On the importance of getting the boundaries right in water management and governance

Posted by on

I’m working this weekend on two talks, one a webinar Wednesday with Audubon and the other a lecture for UNM Water Resources grad students Thursday, that both touch on one of the fundamental challenges in getting water management right – the question of how we draw the boundaries, both geographically but also conceptually – around the problem we’re trying to solve.

beaver dam at Laguna CILA site, March 27, 2014, by John Fleck

beaver dam at Colorado River Delta environmental restoration site, March 27, 2014, by John Fleck

For Audubon, I’ll be giving an overview of my book, but tailored to the audience – folks who care about the environment in a very particular way. (Everywhere I went while I was working on my book, I took time out to go birding. I even have bird lists of the mallards I saw in the casino fountains on the Las Vegas strip. I am one with this.) The importance for this group is the way the struggle to bring environmental values to the water management discussion required connecting them to the broader ways in which we humans use and conceptualize water. It also required rethinking an international border.

For the UNM students, the lecture will focus on Minute 319, the U.S.-Mexico agreement that famously moved Colorado River water across the international border for environmental purposes, but that also tied together water management in the two nations in a tentative but unprecedented way. Different audiences, so I’ll be telling the story in very different ways. But it is the same story.

The University of Arizona’s Karl Flessa once showed me a slide with a map of four great North American estuaries and the amount being spent on environmental management in each. I don’t remember the numbers and can’t find a copy of the slide, but the basic point was that we were spending millions on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Everglades. On the fourth, the Colorado River Delta, the number until recently was zero.

Here’s how I explain it in Chapter 12 of my book:

Elsewhere the problems of North America’s great estuaries—the Chesapeake Bay, the Everglades, the Sacramento–San Joaquin delta— triggered societal handwringing. As upstream users diverted their water and polluted what was left, the fate of these wetlands remained uncertain, but at least there was a societal conversation about them, with arguments over Endangered Species Act obligations and federal funding to try to fix the problems. But each of those estuaries lay entirely within the United States. In western North America, the convenience of an international border allowed us to largely ignore the Colorado River delta, using the river’s water on both sides of the border while ignoring the environmental and cultural consequences downstream.

The consequences in the Colorado River delta are that essentially no water gets past Morelos Dam, the last dam on the Colorado River 100 miles upstream from where the river used to meet the sea. The environmental implications are profound.

The question of how to draw boundaries around the resource comes up all the time in the contemporary issues class that forms the core of what we’re trying to teach UNM Water Resources Program grad students. We use Elinor Ostrom’s “Why Do We Need to Protect Institutional Diversity?“, which highlights the boundary question as one of the central questions of common pool resource management

How are we going to define the physical boundaries of this resource over time?

In the four cases above, national borders have been used to define resource boundaries. This meant that when the environmental group Defenders of Wildlife tried Endangered Species Act litigation to force water back into the Colorado River delta, they lost. U.S. officials were adamant that their legal obligation stopped at the border, and the courts agreed.

This matched the way the river’s water was managed for human use, with two entirely separate governance systems separated by an international border with little interaction over the shared river.

That has gradually changed over the last 15 years, with what amounts to a redrawing of the boundaries around water management. The border in all its rich and sometimes painful complexity is still there, but a series of agreements between the United States and Mexico, with increasing participation by water management institutions on both sides of the border, has redrawn the water management boundaries as the river moves from the United States to Mexico.

The Colorado River "pulse flow" begins. Morelos Dam, March 23, 2014, by John Fleck

The Colorado River “pulse flow” begins. Morelos Dam, March 23, 2014, by John Fleck

This is a big environmental story, creating a trans-boundary governance regime for restoration of a small part of the once vast delta’s riparian habitat in Mexico. But it also is a human water management story, a cautious rewriting of some of the rules that allow collaborations among water agencies on both sides of the border – most importantly in the use of U.S. reservoirs to store Mexican water.

This is a crucial point that I’ll be making in my Audubon talk. I am sometimes guilty of over-emphasizing the environmental piece of the new U.S.-Mexico relationship over the Colorado River – the money and water put into habitat restoration. Often environmental stories like this are intensely local. But their success requires understanding how they connect to far broader water management regimes. In the case habitat restoration in the Colorado River Delta, that requires a recognition that solving local environmental problems requires thinking about a system the size of the entire Colorado River Basin. It requires understanding when the boundaries around our problem need to be redefined, not only in geographic terms but also in conceptual terms. You can’t fix the environmental problem without understanding the ways cities and farms are using water too.

This is not just about boundaries as lines on a map.

