The US government released its anxiously awaited plan for how to manage the Colorado River crisis on Friday, which includes the potential for harsh cuts in water supplied to California, Arizona and Nevada.
Under the proposal, the so-called lower basin states stand to lose up to 3m acre-feet (3.7bn kiloliters) a year – enough water annually to serve more than 25 million people and roughly 40% of their collective total. The so-called upper basin states – Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming – were spared from mandates restricting their supply.
The Colorado River supplies roughly 40 million people in seven states, two countries and dozens of tribes, and also irrigates 5.5m acres (2.2 hectares) of farmland. The federal government has limited jurisdiction over state-based water policy but is responsible for managing the dams at Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two key reservoirs that lower basin supplies flow through.
The 10-year plan makes space for changing conditions, with specifics decided in two-year increments based upon supply in the system. Officials said this enables better planning during an uncertain future and also leaves options open if the seven states responsible for managing the essential and overdrawn waterway are able to forge an agreement in the near future.
“This framework provides the flexibility to respond to changing hydrologic conditions while preserving the opportunity for the Basin States to continue working toward durable, consensus-based solutions,” saidDough Doug Burgum, the US interior secretary, Secretary of the Interior Dough Burgum in a the press release.
But according to Noah Garrison, a water policy researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, adding these open-ended terms could leave the plan toothless.
“All this does is kick the can down the road yet again, in search of an agreement between the states that has failed to materialize for more than 3 years,” he said in an emailed response. “We need to be more aggressively pursuing the suite of solutions that can provide a safe, reliable, new supply of water for the region.”
The federal government is expected to release a so-called “record of decision” in the coming week that will detail operations under the plan in the short term. It has been reported that they will closely follow a proposal issued by the lower basin states earlier this year that would shave 3.2m acre-feet from their combined total over 2027 and 2028.
The plan follows years of fraught negotiations and missed deadlines. The states that rely on the river continue to fight over a long-term management plan for the dwindling resource that supplies huge swathes of the western US.
Tensions are high and the stakes are rising. The Colorado has been overdrawn for more than a century, as demand continues to outpace supply. The river and its tributaries are the lifeblood for the American west, supplying bustling cities such as Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles, as well as agricultural centers.
The climate crisis is also taking an increasingly large share. Snowmelt that feeds the river is evaporating more quickly, and thirsty soils and plants soak up more water. Flows in the Colorado are down 20% over the last century and precipitation has shrunk by about 7%.
The ecosystems on the banks of the river have already paid a heavy price. Fourteen native fish species are endangered or threatened. The once-lush wetlands in Mexico’s river delta have been dry for decades and the once mighty river slows to just a trickle as it crosses the US-Mexico border.
This year was devastatingly dry, pushing the combined levels of the two largest reservoirs on the river, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, to record lows. It’s exceedingly unlikely that the system will bounce back in the near term, even if there is a wet winter.
“Reclamation is doing what it can absent a seven-state deal,” said Dr John Berggren, regional policy manager at Western Resource Advocates. He added that the plan is moving things in the right direction but that there’s little time to lose.
“The lower basin states are going to have to do more. The upper basin states are going to have to do more,” he said. “There’s a good framework in here, but the implementation is going to be key in the coming years.”
The threat of lawsuits has also hung over the rule-making process, even as most stakeholders agree that drawn-out legal battles would be calamitous for the river and the region inextricably tied to it. The new plan hasn’t pushed them off the table, especially in Arizona, which is slated to take the biggest hit.
“While we are still awaiting the final operational plans for the next two years, any proposal that imposes the vast majority of cuts on Arizona is unreasonable and unacceptable,” the Arizona representative Adelita Grijalva said in a statement issued Friday.
“Upper Basin states continue to hide behind an outdated legal framework that is disconnected from today’s hydrologic realities, allowing them to avoid making meaningful reductions to their own water use,” Grijalva said, echoing the frustrations voiced by lower basin officials throughout the negotiation process.
In the north, however, stakeholders say they’ve already taken the hit from drier conditions directly. With no reservoir to manage their supply, they source from waterways themselves. When the system is low, there’s simply less to go around.
“We in the upper basin know all too well that poor hydrology makes for tough decisions,” said Mike Vickrey, a rancher in the Green River valley of Wyoming, during a congressional committee hearing on the Colorado River crisis held in June. “The only way going forward is a shared pain as hydrology worsens.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting