New Mexico forest acreage cleared to protect the state’s watersheds and water supply tripled this year: The Rio Grande Water Fund was started in July 2014. In conjunction with its 45 investor partners, the water fund thinned 10,130 acres of forest during its first year. That’s up from an average of 3,000 acres per year …
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Will we empty Lake Mead? Which uses more water, lettuce or bacon? That and news from the Colorado River Water Users Association’s annual meeting in John Fleck’s water news. And you can subscribe here.
I’m not sure who came up with the “More Slices than Pie” title for the panel discussion I moderated Thursday at the annual meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association, but it had a nice ring. A big thanks to Tom McCann from the Central Arizona Project for putting the panel together and inviting …
Continue reading ‘“More Slices Than Pie: Structural Deficit on the Colorado”’ »
Anyone who flies in an airplane and doesn’t spend most of his time looking out the window wastes his money. – Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert My Southwest flight into Las Vegas was nearly empty (a rarity these days), so I had my choice of window seats on either side of the plane and the chance …
Total water use in Albuquerque for the first 11 months of 2015 is down 6 percent from the same period in 2014, according to the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority’s latest pumping and diversions report. Indoor use (as measured indirectly by comparing this year’s sewage treatment plant outfall to last year’s) is essentially unchanged, …
Fortunately, the L.A. Department of Water and Power has come a long way in the last 20 years. For a time, says McQuilken, managers balked at the idea that conservation and recycling could replace the Mono Basin losses. But since then, the utility has become one of the country’s most progressive. Take water conservation. Simple measures like …
A paper out yesterday adds new detail to the picture provided by satellite groundwater observations of the Colorado River Basin, arguing that groundwater depletions from human pumping are not as large as suggested by previous research. The paper, Hydrologic implications of GRACE satellite data in the Colorado River Basin published in Water Resources Research (behind paywall, sorry), …
Preparing to moderate a panel at next week’s Colorado River Water Users Association annual meeting, I’m struck by the mix of good news and bad news on the river. 2015 water use across some major user groups is at record lows for the modern era, something that I don’t think gets enough attention. But Lake …
Continue reading ‘Is the Colorado River Basin half empty, or half full?’ »
Jon Christensen makes a great point: Christensen says experts learned lessons about the “stickiness” of behaviour change during California’s drought. “When there’s a lot of messaging about conserving water, when there are incentives to conserve water, people do conserve water, they use less water,” Christensen says. “And when the drought is over there’s some rebound, …
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Arizona cotton acreage this year is the lowest it has been in nearly a century. Cotton is incredibly important in the evolution of western water policy, in Arizona in particular and therefore in the Colorado River Basin in general. In Arizona, it was one of the “Three C’s” that dominated the state’s economy – cattle, …