflected in Reclamation’s analysis, according to Bill Hasencamp, the manager of Colorado River Resources for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which provides water to Los Angeles.
“People in the upper basin are dealing with feet and feet and feet of snow. The snowpack is still increasing,” Hasencamp told CNN. “It’s a completely different trend than we’ve seen the last three years. This is definitely going to make a huge difference in the short run. But people don’t want to go too far because they don’t want to go back to complacency.”
A snowy mountain in Southern California after rthis winter’s historic snowfall. [Will Lanzoni/CNN]
An aerial view of Riverside County, California — green from recent snow and rain. [Will Lanzoni/CNN]
Still, others are cautioning that one historic winter will only delay the inevitable pain of water cuts, as years of overuse collide with climate change-fueled droughts.
As welcome as the reprieve this winter is, if water usage isn’t cut by up to 25%, “we will crash that system,” said Cynthia Campbell, water resources management adviser for the city of Phoenix, told CNN. “I think we’re going to come right back to that conclusion in a year – in a very short amount of time.”
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Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/killing-colorado-pat-mulroy-las-vegas-water-witch
The ‘Water Witch’: Pat Mulroy Preached Conservation
Former Commissioner, Southern Nevada Water Authority
One afternoon last summer, Pat Mulroy stood in 106-degree heat at the broad concrete banister atop the Hoover Dam, the wall that holds back the mighty Colorado River, and with it the nation’s largest reserve of water.
The reservoir is the brain stem of the system that helps sustain just about every person from here to San Diego. But as Mulroy looked out over the drought-beleaguered pool, then at 39 percent capacity, it appeared almost empty.
“Scary,” Mulroy said.
Few people have played a greater role in determining how the reservoir’s coveted and contested water supply has been used than Mulroy. Much of it has gone to nourish the Southwest’s booming cities, and for 26 years, Mulroy was the chief arbiter of water for the fastest-growing city of them all, Las Vegas. As the head of the Las Vegas Valley Water District, she handled the day-to-day approval of water for new housing developments, emerald golf courses and towering casinos. As the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority — a second job she held starting in 1993 — she also budgeted water for Las Vegas’ future, helping to decide its limits. As the Water Authority’s general director, Mulroy stretched her enormous influence over state bounds, shaping how Nevada negotiated with the six other states sharing Colorado River water.
Deploying a prickly wit and a rare willingness to speak truth about the water challenges hammering the Western states, Mulroy met head-on a reality few other leaders wished to face: that the Colorado River’s ability to support the West’s thirst to grow its economy and embrace the large population that came with it was not unbounded. She has been lionized for espousing conservation and pioneering a list of progressive urban water programs in Las Vegas while fiercely negotiating tough agreements between the states to use their water more efficiently and come to terms with having less.
But an examination of Mulroy’s reign shows that, despite her conservation bona fides, she always had one paramount mission: to find more water for Las Vegas and use it to help the city keep expanding.
Mulroy wheeled and dealed, filing for rights to aquifers in northern Nevada for Las Vegas, and getting California to use less water while her city took more. She helped shape legislation that, over her time at the Water Authority, allowed Las Vegas’ metropolitan footprint to more than double. She supported building expensive mechanisms with which to extract more water for the city’s exploding needs – two tunnels out of Lake Mead and a proposed pipeline carrying groundwater from farms in the east of the state. Not once in her tenure did the Authority or the Las Vegas Valley Water District she ran beneath it reject a development proposal based on its use of water. The valley’s total withdrawals from the Colorado River jumped by more than 60 percent on her watch.
Yet even last summer — staring at the effects of growth and drought on the reservoir, where once-drowned islands were visible for the first time in as much as 75 years — Mulroy apologized for none of it. She bridled at the idea that Las Vegas or other desert cities had reached the outer edge of what their environments could support.
“That’s the silliest thing I have ever heard,” she said, her voice rising in anger. “I’ve had it right up to here with all this ‘Stop your growth.'”
ProPublica is exploring how the West’s water crisis reflects man-made policies and management strategies as much, or possibly more, than it does drought and climate change.
Whether and how cities grow is one of the most decisive factors in determining the future of Western water supplies, and, to some extent, the nation’s economy. For much of the last century the West has been guided by a sort of “bring ’em on” philosophy of the more people the better. Teddy Roosevelt first envisioned using the Colorado River’s resources to move west a population the size of that day’s Eastern Seaboard. They came in droves, supported by infrastructure the federal government built — including the Hoover Dam — and the water those facilities helped supply.
To an arid region blessed with little rain, the newcomers brought their Eastern tastes: Kentucky bluegrass planted across sprawling yards; fountains flowing with abundance; fruits and vegetables growing in an Eden-like oasis. Hundreds of thousands of settlers turned into tens of millions of people still dividing the same finite supply of water, one that was stretched thin from the very start. By the time it became apparent that growth might need to be controlled to be both productive and efficient, Western sprawl, like a sort of Frankenstein monster, had taken on a momentum of its own.
Los Angeles went through this spurt first, roaring through the 1920s with Hollywood’s ascendance and having its own legendary water wars. Then came Phoenix and Denver. Las Vegas, in many ways, was last. But in its story the tensions are the strongest, the lessons the loudest and the crisis the most imminent.
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Bio:
A leader in the international water community for more than 25 years, Pat Mulroy serves as a Senior Fellow for Climate Adaptation and Environmental Policy and also as a Practitioner in Residence for the Saltman Center for Conflict Resolution at the UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law. She also holds a faculty position at the Desert Research Institute, where she serves as the Maki Distinguished Faculty Associate. Mulroy also serves on the Wynn Resorts Ltd Board of Directors.
