Students in next semester’s University of New Mexico Water Resources Program core curriculum will be reading this new paper by Paul Cairney and Richard Kwiatkowski: To communicate effectively in policymaking systems, actors need to understand how policymakers process evidence and the environment in which they operate. Therefore, we combine psychology and policy studies to produce a three-step strategy. First, do …
When we talk about capturing “wasted” water for use – stormwater, sewage treatment plant effluent – it’s important to think about where that water is going now, before we start capturing it. Often, it’s into a river. So capturing it and putting it to use for some human purpose is depriving the river of that …
My “natural” versus “not natural” categorization sometimes blinds me to the ways of urban nature: The development of Phoenix has, perhaps counter-intuitively, increased the total water permanence throughout the city when compared to the surrounding desert. This helps explain how Phoenix’s discrete blue spaces are able to subsidize such high levels of waterbird diversity and …
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tl;dr Western water policy and politics has to come to grips with the fact that overall water use is declining, not rising, as populations and economies grow. The longer version…. Two years ago, when I was deeply immersed in the act of writing my book, I had an incredibly important conversation with Emily Turner, my …
Continue reading ‘We need to come to terms with the fact that we’re using less water’ »
Hiroko Tabuchi has a fascinating piece in this morning’s New York Times about a battle underway to determine whether gazillions of dollars in infrastructure spending to upgrade America’s municipal plumbing is spent on iron or plastic pipe. It features a couple of issues I love to talk about with our University of New Mexico Water …
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The latest USGS data on water use by U.S. municipalities shows a continued decline, despite a growing population. This not just a decline in per capita use, though it is that. But per capita use continues to drop faster than population is rising in most areas. Brett Walton has a nice summary of the findings, …
Consumptive use of Colorado River water by the states of the Lower Basin (Nevada, California, and Arizona) is on track this year to be at its lowest since 1986. This graph, which I put together this weekend for a talk I’m giving at the Upper Colorado River Basin Water Forum at Colorado Mesa University in …
Continue reading ‘When people have less water, they use less water’ »
One of my favorite bits of business that never made it into my Colorado River book was a late afternoon encounter at Lake Mead’s Boulder Harbor boat ramp with a guy named Scotty. I was thinking about Scotty when I came across the image below, in a 1946 Bureau of Reclamation report on the development …
Scientists for many years have projected a decline in the Colorado River’s flow as a result of a warming climate. But it’s only in the last couple of years that we’ve begun to see evidence that this is already happening. The system has a lot of natural variability, so detecting the relatively smaller impact of …
Continue reading ‘More evidence that climate change is reducing the Colorado River’s flow’ »
A little “field work” yesterday morning, with one of our University of New Mexico Water Resources Program graduate students and a faculty colleague, looking at a potential environmental restoration site we’re studying. The only way to get there was by bicycle. Bummer.