Fall colors on the Rio Grande, north of Central Avenue bridge, by John Fleck, Nov. 19, 2015
Tail end of fall color
Five pieces of good news for water in the western United States
CPC long lead forecast
Amid the litany of the apocalypse, with the pictures of fallowed farm fields and dead fish and trees and cracked mud, here are five pieces of good news on western water, both on the supply side and on the demand side.
1. Colorado River Basin storage is up
Total storage in the Colorado River Basin’s big reservoirs ended the 2015 water year up 281,000 acre feet compared to the same time last year. The increase happened in the Upper Basin, with the biggest increases in Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Green River in Wyoming and Navajo Reservoir on the San Juan in New Mexico. This is not because it was a wet year. Total streamflow above Lake Powell was just 94 percent of average. (Source: USBR draft AOP, Table 1, pdf)
2. Colorado River Lower Basin water use is down
Total projected 2015 water use in Arizona, Nevada, and California, with a bit more than a month left in the calendar year, is on track to be at its lowest point in a decade. At a projected 1.504 million acre feet, the Central Arizona Project, which pumps Colorado River water to the Phoenix and Tucson areas, is on track for its lowest diversions since 2005. The Imperial Irrigation District (desert farming in southeastern California) is, at a projected 2.469 maf, on track for its lowest water-using year since at least 1965 (that’s as far back as my dataset on this goes). Source (pdf)
3. The forecast map is sorta greenish
The Climate Prediction Center’s long lead forecasts, out today, are projecting above-average odds of a wet winter and spring across all of the southwest, and well up into the headwaters of the Colorado River Basin. (see map above, for Jan-Mar).
4. The other forecast map is not very brownish
drought outlook
The seasonal drought outlook, in keeping with the CPC precip maps, calls for the removal of “drought” across the entire Four Corners/Colorado Basin region, with improvement in California:
Sorry, Montana and the rest of you up there on the top of the map. Winners and losers, always, in the Game of Drought.
5. New Mexico drought conditions the best they’ve been in five years
New Mexico drought monitor
In my home state of New Mexico, the brown bits are nearly gone from the drought monitor map. That’s the best we’ve been since November 2010.
Final thoughts
The bathtub ring around Lake Mead is still bigger than it’s ever been, and the risk of a formal Lower Basin shortage declaration looms. But the context is important. The supply side is not something we can do anything about (other than reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which we probably oughta thing about?), but we’re seeing some clear progress on the demand side that is worth noting.
And the supply side makes me happy.
The Salton Sea: natural or not?
Daniel Polk, an anthropologist now based at Stanford’s Lane Center has an interesting post looking at the question of our perceptions of the Salton Sea – natural or not?
The lake demonstrates that the “natural” is a fluid and not fixed term. Proponents of the Salton Sea often emphasize the natural qualities of the lake. If the lake is unnatural, then its decline can be more readily accepted by the public, yet if it is a natural place, then its restoration becomes a more urgent imperative, less easy to ignore for those in power.
The importance of measuring water
From a new Public Policy Institute of California white paper on water allocation reforms:
Regions with drought-prone climates need reliable accounting of water availability and use. Authoritative water accounting is a foundation for the transparent, reliable, timely administration (and, if necessary, curtailment) of water rights, management of groundwater, and water trading. This drought spotlighted serious gaps and fragmentation in California’s water accounting system, hampering such actions.
Importantly, according to authors Brian Gray et al., California law does not now have a framework for measurement return flows, the water returned to the system (through agricultural drainage back to a river or groundwater recharge):
Understanding net water use (the amount applied minus return flow) is key to understanding water availability and also the amount of water that can be traded without harming other water users.
California also suffers from a lack of clarity of the place public health and safety, and the environment, have in the water rights priority queue:
The water board does not have a clear policy to take public health and safety or the environment into account when ordering surface water curtailments, even though an array of laws designates these public interests as priorities that may take precedence over senior water rights. So far, this omission has been especially costly for the state’s stressed riverine and wetland ecosystems.
The proposed solution:
Adopt a process for the local development of watershed-based environmental flows, combining a state mandate and local authority to flesh out details (water board and local action).
There is much more, a very rich and thoughtful package of actionable recommendations.
The last concrete
One of my early ideas for a western water book was going to be called “The Last Concrete”, telling the story of the last big water project to be built in the western United States. But this is a dilemma, because which will it be? And how do we know the others lingering on the laundry list won’t be built? So, definitely dumb idea for a book.
