Ry Rivard in Voice of San Diego:
As San Diego benefits from its new supplies of water, its customers are cutting their water use.
That means San Diego now has more water than it needs.
This is what I’m talking about Friday at the Law of the Colorado River conference. It’s the core of the solution space.
A tree hit by tamarisk beetles, Albuquerque’s Rio Grande bosque, July 2015, by John Fleck
The tamarisk beetle, introduced in 2001 as a strategy to control “invasive” tamarisk trees in the United States, is “expected to
spread throughout the entire (Colorado River Basin), and tamarisk presence, distribution and abundance will likely decline as a result,” according to a new report (pdf). “Tamarisk beetle in the Colorado River basin”, written by Ben Bloodworth of the Tamarisk Coalition, Pat Shafroth of the USGS, and colleagues, documents the findings of a major workshop last year.
The scare quotes around “invasive” are a reference to the issues raised by biologist Ken Thompson’s book Where are Camels From. Our ideas about “native” and “invasive” are in part social constructions, Thompson argues. How long has the newcomer been here? Do we “like” it or not? How do they fit into the changed environment we’ve created?
With the changed hydrology of dams and diversions on our western rivers, we’ve got a sufficiently altered system that the “native” biota we’re trying to protect are often ill suited to the new environment we’ve created. With tamarisk, that means that we now have “native” critters that do well in tamarisk because the old flood plain habitat in which they lived is gone, on account of no floods. Two key points from the report:
- Tamarisk beetles are expected to spread throughout the entire CRB, and tamarisk presence, distribution and abundance will likely decline as a result.
- The expected effects of this tamarisk decline on native plant species are dependent upon a number of environmental factors that may be useful in predicting outcomes. Most important is the degree to which the system has changed from historical conditions, including dynamism of the river, soil conditions, and the state of the remnant native plant community.
So for example the endangered willow flycatcher may suffer as a result. With its native habitat gone, it’s made a new life in the tamarisk, which will be harder now.
The report suggests that a more natural, spread out hydrologic system may be possible as tamarisk declines, but only in river systems that have something approximating their natural flow regime.
I’ve begun putting scare quotes around “done”, but we just passed a major milestone deserving of the word – done – with my upcoming book on the problems facing the Colorado River Basin and what I think solutions might look like. The book is now fully edited and entering the production process at Island Press. And when I say “fully edited” I have to add the scare quotes too, there are a couple of more rounds of copy editing and proofreading as part of said production process. But It’s now largely off my desk and into the hands of the professionals.
Lake Mead at sunset, by John Fleck
If I was a better writer I’d have a good metaphor here for the strange time-shifting experience of writing a book. Maybe a life that spans global time zones – I’m over here on one side of the International Date Line done with it, and y’all are off there on the other side waiting until next fall to read it? (You are anxiously awaiting the chance to read it and buy copies for all your family and friends, right? Put it on the holiday shopping list now.) Maybe the metaphor is the old days when news had to travel by boat around the Horn?
It’s a weird limbo, starting to work on other projects (I’ve already written some other stuff, teaching is the most fun right now), starting to think about what a next book might look like, while the thing that sorta feels behind me (The Book) is still very much ahead of me.
The last task was the acknowledgments, and it was the hardest, because so many people helped me. But I realized in sorting through the lists of the many people who gave their time and data and insights that they shared a common characteristic – a clear-eyed view of the difficulty of the Colorado River’s problems, combined with a persistent optimism that they can be solved.
I hope the book honors that zeitgeist, which I share – that the inexorable draining of Lake Mead demonstrates a clear problem in our relationship with water in the Colorado River Basin (we use too much of it!) but the litany of success stories I chronicle suggests significant progress, both in water conservation on the user end, and in institutional frameworks needed to manage the allocation of an increasingly scarce resource.
I’m off to Las Vegas this week for the annual CLE Law of the Colorado River conference. It’s a gathering of the community, and I’m looking forward to hearing the latest and sharing some of my ideas about where we go from here.