This boundary redrawing is still a work in progress, as Annie Snider’s story last week in Politico about the race to finish U.S.-Mexico negotiations to firm up the relationship made clear:

[N]egotiators who have worked for years are pressing to finish a new pact before President Barack Obama leaves office — or put at risk years of fruitful collaboration on the sharing of cross-border water supplies that are vital to both countries.

 

Ban Ki-moon: water should be source of collaboration, not conflict

Posted by on

Water resources ‘a reason for cooperation, not conflict,’ Ban tells Security Council

Noting that three quarters of UN Member States share rivers or lake basins with their neighbours, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today highlighted the value of water resources as a reason for cooperation, not conflict.

“The need for coordination in water management is especially compelling for the more than 260 international rivers and at least that many transboundary aquifers,” Mr. Ban told a Security Council debate, which was open to non-Council members….

“Access to water can exacerbate communal tensions,” the UN chief said, citing hostile competition for scarce water resources in Darfur and Afghanistan as well as protests and violence against extractive companies by local communities in Peru.

On the other hand, shared water has historically – and sometimes rather improbably – brought adversaries together, and served as a crucial confidence-building measure in both inter-state and intrastate conflicts, Mr. Ban stressed, noting that in the second half of the 20th century, more than 200 water treaties were successfully negotiated.

A return to flood irrigation in search of environmental benefits

Posted by on

I’ve praised the successful shift from flood irrigation toward more efficient technology – meaning things like center-pivot and drip over flood irrigation – that has enabled a downward trend in the amount of water applied to a typical irrigated acre of farmland in the United States. According to the USGS, US farmers decreased their average annual application of water from 2.8 acre feet per acre in 1970 to 2.07 in 2010, the most recent year for which data are available.

That’s a good thing, right?

Not in all cases, as this piece by John O’Connell at Capital Press explains:

[F]lood irrigation, with its leaky canals and standing water, helps recharge shrinking aquifers and provides migratory birds with a stopover on their annual pilgrimages between the Arctic and points south.

Unlikely partnerships of agricultural landowners, conservationists, government officials and water managers are behind efforts to keep farmers flooding fields in Idaho, Oregon, Washington and California. During the past year, Colson estimates the movement has maintained flood irrigation on roughly 4,000 acres across the West.

“For 15 or 20 years or more, the conservation community has been telling people how wasteful flood irrigation is and convert to sprinkler,” Colson said.

Here’s an interesting bit on the recharge of shallow aquifers:

In December of 2015 irrigators hoping to improve their own water outlook partnered with Farm Bureau, local cities and counties, Friends of the Teton River, Teton County Soil and Water Conservation District, Water District 1, the Henry’s Fork Foundation and others to form the Teton Water Users Association.

The association is pursuing funds to rebuild flood-irrigation infrastructure, which irrigators will use to flood pastures within their existing water rights during peak spring flows. When flows subside, they’ll resume using only efficient sprinklers. The water they bank through canals and flood irrigation should emerge from springs about three months later, when it’s needed most, extending the irrigation season, cooling the river for native Yellowstone cutthroat trout and replenishing dried marshes.

The story is a fascinating throughout, an example of why we have to be careful about how we think about water that is being “wasted”. It’s always going somewhere and doing something.

 

on apocalyptic environmental discourse

Posted by on

Clearly, the apocalyptic imaginary is unlikely to disappear from the popular global psyche any time soon. Despite this, we must resist catastrophic hyperbole, including the increasingly alarmist discourses adopted by climate scientists in recent years. With the shock election of serial climate change denier Donald Trump to the Oval Office, the need for an effective, cohesive environmental discourse is now more pressing than ever before.

Jonathan Coward, “How’s that for an ending? A political ecology of apocalypse“

talking water cooperation this morning on Colorado Public Radio

Posted by on

I’ll be on Colorado Public Radio this morning (Mon. 11/21/16) sometime around 10:30 a.m. mountain time, talking about the importance of water conservation and collaboration. CPR’s Rachel Estabrook, who spent some time talking with me last week about my book, did a nice writeup ahead of the interview:

To avoid federally mandated cutbacks, Arizona, Nevada and California are working together to come up with savings, to account for the fact that climate change and population growth in the region are stressing the river more than ever before.

Fleck says that’s encouraging, because when states work together they have a better chance of putting the limited water on the Colorado River to good use. But cooperation is a departure for this river basin, Fleck says, which for a long time has lived by the saying, “Water is for fighting over.”

Click on the orange link at the bottom of the page for a live feed, and I’m told the interview will then be archived at the link above for later listening.

