There will be no Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan before the end of the Obama administration

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“We are not going to get the Drought Contingency Plan completed.” That was the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California’s Jeff Kightlinger this morning during the opening panel at the Colorado River Water Users Association meeting in Las Vegas.

It was a very public expression of something that has been increasingly clear in recent weeks – that the intense negotiations to work out details of a broad plan to reduce Colorado River water use in Arizona, Nevada, and California haven’t converged on a solution.

In the public session this morning, two key unresolved issues loomed over California’s participation:

  • a plan for the Salton Sea, which will soon be significantly diminished as the huge ag->urban Imperial Irrigation District->MWD/San Diego water deal reduces ag runoff to the sea.
  • a commitment to action on the Northern California Bay Delta, hub of California’s water system. Without a clear solution to MWD’s Bay Delta water reliability problem, it’s harder for that huge player in these discussions to make a commitment to more flexible use of its Colorado River water.

Behind the scenes, there is a lot more complexity that is causing this deal to drag on, including discussions within Arizona about how to deal with shortages that state’s water users would have to take on to prevent Lake Mead from crashing. There’s also a huge chicken-egg problem with a parallel negotiation underway with Mexico. The goal is to get Mexico to join in the shortage sharing provisions with U.S. water users. But can that deal be signed soon – ahead of the Jan. 20 change of administration – without also getting a deal within the United States?

How Arizona plans to help reduce the pressure on Lake Mead

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With the Colorado River water management community converging on Las Vegas this week, we are likely to learn more about whether or when we’ll see a deal on the long-awaited “Drought Contingency Plan” to reduce Lower Basin use of water from Lake Mead.

Under the DCP, which has been in nearly final form for the better part of a year, the three Lower Basin states – California, Nevada, and Arizona – agree to reduce their use, banking unused water in Lake Mead to keep that reservoir from crashing (details on the agreement here). The catch has long been how water users within each state would divvy up the who’s-not-using-water part of the deal.

The Phoenix City Council will get a briefing tomorrow (Tuesday, Dec. 13) on the details of the deal. The staff report prepared for the meeting’s agenda packet lays out the basics of how this will work within Arizona:

 

What remains unclear to me is how much money this entails, how much the federal, state, and local contributions might be, and who within Arizona is on board with this approach and who might still object.

Click the “view entire document” link to read the full report, it has lots of helpful detail on the DCP as a whole as well.

Water as a tool for Middle East peace

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Comments from an interesting workshop in Tel Aviv:

Rather than cling to an “all or nothing” peace process, the international community should promote smaller advancements in areas such as water, Lars Faaborg-Andersen, the European Union’s ambassador to Israel said at seminar in Tel Aviv on Thursday. “We’ve spent too much time promoting an Israeli-Palestinian solution that is all or nothing,” he said.

“We have got to revise our approach to the peace process, which would allow us to address the issue of water and a number of other issues also,” he continued.

“What we need to do is build up basic confidence on the ground through an approach of small steps.” Faaborg-Andersen was speaking at a roundtable discussion titled, “Can Water Bring the Political Process to a Safer Shore?”

the resilience of Las Vegas and water

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When I was writing my book, I wanted to talk about water use in cities through the story of a single city, and I chose Las Vegas (Nevada, not the one in New Mexico) intentionally as a rhetorical device. One of the writer’s tricks is to start readers on familiar terrain and lead them to a new and different place. Las Vegas and its reputation for profligate excess is familiar terrain for a lot of people. I wanted to start there and lead readers to rethink their ideas about what counts as resilience, to rethink Vegas.

I’ve got a piece up today at The Urbanist that grew out of a lecture I did a few weeks back to UNM Water Resources Program students offering a layer below the book’s Las Vegas chapter. We’ve been talking about water governance this semester, and I laid out an argument that the evolution of water governance structures in Las Vegas have made that community more resilient in the face of pressures on its water supply:

The ability to band together to take collective action for the common good is a key to resilience in human systems.

In some sense, that’s the broader theme of my book – that successful institutions are the key to resilience.

Is Colorado River water responsible for 15 percent of U.S. crops?

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I’ve seen this more than once:

Fifteen percent of all U.S. crops are grown with irrigation water that originates in the Colorado River Basin.

That’s from an Alternet piece, and it’s a number I’ve seen repeated many times (see here, here, here for just a few of the many examples).

I am skeptical. I’ve been unable to find anyone who cites an original source, but the data I’ve been able to find suggests it’s off. By a factor of a lot.