I’m driving over a day early, to spend time wandering around looking at water. It’s always been one of my great joys, getting down to the water, seeing how it moves through the system, and I’ve been in the writing tunnel and away from the water too much over the last six months. There’s a big reservoir out east of Vegas that I’ve grown fond of over the last few years, gonna pay a visit.
In freshman college physics, a common conceit to simplify the study of velocity and momentum is the air table (think air hockey), which allows you to reduce the friction on a moving object to negligible levels. “Imagine,” the professor explains, “a frictionless plane.” And then sketches out on the chalkboard the equations for velocity and momentum and such.
This is great for abstracting away that troubling friction part to understand the core phenomena. Once you actually have to do stuff in the real world, though, you best bring friction back into the discussion. It matters.
I was reminded of this as I read UC Riverside economist Christopher Thornberg’s thoughts in the Riverside Press-Enterprise about the Saudi Arabian dairy company Almarai’s purchase of Palo Verde Irrigation District farmland with senior Colorado river water rights:
One vocal critic is UC Riverside economist Christopher Thornberg, who says the practice is akin to exporting water.
“They have already destroyed their water tables, now they’re destroying ours,” he said.
The solution, according to Thornberg, is to raise prices on agricultural water and overhaul the water rights system that gave Palo Verde farmers their “first in time, first in right” claim in 1877.
Such a move would surely eliminate high-water crops like alfalfa and cotton in the valley. Those crops would then have to be purchased from other states that aren’t suffering water shortages, he said.
“If (farmers) have to pay for that water at anything remotely like a reasonable price, it wouldn’t happen because they wouldn’t make money on it,” Thornberg said.
This is, for Thornberg, not new. In 2008, he and Michael Bazdarich wrote a book chapter arguing that California’s water administration system would work better under a market. Like much of this literature, the 2008 chapter ignores a central piece of the economics – the transaction costs of building such a market. His more recent comments suggest a new twist – overhaul the property rights system under which Palo Verde farmers now have the highest priority to California’s Colorado River water rights. Perhaps he has more to say on this than was quoted in the PE, but to just blithely call for property rights reform seems to ignore one of the central findings of decades of research by economists on this issue – institutional change of this sort is accompanied by significant transaction costs.
Changing property rights and building markets doesn’t just happen by magic. Ignoring the transaction costs of institutional change is the ag water economics equivalent of “Imagine a frictionless plane.”
While we were blathering on mindlessly in a comment thread about the water exported form California via alfalfa exports, Peter Gleick helpfully jumped in with come actual data:
California’s total water footprint is an estimated 64 million acre-feet of water. That’s more than double the amount of water that flows down both of the state’s two largest rivers, the Sacramento and San Joaquin, in an average year. An estimated 38 million acre-feet of water is used to produce goods and services within California. Half of that water is used for goods that are then exported and consumed outside the state. The remainder – about 19 million acre-feet of water – is used to produce goods that are consumed in California. An additional 44 million acre-feet of water is required to produce the goods and services that are imported into California and consumed here, making California a net importer of virtual water.
“As pressures on water resources intensify, evaluating our impact on the world’s water resources becomes increasingly important; the water footprint is one way to quantify this impact,” said Julian Fulton, lead author of the report. “Most of California’s water footprint is external, meaning that Californians are more dependent on water resources from other places than in-state.”
For the home town crowd, the University of New Mexico School of Law’s new environmental law professor, Cliff Villa, is talking next week about Flint:
Flint talk
The law school’s at 1117 Stanford Dr NE.
The downside to the remarkable water conservation I’ve been writing about (see yesterday’s Albuquerque numbers, for example) is revenue. Water utilities sell water. If people use less water, water utilities make less money. One option is to shift to more fixed-costs pricing, charging a flat rate for service, but then you lose the behavioral incentive of price.
Tony Davis’s latest story out of Tucson is an example:
Tucsonans conserve so well that their usage — and Tucson Water’s revenue — has plummeted over the years, and that’s something the utility’s new director wants to fix. A specific proposal is a year away, but a new rate structure likely would reduce the utility’s dependence on revenue coming from monthly charges based on how much water a home or business uses. Under a scenario outlined by newly hired Tucson Water Director Timothy Thomure, a greater portion of customers’ bills would shift to the utility’s fixed charges, which stay the same regardless of how much water people use.