& the West – new offering from Stanford’s Lane Center

Posted by on

Worth bookmarking:

We want to be a place where research findings about geology or sociology blend with our journalism about the world of the West, to give a multi-dimensional picture of the region’s life and issues. We will also introduce, and constantly update, a library of links you can use to explore the subjects we cover.

That’s Felicity Barringer, formerly of the New York Times, now writer in residence at Stanford’s Lane Center, on “& the West”, a new project she and Geoff McGhee recently launched looking at a range of issues. These are two very smart people finding new space in what I’ve been calling the “borderland” between academia and journalism.

You can see what they bring to the discussion here, with a look at the proposed  Bears Ears National Monument. Good stuff.

federal dam operations in a Trump administration

Posted by on

A new paper on federal dam operations by my University of New Mexico colleague Reed Benson seems suddenly timely.

It’s an exhaustive review of the legal structures surrounding Bureau of Reclamation and Corps of Engineers dam operations, with an eye toward finding a path to more flexibility in response to changing climate, human values, and needs. The paper’s lengthy, but in light of a changing federal administration it rewards a careful read to help in understanding what can and cannot be done within the constraints of our laws.

The core of Reed’s argument is that periodic review of dam operations, rather than strict adherence to operating plans established when dams were first built, could provide crucial benefits in providing the resilience needed to respond to changing circumstance:

Federal water projects may play an especially crucial role in helping the West adapt to its dramatic changes, because the region’s water allocation and management regime is simply not built for flexibility. The early West prioritized “putting water to work” for industry, irrigation, and other economic uses, and today the region’s water law still reflects that focus on development. Water rights last forever, with little or no legal scrutiny applied to established uses; in times of shortage, the oldest uses have a right to take their full share before later users have a right to any water at all; and the system still struggles to accommodate important “new” uses such as water for recreation and the environment. As the western states’ water law reform efforts have lagged, federal initiatives have become increasingly important, and federal reservoir operations are one area where federal agencies may find a measure of needed flexibility in water management.

Maintaining current operating plans may be the path of least resistance in the short term, and it is easy to understand why the agencies are reluctant to undertake reviews given the potential cost, controversy, and litigation risk. The record shows, however, that for many years dam operations have been the focus of controversy and costly litigation, with most of that litigation arising under the ESA. Maintaining the operational status quo nearly guarantees that endangered species listings and litigation will remain the go-to tactics for those who seek to address environmental problems associated with federal water projects. A more open and inclusive process for addressing environmental concerns could make the ESA less crucial, allowing the agencies to break away from reactive water management driven by a single species, and might even result in less controversy and litigation than the current approach.

In a nation that has always subjected private hydropower projects to periodic review, it is especially difficult to justify allowing federal reservoirs to operate under old plans in perpetuity. After all, these are public projects. Congress authorized them, ostensibly to serve the national interest. They were primarily built with public money, and today they are operated by public agencies. In serving the public, those agencies should do more than apply the best science and analytical tools in determining reservoir operations; they should also engage the public, which deserves to have a say in how these projects operate. Only then can the Corps and the Bureau ensure that their projects will adapt to change and serve the public interest.

We have few clues as to what approach a Trump administration might take toward water policy, but Reed’s paper provides a careful look at what might be possible, especially in light of a new “changing circumstance” – the election’s result – that many of us did not anticipate.

(Reed’s a regular guest lecturer to UNM Water Resources Program students, teaches great water and federal environmental law stuff, if you’re looking for a chance to take a deeper dive into these issues and have a couple of years to devote to getting a masters degree. Plenty of time to apply for fall 2017. 🙂

NAFTA and the Colorado River

Posted by on

With campaign rhetoric suggesting the likelihood of a changing relationship with Mexico, it is worth asking how a Trump administration might influence ongoing binational collaborations on the Colorado River.

The important caveat here is that, as one of my friends put it in the days after the election, we chose Door Number Two on Nov. 8 and for large swaths of the policy world, including western water, we have no idea what’s behind it. But we do know that as a presidential candidate, Donald Trump suggested dissatisfaction with the North American Free Trade Agreement, the 1994 deal among Canada, the United States, and Mexico. How that dissatisfaction might manifest itself in actual policy is one of those “Door Number Two” things, but at least it gives us a starting point.

Management of Colorado River as it crosses from the United States into Mexico is governed by the 1944 Treaty for the Utilization of Waters of the Colorado and Tijuana Rivers and of the Rio Grande. Because the treaty left ambiguity about important issues, especially environmental issues like water quality and the sharing of surplus and shortage, a series of addenda, called “minutes”, have been negotiated over the years to clarify its terms. In recent years, the most important of those has been Minute 319, signed in 2012, an interim deal that clarified shortage rules and creating the framework for important environmental restoration activities on the Mexican side of the border.