The best attempt I’m aware of to quantify total agricultural production in the Colorado River Basin was done as part of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Moving Forward report (pdf). They went through Census of Agriculture data county by county and concluded that total agricultural production attributable to Colorado River water, both crops and livestock, was on the order of $5 billion.

Total ag production for the United States as a whole for the same year they used for the calculations was $297 billion. That’s around 1.7 percent by this measure.

The salient feature of the basin here is that it is largely an arid and/or mountainous region, and the river’s water only allows for the irrigation of a small portion of the land. Exports from the basin (which are considered in the Bureau of Reclamation analysis) expand the arable land to which Colorado River water is applied, but don’t change the numbers all that much.

Here’s a way to get a sense of the scale. According to the Moving Forward report, Colorado River water irrigates 4.7 million acres of cropland both in the basin and as a result of out-of-basin diversions. Consider that Iowa alone has 24.5 million acres of harvested cropland. For the U.S. as a whole, the number is 310 million acres. Colorado River Basin agriculture makes up about 1.5 percent of U.S. harvested cropland, which matches up pretty nicely with the 1.7 percent share of ag revenue.

This is not to say that agriculture in the Colorado River Basin is not important. A lot of my book is devoted to a defense of the importance of Colorado River Basin ag.

As I said, I’ve been unable to find an original source, just an echoed stat. I’d love to hear from anyone, especially folks who have been using this number, who has some idea of where it came from. Maybe I’m missing something?

California’s Bay-Delta and the Endangered Species Act

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California's Bay-Delta, courtesy CADWR

California’s Bay-Delta, courtesy CADWR

Ellen Hanak and colleagues at the Public Policy Institute of California stuck their necks out last week with a scheme to move California’s Bay-Delta water conflict forward. It has a number of elements – I’d like to focus here on its proposal to “manage water for ecosystems, not just endangered species”:

To improve the effectiveness of environmental investments, California will need to move away from viewing water and land management activities in the Delta primarily through the lens of the Endangered Species Act. Instead, environmental managers should allocate water and restoration funds based on greatest overall ecological returns on investments.

This does not mean abandoning threatened or endangered species, but rather refocusing recovery efforts on ecological health, based on realistic assessments of the benefits of environmental water allocations.

The ESA: old, creaky

Environmental management via the 1973 Endangered Species Act has come to dominate the interface between environmental values and extractive human water use in the western United States. But it’s a pretty frustrating interface. The statute is old and creaky – a “static law meeting a dynamic world”, to slightly paraphrase UC Berkeley’s Holly Doremus (pdf).

The ESA’s language gives a nod to overall ecosystem health:

The purposes of this Act are to provide a means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species depend may be conserved…. (emphasis added)

But its implementation nevertheless tilts toward a species-centric approach rather than a broader ecosystem perspective. That leads to the situation in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande, for example, where we expend intense effort on providing environmental flows to a relatively small section of the river where the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow still survives, while largely writing off vast areas of the minnow’s original native habitat because the fish had been extirpated from those stretches of river long before it was declared endangered.

a new direction for the ESA?

The Hanak et al. piece echoes a strong thread in recent environmental policy scholarship on the ESA’s shortcomings. Here’s what my University of New Mexico colleague Melinda Harm Benson* wrote about this back in 2012:

[T]here is a need to shift management strategies from a species-centered to a systems-based approach. Chief among the shifts required will be a more integrated approach to governance that includes a willingness to reassess demands placed on ecological systems by our social systems. Building resilience will also require more proactive management efforts that support the functioning of system processes before they are endangered and on the brink of regime change.

I don’t understand the details of California’s Bay-Delta ecosystem well enough to opine on where it stands on Prof. Benson’s “brink of regime change” spectrum. But it seems as though more flexibility in defining and pursuing environmental goals there may provide some room for solutions that meet a broader range of our values and needs.

* shameless plug

Prof. Benson is in UNM’s Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, doing a lot of really interesting work in this area if you’re looking to further your education. In addition to her home base in geography, she’s also closely affiliated with our Water Resources Program, an interdisciplinary graduate program that mixes hydroscience with law and policy.

Albuquerque averages nearly 300 sunny days a year.

Could funding for US water plants and pipes be a bipartisan common ground?

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Andrea Gerlak:

Reinvesting in our crumbling, neglected drinking water and wastewater systems is something that both Democrats and Republicans can agree on – and they are likely to find support in the new White House. The time is ripe for coalition building, collaborative problem-solving and a bit of old-fashioned American ingenuity to ensure that our reinvestment in America’s water infrastructure is both sustainable and equitable.