There’s pushback from water conservation advocates, who think that would lead to an increase in water use. Albuquerque used a similar approach a couple of years ago (higher fixed cost on my bill) and conservation continued, so maybe not? But the details matter. There’s a lot of room here for some detailed house-by-house, neighborhood-by-neighborhood number crunching to try to get a better understanding of the elasticity of demand and how that interacts with various pricing structures. Call in The Economists!
Albuquerque water use
I’m giving a talk next week at the CLE Law of the River conference in Las Vegas about what I think is one of the two most important trends in western water management. The first, which we hear a lot about, is the pressure posed by climate change and drought. The second, which I don’t think gets enough attention, is the remarkable trends in water use by the region’s municipalities. They are going down everywhere. I think this is the salient feature of our water planning and management efforts.
I’ll have to update my slides (that’s a joke – I’ve got a week, you think I’ve started on my slides?) after this morning’s news that Albuquerque’s 2015 water use came in at 127 gallons per capita per day. If you’re not a water numbers nerd, let me try to explain how remarkable that number is. In 1995, Albuquerque residents used 251 gallons per person per day. A major American city has cut its per person use of a critical resource by 49.4 percent in two decades:
“The last time overall water use was this low was in 1982,” Yuhas said. That’s especially impressive when you consider that the Albuquerque population in 1982 was about 366,000 and that the water utility serves more than 658,000 people today.
the 1.28 gallon per flush throne
There’s a lot going on here. On the indoor side, changing national appliance standards and incentives from the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority mean that toilets, clothes washers, etc., are growing steadily more efficient, both in all new construction and as new fixtures replace new ones in existing buildings.
The real action, though, is outdoors. There, incentives and education by the water utility are entwined with changing community values about what we want Albuquerque to look like. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the bulk of those savings over the last two decades have come in outdoor water use, the “consumptive” portion of our water use that we use in our gardens. There is politics and policy here, but all the outdoor savings have been voluntary, a change in behavior and values that is happening one yard at a time.
The outdoor piece matters because indoor water use is fully reused in New Mexico’s middle Rio Grande – we put our treated effluent back into the river where it is available for use by downstream cities, farms, and the river ecosystem itself. When you look at the consumptive fraction, which I think is the most important measure, the outdoor conservation success over the last two decades provides Albuquerque with a remarkable buffer to try to ensure resilience in the face of the threat of climate change to our water supply.
Note to self: remember that El Niño isn’t just about enjoying a growing southwestern U.S. snowpack and pondering its implications on our 2016 water supply.
Across the horn of Africa (and many places around the world) people go hungry as a result. From SciDev.Net, a portal for global development issues:
The consequences of a lack of rain between June and September will be seen between now and March, during the main cropping season in northern East Africa. Traditionally, January marks the start of the harvesting period, when markets are usually replenished, but this year’s yields are predicted to be dire, and fodder scarce.
Their maps:
Food stress
From the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado, Rio Grande headwaters, more evidence that ag communities can overcome the groundwater tragedy of the commons:
ALAMOSA — For the second year in a row, water officials have seen a recovery in one of the aquifers that farmers lean on heavily in the San Luis Valley. The unconfined aquifer, which is the shallower of the valley’s two major groundwater bodies, saw its volume increase by 119,000 acre-feet.
That bump follows an increase of 71,000 acre-feet from the year before.
That’s Matt Hildner in the Pueblo Chieftain.
How’d they do this? Cally Carswell did a great piece a couple of years ago in High Country News explaining:
Instead of denying or ignoring the problem, farmers are facing the fact that agriculture has outgrown its water supply. They admit they must live within new limits, or perish. Determined to avoid state intervention, they’ve created an innovative irrigation market, charging themselves to pump and using that money to pay others to fallow their land. Thousands of acres have come out of production, and their sights are set on fallowing tens of thousands more.