Hillary Rosner stood recently in the mountain valley to be submerged in Colorado’s proposed Chimney Hollow project and pondered the same sort of question:
At some level, decisions about how to plan for the future of Western water supplies come down to both values and inertia. As Werner says, it’s not feasible to stop people from moving to Colorado’s Front Range and other booming parts of the Western U.S. While environmental conditions—unbearably hot summers or persistent extreme drought—might ultimately make both the Front Range and the entire West far less attractive, for the moment, they’re still desirable places to live. It’s hard to stop progress.
Journalism, “public goods”, and climate change in New Mexico
I heard a great talk this afternoon by Laura Paskus, a journalist here in New Mexico who recently launched a climate change project under the umbrella of New Mexico in Depth, a non-profit news organization. I also made a financial contribution to support the work, and I would encourage others to do the same. Here is why.
Some time ago, when I still had that cushy newspaper job with all the printing presses and driveway delivery drivers and stuff, I wrote a short post about why I think it’s important to contribute financially to support the journalistic enterprise. Journalism is what economists call a “public good” – something from which we can all benefit even if we do not contribute financially to its support. Clean air is an example of a public good. So is journalism, but in ways more subtle than is often realized. In its simplest form, journalism thanks to ‘Net delivery has become a public good in the sense that I can pretty easily consume it without paying.
But the more subtle nature of quality journalism as a public good is that society benefits, and I therefore benefit, even if I don’t read it. Even if we never bought the Washington Post back in the day, or read Woodward and Bernstein’s work, we all benefitted from their efforts to plumb the depths of Richard Nixon’s behavior. This second type of “public good” is, I believe, more important.
Laura’s climate change work, if it is of high, impactful quality, has the potential to influence political and policy processes – something from which I will benefit even if I don’t read it. It is an iron law of economics that public goods will, absent interventions, be under-provided. If you think that better understanding of climate change could lead to better politics and policies, stepping up to help fund Laura’s project is a way to intervene.
Of course I’ll read Laura’s stories. But the larger benefit is the one I’m after. Here is the donation info page. The “donate” links take you to a second page. At the bottom of that page, you’ll see a pull-down menu with the option of earmarking your contribution to Laura’s climate change project.
A plea for more attention to water use demand-side projections
An excellent Laura Paskus story this weekend on a new climate water risk study by Justin Mankin at Lamont-Doherty and colleagues, includes some really important comments from Mankin on the implications of the work for water policy.
The study helps clarify risks to water supply in the Rio Grande (and elsewhere, notably the Colorado River Basin) as a result of climate change. Here’s Laura’s summary:
Decreasing snowfall and rainfall will put many western water supplies at risk in the coming century.
The authors drill down to the seasonal scale and look at risk to both rain- and snow-supplied water supply, with current water use as their benchmark. Both the Colorado and Rio Grande basins are at high risk of shortfall, they found.
For the Rio Grande, writes Mankin, “it is highly likely that both spring and summer snowmelt will decrease at the same time that spring and summer rains will decrease.”
Slicing up the data to look at water supply at these fine scales is a valuable contribution. In Laura’s story, Mankin makes a really important point, though, about the limitations of their work:
Although the authors planned for continued increases in population, he says that water consumption by those populations could change due to conservation, efficiency, or other technological changes.
“Humans have a great deal of agency in this picture of water availability moving forward,” says Mankin. “We have a really long history of providing water to people during periods of atmospheric shortfall.”
This gets to a shortcoming in the science we’ve been doing in our efforts to come to grip with the implications of climate change for water supplies that I’m finding increasingly frustrating. Work like Mankin’s reflects an increasing sophistication in the modeling of available water on the supply side. But there’s a shortage of similar research underway on the demand side.
Water problems are the product of the relationship between the two.
In their paper, Mankin and colleagues frame the issue thus:
The likelihood that population growth and economic development increase human water demand in the future implies that our analysis provides a lower bound on the risks that global warming will present to snow resource potential, as increasing population and/or per capita consumption will further increase the total amount of water required to meet human demand.
New Mexico water use, data from USGS
This is the common assumption, but I’m not sure that it’s right. Peter Gleick and Meena Palaniappan, in a 2010 paper that I love to cite, point out that U.S. population and economic growth decoupled from water use around 1980. Since that time, water use has been flat. In New Mexico, a Rio Grande basin community implicated in the shortfall risk cited by Mankin, water use peaked around 1980 and has declined 20 percent in the decades since, even as population has doubled. The New Mexico data is frustratingly coarse, so it’s hard to know whether our water use has bottomed out, or whether I’m making a mistake in citing 1980. (In my graph, the 1980 spike looks weird. Bad data?) Certainly in the municipal water sector we don’t seem to have bottomed out. Albuquerque’s water use is declining again this year, something that seems to be the case in other big cities I’m looking at across the Southwest. Phoenix and Las Vegas both seem to have peaked in 2002 and have seen a substantial decline in water use since then, even as their populations have grown. There also are signs that we’re seeing a reduction in ag water usage.
