Is Phoenix’s fondness for lawns and pools really a water management strength?

Posted by on
Wigman Resort, Phoenix, photo by Dan Dickinson, licensed under Creative Commons

Wigman Resort, Phoenix, photo by Dan Dickinson, licensed under Creative Commons

An AP story that made the rounds yesterday pointed out that Phoenix set an all-time water consumption record during last weekend’s heat wave:

Water Services Department spokesman David Cerull tells radio station KJZZ that homeowners used most of the water.

He says demand generally goes up when it gets hot and that people water their yards more for fear of plants dying. He adds that residents with pools use more water because of increased evaporation.

When Phoenix residents face the inevitable alternative – give up their lawns and pools, or abandon their homes – this current consumptive reality means they’ve got a lot of savings left to squeeze out of their water budget. Is their profligate lawn-and-pool lifestyle thus an advantage?

The Ogallala – another example of what people do when the water starts to run out

Posted by on

Kate Galbraith in the New York Times last week had a piece with another example of how farmers respond when the water begins to run out:

Mr. Grall’s cornfield is part of a closely watched demonstration project aimed at showing farmers how to use less irrigation water on their crops. It was put together by a groundwater authority in the Panhandle that strictly limits the amount of Ogallala water each farmer can pump. The project reflects the harsh reality that has taken hold across the drought-stricken state: farmers, who account for more than half of the water used in Texas, must learn to do more with less, just like cities and industrial plants.

The story is a reminder that simply extrapolating current supply and demand trends into the future and then projecting our doom is not the right way to think about or water future in the increasingly arid West. You have to look at both the alternative approaches that use less water (which are many, as Galbraith’s story points out) and also the ability of our institutions to provide the underlying structures needed to support adaptation:

The North Plains district first imposed pumping limits in 2005 and tightened them in 2009. In 2005, it also began phasing in requirements for some wells to have meters. Both moves were controversial at the time. A larger groundwater district just south of North Plains, the 16-county High Plains Underground Water Conservation District, has struggled in its attempts to impose metering requirements and pumping limits.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: irrigating the Rio Grande

Posted by on

From the morning paper, Day 1 (Day N?) of my Rio Grande death watch:

JARALES – There’s a great line about New Mexico’s central river, often attributed to Will Rogers: “The Rio Grande is the only river I ever saw that needed irrigation.”

Whether Rogers said it or not (and there is some question), it is no longer a joke.

“We’re irrigating the Rio Grande,” water manager David Gensler said as he watched a small flow off the Sabinal canal in southern Valencia County, where workers have cleared an old ditch and diverted a bit of the precious liquid into the otherwise largely dry bed of the Rio Grande.

 

Lund on a call for a new environmentalism

Posted by on

Smart Jay Lund piece on the shortcomings of old-school environmentalism in the new world:

Classical environmentalism is mostly about stopping new harmful human influences, not reversing the harmful effects of past changes or shaping a more environmentally friendly future. Environmentalism has not substantially reversed the widespread urban and agricultural destruction of wetlands or freed rivers from the concrete and rock that straightened their course.

A new environmentalism is needed that can redirect and reconcile human activities to better support and even expand habitat for native species. Rather than insist on blocking human use to protect nature – a largely quixotic quest now – environmental reconciliation works in and with unavoidably human habitats.

 

Cutting the Gordian knot of the Upper Colorado River Basin’s delivery obligations

Posted by on

The folks at the University of Colorado’s Colorado River Governance Initiative have a clever idea to keep the Upper Basin states from getting screwed by climate change. Their new Upper Basin Voluntary Demand Cap white paper (pdf) offers a solution path for one of the stickiest problems in future Colorado Basin water management under climate change.

Lee's Ferry

Lee’s Ferry

In short, it’s a bargain under which the two basins would share a huge risk at the intersection of climate change and legal uncertainty over interpreting the Law of the River.

The sticky problem is Article III(d) of the 1922 Colorado River Compact (pdf):

The States of the Upper Division will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years reckoned in continuing progressive series beginning with the first day of October next succeeding the ratification of this compact.

