More cuts, sooner, under Lower Colorado deal taking shape

Posted by on

Looks like significant progress toward an Arizona-California deal to slow Lake Mead’s decline, according to a story from the Arizona Daily Star’s Tony Davis:

Arizona, California and Nevada negotiators are moving toward a major agreement triggering cuts in Colorado River water deliveries to Southern and Central Arizona to avert much more severe cuts in the future.

Details still sketchy, with final negotiations still ongoing, but according to Tony’s story, a couple of very important points stand out on which there seems to be general agreement:

  • Arizona would take cuts in Colorado River water sooner – as early as 2017, rather than 2018 under the current operating rules
  • California, which under the current rules wouldn’t have to take any cuts until Arizona’s Central Arizona Project supplies drop to zero, would agree to take some cuts if Mead drops below a trigger 30 feet below current elevation
  • Arizona will spread cuts more broadly among that states users, rather than the current scheme under which ag takes the hit

This will need Arizona legislative approval, according to Tony, which should be interesting given that state’s belligerent tone toward California over these issues.

The whole story is worth a read.

Is Flint a reverse “environmental Kuznets curve”?

Posted by on

One of the most important findings of environmental economics in recent decades is what is called the “environmental Kuznets curve”, a finding that as a community’s affluence rises, environmental “bads” – think air and water pollution, for example – decline. Could what has happened in Flint, Michigan, be evidence that this phenomenon is bi-directional – that as a community becomes impoverished, environmental conditions worsen?

In 1991 Princeton University economists Gene Grossman and Alan Krueger first documented this intriguing and potentially important relationship between wealth and pollution. At the time the United States, Mexico, and Canada were in the midst of negotiating what would become the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA’s critics had objected that the deal would simply shift pollution from the more heavily regulated and affluent north to Mexico. Preparing for a conference on the deal, the pair looked at levels of sulfur dioxide and smoke pollution in 42 countries around the world. They found that as affluence grew in the 42 countries they studied, pollution grew along with it, but only to a point. Once per capita gross domestic product reached an inflection point ($4,000 to $5,000 in 1985 dollars), things turned around. It was as if, once people had their basic needs covered (food, housing, etc.) their desires turned toward a cleaner environment. The pollution curve, at least for sulfur dioxide and smoke, turned back down.

Could the expected income growth in Mexico, the pair wondered, push Mexico’s economy past the point at which the nation’s pollution curve bends back down? “A reduction in pollution may well be a side-benefit of increased Mexican specialization and trade,” they wrote.

Per capita GDP, Flint, Michigan, adjusted for inflation, courtesy BEA

Per capita GDP, Flint, Michigan, adjusted for inflation, courtesy BEA

The inverted U-shaped effect of environmental damage rising and then falling came to be called the “environmental Kuznets curve” after the work of economist Simon Kuznets, who in the 1950s posited a similar relationship between rising income and inequality. The observation resonated in a world in which rich countries seemed to have turned a corner on their pollution problems with things like the U.S. Clean Air and Clean Water acts and the Endangered Species Act, laws that reflected a culturally noticeable pivot in the decades before Grossman and Krueger published their pioneering work. In the years following the paper, a flurry of studies put empirical flesh on the skeleton, measuring the relationship across a range of environmental “bads”, from urban air pollution and deforestation to climate-changing emissions of carbon dioxide. Researchers argued about the statistical measures and the underlying theory, about whether income and wealth were the right causal variables, but again and again, their curves showed the inverted U’s of an EKC.

The story of Flint is well known – a community gutted by economic change, and left in the process with lead-contaminated drinking water. In terms of both total and per capita GDP, Flint’s economy tanked from 2004-2009, then began to recover in the years since. So is this a thing? As communities get poorer, do things like clean water fall by the wayside? Is Flint an example worth looking at, or does the curve above suggest that the timing is all wrong? How might we look more generally for a reverse EKC?

 

the water conservation ratchet

Posted by on

While there is much water policy Sturm und Drang in California over the extent to which water conservation mandates should or should not be extended now that weather has provide some drought relief, the reality is that the rules may not matter:

The state of California ordered San Juan to reduce water usage by 33% from 2013 levels in response to a statewide drought emergency. While local water supply conditions have improved in 2016 with El Nino rains and some easing in drought restrictions is expected, some degree of conservation has likely become habitual. Usage levels may remain low.

That’s from Fitch’s bond rating on the San Juan Water District. In the topsy turvy world of municipal water management, conservation is a financial problem. But in the bigger picture, these are good sorts of problems to have.

“drought is not synonymous with shortage”

Posted by on

Drought is not synonymous with shortage. Drought occurs when there is a deficit in precipitation, streamflow, soil moisture or all of the above. Shortage occurs when we lack the policies, incentives and technologies to balance supply and demand in a variable and changing climate.