In the U.S. Bureau of Reclmation’s recently published “Moving Forward” report looking at municipal water use needs in the Colorado River Basin, there’s a remarkable moment of clarity on this point in the discussion of municipal water use in Arizona:
Despite a 29 percent increase in the number of homes, total deliveries to single-family residences in Maricopa County were 2 percent lower in 2013 than in 2000. Tucson Water’s 2013 deliveries to single-family residences in 2013 equaled deliveries in 1989. Demand has become decoupled from population, and the downward trends will almost certainly continue for some time to come (Woodard, 2014b).
(The “Woodard” there is Gary Woodard, formerly of the University of Arizona and now at Montgomery and Associates in Tucson, with whom I’ve had useful recent discussions on these points.)
David Katz at the University of Haifa published an interesting paper this year trying to get at the underlying issue. It talks about what economists call an “environmental Kuznets curve”, a situation in which some environmental variable (pollution, resource use) rises as populations get more affluent until wealth reaches a certain point, after which the curve bends. At that point in an EKC, increased wealth leads to a decrease in environmental stress – less pollution or resource use. Is water use subject to an EKC? Woodard’s data (and my own) suggests, empirically, that something of that sort is going on in the western United States. Katz’s analysis, looking across the developed world, suggests something more mixed.
The uncertainties I mentioned above (municipal use seems to be dropping, as does agricultural use) are incredibly important, and I’m frustrated that I don’t have Mankin-style analyses of the demand side on the Rio Grande or Colorado River basins to draw on to help me understand that half of our supply-demand risk. What if we’re at (or past) an inflection point in the western water use EKC? What are the supply-demand implications?
As Katz notes in the classic concluding line from every truly interesting research paper, “Further study is in order.”
The great emptiness of Elephant Butte Reservoir
Elephant Butte Reservoir storage, 1915-present
The New Mexico water nerd joke is that Elephant Butte Reservoir is where we spread our water out to dry. Everybody probably has the same joke?
Built from 1911-1916, it’s one of the first federal reclamation projects, storing Rio Grande water for irrigation in southern New Mexico and Texas. It’s one of those reservoirs that we pretty much run down to empty periodically, as we did during much of the “drought of the ’50s”, which as you can see really stretched from the 1940s into the late ‘7os.
We’ve done it again. It ended the 2015 water year with 183,134 acre feet of water, 9 percent of capacity.
Faltering on the Klamath
There may be yet another important lesson in what is happening right now on the Klamath River, land of a bunch of very important water management lessons.
The Klamath once was a symbol of all that is wrong with water management in the western United States (a battleground, lesson one) that had come to symbolize all that could be right (a historic collaborative agreement to overcome the fighting, lesson two). Now there is a risk that we may be headed back to the first.
Brett Walton (Circle of Blue) and Emma Marris (New York Times) provide background, and I’d like to highlight a critical part of Brett’s piece that may provide lesson three:
Signed in 2010 and expanded in 2014, the three Klamath agreements were hailed as a model for watersheds that must realign water supply and demand. The three agreements, amounting to the largest watershed restoration project in the West, covered federal lands, funding, and water rights that require Congressional review and approval. But if Congress does not pass a bill by December 31, 2015 that authorizes the new management practices in the package and provides funding to facilitate the transition, three Indian tribes that are party to the agreements have indicated that they will pull out because of inaction.
To say that the agreements were a locally negotiated solution is right as far as it goes, but the fact that the deal(s) required Congressional action means that in important ways it was not entirely a local solution.
As soon as you need federal funding for a deal – as soon as you need to tap into “other people’s money”, as David Zetland puts it, other people’s values come into play as well. Whether this is simply because Congress is dysfunctional, or because there are members of Congress who actually object to the deal, there’s a lesson here: if you want to work out a collaborative water deal at the local or regional scale, best to keep Congress out of it.
Visualizing Albuquerque water conservation
I just stumbled on a very cool tool from the folks at ESRI using U.S. government Landsat imagery (yay public goods! background here) allowing you to look at vegetation change over time. Here’s a graphic look at water use in Albuquerque 1990-2010. The bits in green are places where vegetation has increased. The bits in that reddish colour (magenta?) show where vegetation has decreased. It’s outdoor water conservation, visualized:
Albuquerque vegetation change, Landsat via ESRI
This covers a time period during which per capita water use has decline from ~250 gallons per person per day to something around 150. The green patch in the upper right is an area of affluent sub-urban sprawl since 1990. The reddish blotch in the center is the already developed area of town (the “northeast heights” for ABQ folks). Fewer trees and lawns.