Kathleen Ferris explaining the new ordinance in Chandler, Ariz., creating a linkage between land use and water use as the city builds out its last vacant acreage: Chandler’s new ordinance helps the city make decisions about land use and water use simultaneously. The new ordinance allots water to new businesses based on the square-footage and …
Continue reading ‘Chandler builds a land use-water use widget’ »
This is fascinating:
Tom Curwen has a great story in today’s Los Angeles Times of the sort that I’d like to see more of – beyond “OMG California is toast” drought coverage to look at what works in the state’s water management, what sort of adaptive capacity exists in the places where water is not running out. Which, …
Thursday morning I found myself standing knee deep in the Rio Grande. Grinning. University of New Mexico water resources faculty members Mark Stone (that’s Mark in the green shirt helping the knee-deep students learn to measure river flow) and Becky Bixby were out at the river with the summer field course students. It was a trial run …
Continue reading ‘University of New Mexico Water Resources Program: my newly remodeled career’ »
A fascinating analysis by the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program concludes that 57 percent of the nation’s population growth between 2000 and 2014 happened in places currently experiencing drought. Weird. But there also is this: In the midst of these challenges, though, some of the fastest-growing places like Las Vegas, San Diego, San Antonio, and Austin …
The U.C. Davis drought team today released its estimates for the economic impact of the drought this year. Spoiler alert – it’s worse than last year. Highlights: 560,000 acres fallowed, which is 6 to 7 percent $1.8 billion in direct ag losses (increased groundwater pumping costs and reduced sales), which is about 4 percent Total …
Smart words from Annie Snider on tomorrow’s Senate hearing on western water problems and drought: There are no silver bullets, and few, if any, of the opportunities that do exist are cheap. Details on the hearing here.
Many Navajo homes lack running water. Many more draw from shallow wells with poor quality water and resulting health problems. Now, my friends Olivier Uyttebrouck and Roberto Rosales report, this community could also lose its hauler, the grandma who trucks in the only clean water available: As she pulls up outside a house, residents quickly …
A month that Eric Kuhn of the Colorado River Water Conservation District in western Colorado called a “miracle May” has left the Colorado River’s two largest reservoirs in much better shape than we might have expected given the glum projections of doomsayers like me. Precipitation across the Colorado River Basin has been well above average, …
Mount Holyoke’s “Academic Minute” has a nice interview with Park Williams, who’s been using tree rings to flesh out the story of the current drought in the context of historic droughts, as it pertains to forests in the Southwest: I study the year-by-year records left by these rings, and they tell a fascinating story more …