That’s water wonk Dustin Garrick in a new piece urging a rethinking in our response to “drought” and “shortage”, calling for a shift away from our episodic approach. Bonus Steinbeck.

The costs of getting California’s Central Valley groundwater house in order

Posted by on

Groundwater overdraft, especially at the pace and scale now underway in the southern part of California’s Central Valley, has substantial costs – in terms of lost water availability and ground subsidence. But the discussion of those costs often occurs in a vacuum, without a discussion of the very real costs incurred by fixing the problem. People were doing something with that water that was valuable to them, and they’ll either have to stop doing it, do less of it, or find an alternative water source.

One of the most interesting findings in a new paper by a team of UC Davis researchers is the increased pressure on the Sacramento Delta, one of the alternative water sources for the region. Here the authors explain:

The analysis used a hydro-economic optimization model for California’s water resource system (CALVIN) that suggests operational changes to minimize net system costs for a given set of conditions, such as ending long-term overdraft. Based on model results, ending overdraft could induce some major statewide operational changes, including significantly greater demand for Delta exports, more intensive conjunctive-use operations to increase artificial and in-lieu groundwater recharge, and greater water scarcity for Central Valley agriculture.

 

The many values of Colorado River Basin irrigated agriculture

Posted by on

The East Mesa Water Co., in its grant application to the roundtable, says the ditch has a service area of 740 acres.

And it says the hay grown on that 740 acres is worth about $500,000 annually, assuming a yield of four tons per acre and a hay price of $170 a ton.

The ditch company, however, also says there is more value in how the hay fields look to tourists than in the hay itself, saying the economic value is “closely related to recreation and tourism.”

“The effect on overall commerce would be significant if one of the most scenic views in the valley, that approaching Mt. Sopris, were to be brown and dry rather than green and lush because this ditch failed,” East Mesa’s grant application states.

East Mesa Ditch owners open to leaving water in Crystal River, By Brent Gardner-Smith

The institutional hydrograph: April on New Mexico’s Rio Grande

Posted by on
Rio Grande near Cerro, NM, courtesy USGS

Rio Grande near Cerro, NM, courtesy USGS

Here’s another example of a New Mexico “hydrograph” – the rise and fall of flow on a river over time – driven by rules, not weather. The drop in river flow happens when the irrigation season begins in the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado. Here’s J.R. Logan in the Taos News:

The Río Grande is at the heart of the valley’s massive agricultural industry, and farmers waste no time in taking their share.

“We got to get after it,” says Jay Yeager, head of the Río Grande Canal Water Users Association, which manages a primary irrigation artery in the San Luis Valley.

The rules governing how much Colorado water users can take and how much they must pass downstream for use in New Mexico are governed by the Rio Grande Compact, an agreement among Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas signed in 1938. It is the important implement of governance here, and the flow in the river bears its mark. Here is Logan’s nice explanation of the implications:

The catch – for New Mexico – is that the delivery is calculated on an annual basis, meaning Colorado can let every drop of the river go to New Mexico during the fall and winter while taking most of the river during the spring and summer and still fulfill its debt to New Mexico.

This is a problem if you are a river rafter or a fish, two examples of modern uses and values that weren’t at play in the 1930s when the deal was negotiated.

Resilience and water management on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande

Posted by on

NCDC March precipitation rankings

NCDC March precipitation rankings

After a good start this year, New Mexico’s snowpack cratered in February and March. The month just completed, in fact, was the driest March on record in New Mexico. February and March combined were the second warmest and second driest on record, a devastating combination for what had been shaping up to be a decent snowpack year. The preliminary April 1 median Rio Grande runoff forecast is now calling for 60 percent of the long term average at Otowi, the key measurement point as the river enters the most populous and water-using part of the state.

If the forecast holds, this would be the 15th year of below-average flows in the 17 years since 2000 (inclusive), and the 8th straight below average year. This period represents a significant test of the resilience of the system. How are we doing?

tl;dr

Short answer, looking at the three primary uses of water in the region:

  • municipal water use: doing remarkably well
  • agriculture: also, remarkably well (data below)
  • nature: not so good

longer:

My University of New Mexico colleague (I still love saying that!) Melinda Harm Benson and a group of colleagues wrote a paper a couple of years ago applying a “resilience” framework to the Middle Rio Grande. Their definition of the term “resilience” is the ability of a system – in this case a “social-ecological system” with feedbacks between human and natural systems – to absorb a significant external shock while retaining its basic structure and function:

From a management perspective, promoting resilience involves (1) evaluation of the current trajectory of the system state, and (2) fostering the ability of the system to resist perturbations. The abilities to influence both of these factors are determined by a combination of attributes of both the social and the ecological aspects of the system. Systems with high adaptive capacity are able to re-configure themselves without significant changes to crucial functions, such as primary productivity, hydrological cycles, social relations, and economic prosperity.