NAFTA was first and foremost a trade deal, but it also created new tools for collaborative environmental work along the US-Mexico border. In a paper published earlier this year* (behind paywall), Colorado State University political scientist Stephen Mumme argued that those NAFTA-related tools for collaboration around the shared resources of the border region played an important role in the complex multi-party negotiations that led to the Minute 319 environmental success.

In particular, NAFTA-related reforms to the International Boundary and Water Commission, the binational governance thingie that manages the shared rivers as they cross from one nation to another or flow along their shared borders, played a key role in enabling the discussions that led to Minute 319, Mumme argues:

There is no question that the NAFTA side agreements and related programs altered the institutional environment for transboundary water management along the border. They established three new international agencies, the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, the Border Environment Cooperation Commission (BECC), and the North American Development Bank (NADB). They strengthened implementation of the La Paz Agreement along the border. They amplified natural resources policy cooperation through the Trilateral Committee on Wildlife. New domestic advisory bodies, focused on sustainable development and environmental protection on each side of the border, were established. The political process associated with NAFTA proved a catalyst for NGO engagement and network along and across the border, strengthening the capacity of civil society to collaborate and influence water governance. These changes, in turn, altered the structural context for transboundary water management, triggering adjustments at the IBWC and broadening its agenda.

There’s a lot more to the 319 deal than that, especially the expanded role for environmental NGOs that followed a path of collaboration rather than litigation (buy my book for that story!). But Mumme argues that NAFTA’s environmental framework played a key role.

Party at San Luis as the Colorado River returns, March 25, 2014, by John Fleck

Party at San Luis as the Colorado River returns, March 25, 2014, by John Fleck

What that means for the future, as US and Mexican negotiators race to try to finish a follow-on deal before Jan. 20, remains one of those “Door Number Two” unknowns. It seems unlikely that the environmental successes, which have been viewed as a positive on both sides of the border, would easily slip away, however the new administration approaches the task of making good on Donald Trump’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric.

But it’s perhaps worth noting that the only negative news story I’m aware of about the 2014 Minute 319 environmental pulse flow was published by Breitbart, making the “Why waste water in a drought?” argument. And Breitbart’s former chief executive, Steve Bannon, has just been named chief strategist and senior counselor to the next President of the United States. I’m not sure that reading old Breitbart stories to try to figure out what might be behind Door Number Two is the best approach, but I’m hunting my clues where I can find them.

* Mumme, Stephen P. “Scarcity and Power in US–Mexico Transboundary Water Governance: Has the Architecture Changed since NAFTA?” Globalizations (2016): 1-17.

on journalism’s failings

Posted by on

When Brad Plumer interviewed me about my new book for Vox, he seized on this point:

For a journalist, few things make better headlines than a good resource crisis. Which is why reporters writing about water issues in the American West are often attracted to the prospect of apocalypse — that the region is going to run out of water someday….

It’s a sexy story. But it’s not always an entirely accurate story. As longtime water reporter John Fleck argues in his thought-provoking new book, Water Is for Fighting Over, the constant doom and gloom about water in the West misses something extremely important that’s been going on in recent years. Even in the face of scarce water and apocalyptic fears, communities have managed to adapt and thrive in surprising ways.

It was clear to me in the waning years of my 30-year career in journalism that my business incentivized the delivery of bad news, creating a deep bias toward a what my friend and colleague Melinda Harm Benson calls the “tragedy narrative”.

Benson is writing (see here for example) about environmental discourse (as am I in my book) but this generalizes. It is even more clear to me after nearly two years outside the newsroom bubble how pervasive the problem is. And last week’s election shows how destructive those misleading narratives can be.

David  Borenstein and Tina Rosenberg capture this in a piece in this morning’s New York Times:

Crime is, in fact, at unusual levels, but it’s unusually low levels — close to the lowest rate in 45 years. Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than their native-born peers and twice as likely to start businesses. In many parts of the country, the public institutions that people count on every day like schools and hospitals have improved, thanks to a wide range of reforms and initiatives. In the past few years, there have also been steady gains in employment and wages.

This goes far beyond the environmental sphere Benson and I write about.

The effect on the social fabric has been corrosive. Since the early 1970s, surveys conducted annually have revealed that trust and confidence in virtually all American institutions — government, corporations, banks, medicine, education, organized religion and, yes, the press — have been declining steadily.

The blame does not lie solely with journalists. Audiences are at fault too. The incentives here are important. But journalists must hold themselves to a higher standard, which is truth, not clicks.

This is journalism’s greatest failing.