Translated, that means the Upper Basin states might have to deliver 7.5 million acre feet of water each year at Lee’s Ferry. With a river twice that size, the compact’s authors presumed, there would be plenty of water for the upper basin states (New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming) to use their half and just pass the rest of the water on down for California, Nevada and Arizona. But there’s a central unresolved legal question, as the CRGI folks wrote in a white paper last year (pdf):

[T]he prevailing interpretation has been that the Upper Basin has the obligation to deliver 75 million-acre feet every ten years (an average of 7.5 million acre-feet/year) downstream to the Lower Basin, and if this leaves insufficient water for the Upper Basin to consume the 7.5 million acre-feet promised in Article III(a), then the Upper Basin must bear that shortage in its entirety. However, a counter interpretation more favorable to the Upper Basin is that they do not have a delivery obligation, but rather an “obligation not to deplete” the flow of the river below an average of 7.5 million acre-feet/year based on the language used in Article III(d) of the Compact.

Not surprisingly, you can pretty much guess the legal interpretation a lawyer will offer based on which basin they’re from. Lower Basin attorneys say, “Yup, gotta deliver 7.5, no matter what.” Upper Basin attorneys say, “No, if the river’s low because of a changing climate, rather than our depletions, we’re off the hook.”

This disagreement is a huge deal because under the former interpretation, if as expected climate change reduces the flow in the river, the Upper Basin takes the entire squeeze.

The thing is, water managers hate uncertainty. And no one’s lawyers, Upper or Lower Basin, can guarantee which way a judge would rule if they threw the dice and went to court. The downside risk is enormous.

The CRGI folks call their idea the “Upper Basin Voluntary Demand Cap.” The idea is that Upper Basin states agree to cap their total depletions at some level below the 7.5 million acre feet allotted to them under the compact (which they’re not using right now anyway). In return for holding their consumption line there, the Lower Basin agrees not to make a “compact call” if deliveries at Lee’s Ferry drop below 7.5 maf:

Establishing the value of the “cap” and the release objective are points to be negotiated; but the principle is to establish these numbers in advance of a crisis and without a need to litigate the omissions and ambiguities that exist in the Compact and related elements of the Law of the River.

There’s precedent for this sort of approach in the 2007 shortage sharing agreement, which doesn’t supplant the Law of the River but is rather, in the words of the CRGI folks, “an operational regime placed on top of this foundation.”

It’s the kind of solution space I was thinking of in my “What Seven States Can Agree To Do” piece last year, though I’m not smart enough to come up with the specifics. The Law of the River is malleable if all the parties can come to agreement on the bends it needs.

Another dry month at my house

Posted by on

I take my rainfall measurements at 7 a.m., so June’s over for me. I’m happy to report that our 0.14 inch (36 cm) of rain puts us over an inch for the Oct-now “water year”! We’re planning a fireworks celebration for later this evening, out by the dry brush in the far back corner of the yard.*

Our 1.14 inches (2.9 cm) for the first nine months of the water year are 24 percent of the long term mean. The last month with above average precipitation here was April 2012.

October-June precip, Heineman-Fleck house, Albuquerque NM

October-June precip, Heineman-Fleck house, Albuquerque NM

* This is a joke. There is evidence of a dramatic spike in the number of people burning stuff down around July 4.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: in small-town drought, why the wells go dry

Posted by on

We’ve seen a lot of news media attention in New Mexico’s drought of 2013 to the little village of Magdalena, where the wells earlier this month went dry. Small towns are especially vulnerable in drought. But as I dug into the data the last few weeks, I realized that journalistically swooping down on the town that ran out may be missing something:

[L]ike Sherlock Holmes’ curious case of the dog that did not bark in the night, a key part of the story of the drought of 2013 in rural New Mexico may be the communities that have not been in the news, because they have not run out of water.

While solid numbers are hard to come by, some in the state’s water management community say they believe there are fewer small community water problems in 2013 than in the last major drought, of 2002-03. With the severity of the current drought, water tables all across New Mexico are dropping. But many communities threatened by drought last time around have upgraded their systems, making them more resilient.

After a similar drought ten years ago, the state did an analysis of the towns that went dry:

The 2005 report found that such infrastructure neglect was a common denominator in the communities that lost their water during the 2002-03 drought. “Almost all of these ‘emergencies’ were in fact due to a chronic lack of adequate management, maintenance, and system planning,” the report concluded. The communities where water systems failed “were not robust enough to handle the stress of drought conditions,” the report found.