I find this to be an incredibly useful framework – I don’t talk about it much directly in my book about the Colorado River Basin’s management, but Professor Benson’s help thinking through the issues (she had me come talk to one of her classes – that helps clarify the mind) provided an invaluable conceptual skeleton. It’s useful in part because it requires us to clarify which structures and functions we’re talking about. We then can look at the institutions through which we lumbering humans execute the “social” part of “social-ecological systems”.

Middle Rio Grande crop productivity

Middle Rio Grande crop productivity

The remarkable surprise for me, having watched Middle Rio Grande water management closely through this period of extended drought, is the extent to which the two key human systems built around water extraction have survived and even thrived during this period of less water. One useful measure of the success or failure of the region’s agriculture, for example, is the dollar value of crop production. The Department of Commerce publishes annual estimates of total crop sales (Table CA45 here), which I’ve summed up for the Middle Rio Grande’s four counties (Sandoval, Bernalillo, Valencia, Socorro) and adjusted for inflation here. The blue part is the last wet period, the ugly reddish purple is the drought. I haven’t done any fancy statistical tests here (Danger, journalist doing math!), but just eyeballing it you can’t see any particularly significant impact from drought on the sector of human use that depends the most on surface water for irrigation. A big part of this is efficiency in irrigation water application. During the wet times, farmers were more likely to simply dump a lot of water on their fields. As things dried up and allocation got scarcer, the farm water system has tightened up, but without a significant reduction in crop yields. Middle Rio Grande agriculture is a tiny segment of our economy, but by this measure it appears to have absorbed the shock of unprecedented drought and retained its basic structure and function. The adaptive capacity seems located in two places – on the farms themselves, and in the management of the irrigation district that delivers their water.

Albuquerque water use

Albuquerque water use

The second major human-using water sector, municipal use, has also fared remarkably well during the drought. Total water use in Albuquerque, the region’s metropolitan core, has declined over the last 25 years, even as population has grown substantially (more background here on the 2o15 numbers shown to the left). As a result of the combination of a shift in supply management and conservation trends, Albuquerque’s overtaxed aquifer has risen 15 feet or more over the last decade (data here). Again, the adaptive capacity seems located in two places – among residents themselves via their conservation behavior, and in the water management institution that delivers their water.

Put another way, the rising aquifer means the mass balance of water in this region has increased during the worst drought on record while both agricultural and municipal water use sectors have continued to receive supplies sufficient for them to retain their basic structure and function. In both cases – ag and the municipal sector – we have stable institutions that have have demonstrated their ability to continue delivering the water supplies with general community consensus (or at least lack of significant conflict) around their approaches to managing supply.

The third important piece of the Middle Rio Grande’s water use, nature, is more complicated. The Rio Grande silvery minnow, the endangered species that has been our coal mine canary, depends on fish raised in hatcheries, so altered by human dams and diversions is the “natural” ecosystem in which the little fish evolved. The Endangered Species Act requires us to try to keep alive a fish that evolved in a meandering, braided desert river with large spring pulse flows in what is now a much more narrow, channelized river with much smaller spring pulse flows. Their is no stable institutional structure through which we as a community can come together to hash out our shared community values and then pursue them regarding what we want the river itself to be like, and what kind of natural system we might hope to preserve and enhance, and how we might manage water to achieve this. The best we have is the conflict-ridden Middle Rio Grande Endangered Species Collaborative Program, which has been unable in recent years to complete the most basic of regulatory tasks – extending the “biological opinion”, the basic Endangered Species Act regulatory document, which expired in 2013. This is one of the most interesting questions raised by resilience theory – where do you draw the boundaries around the systems you’re talking about? I think it’s fair to say that the riparian ecosystem has not retained its basic structure and function, and our institutions have not been up to the task of responding.

There remain interesting questions. Have the changes in water management that have allowed us to manage nearly two decades of drought merely taken the slack out of the system, making us more vulnerable to future shocks, especially from climate change? In other words, is the success I describe above not really a demonstration of resilience, but rather a hardening that in the long run leaves us even less resilient to future shock? Is our manhandling of the ecosystem weakening future resilience? Have I drawn the boundaries in the wrong place – maybe we’ve succeeded here in the Middle Rio Grande at the expense of folks upstream or downstream?

Are domestic wells hiding Florida water problem?

Posted by on

On paper, it looks like water use in Gainesville, Florida, is going down. But….

“We are seeing public supply water use decrease over time but population is going up,” Greco said. “So everyone is patting themselves on the back, people like myself, saying, ‘Oh, we are doing such a great job. We are conserving water.’”

But this good news wouldn’t be so good if the numbers are dropping in part because uncounted backyard well pumping is replacing irrigation from public supplies.

That’s from How Many Straws, a piece by Hannah Brown that is part of Project Blue Ether, a look at Florida water from a group at the University of Florida led by Cynthia Barnett.