In California, a new face of water conservation?

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One way to conserve water is to pay people to not use it.

That’s not the normal way of talking about water markets, but that’s one way of framing what’s going on right now between Southern California urban water users and rice farmers up north:

With the drought stretching into its fourth year, a heavyweight water agency from Los Angeles has come calling on Sacramento Valley rice farmers, offering up to $71 million for some of their water.

The price being offered is so high, some farmers can make more from selling water than from growing their rice.

Users (in this case rice farmers) conserve in a dry year and are compensated. Overall system water use (by “system” I’m talking about the state’s interlinked artificial watershed) is reduced. The shock that might otherwise happen if the shortage happened arbitrarily (one or the other parties to this transaction simply running out of water) is avoided.

Potential uncaptured externalities: the people who sell farm equipment to the rice farmers, and their employees. This is not without negative spillovers.

A reminder that stormwater isn’t free water

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There is a natural desire in water-short communities to capture and use stormwater. But a brewing feud between the state of New Mexico and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is a reminder that tweaking the stormwater management system is not without consequences, because the water you’re capturing would otherwise be going somewhere and doing something.

At issue is a new EPA stormwater permit for the greater Albuquerque area intended to improve water quality in the Rio Grande. Stormwater, especially from New Mexico’s summer thunderstorms, washes all kinds of crap into the river. This rightly concerns the EPA, which is charged with keeping crap out of rivers. But the new stormwater permit, according to a Feb. 26, 2015 letter from the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission to the EPA, pursues this goal in part by reducing the amount of water that gets to the river.

The ISC also plays the Endangered Species Act card, arguing that reduced summer storm runoff reduces the amount of water available to meet flow targets for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow:

While this specific conflict – a federal stormwater permit – is narrowly focused, this raises a broader issue about the way we think about stormwater here in the Rio Grande Valley of central New Mexico. The Middle Rio Grande Regional Water Plan, for example, proposes to enhance stormwater capture as a water management strategy. My University of New Mexico colleague Bruce Thomson has long argued that we need to recognize that water management approaches like this are entering into a zero sum game – water captured before it hits the river (stormwater, treated effluent) is less water in the river. From a note he send to water colleagues this morning (quoted with permission):

For decades folks have had their eye on stormwater as the untapped resource that was going to save us all from future water shortages. Stormwater collection is in the 2004 MRG Regional Water Plan. The North Diversion Channel goes right past the Water Utility Authority’s treatment plant and they’ve had conversations about diverting storm water down the hill to their plant. And a topic at all of the local & regional water meetings is about repealing the 96 hour rule to allow folks to capture and store stormwater. The reason is simple – nobody has claimed stormwater or has rights to it so everybody’s first thought is we can see it, it’s right there, we might as well take it and use it.

This letter from the ISC is the first formal declaration that I know of to throw down the gauntlet and officially declare that that water serves an important role in the state’s water balance. There are going to be some wonderful battles to watch between the environmentalists, state & federal regulators, water rights holders, water planners and others as they begin to realize they can’t do anything that will impact stormwater flows.

Here’s the full ISC letter:



Agricultural land, drought and taxes

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The New Mexico legislature is considering a bill this year that would make it easier for farmers to maintain their “agricultural” designation, for property tax purposes, during drought. This is important for preservation of rural agricultural ways of life, because ag land taxes are cheaper than land otherwise labeled (“residential”, for example). For this reason, the New Mexico Acequia Association supports it:

In acequia communities this is vitally important to keep lands in agricultural production and to protect continuity in agricultural use. It protects landowners and families with long-time ties and long-term commitment to agricultural use of the land.

But there are competing/conflicting policy issues.

In the greater Albuquerque metropolitan area, the ag property tax designation incentivizes keeping irrigation going that is clearly non-economic for agricultural purposes alone. (In the most recent census of agriculture, net farm income in the county in which Albuquerque sits was negative.) This suggests that, here, people are farming as a lifestyle amenity, with a day job that pays the bills and a tax break that subsidizes the enterprise.

This may very well be a desirable policy outcome. The community as a whole may sufficiently value that green space to support such a subsidy and to prefer the resulting incentive to divert water to that use. But the discussion should be explicit about that tradeoff.

The legislation: HB 112

update: a couple of helpful comments from Coco over on the Twitters (I wish there was some way to automate this, a lot of the most interesting discussion these days happens over there)

 

 

Good news and bad news for Lake Mead

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The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s monthly report forecasting Colorado River Basin reservoir operations for the next 24 months (pdf) came out today, and it had some good news and some bad news for people in the Lower Colorado River Basin worried about dropping levels in Lake Mead.

Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, February 2015, by John Fleck

Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, February 2015, by John Fleck

Mead ended February at a surface elevation of 1,089 feet above sea level, which is just 41 percent full, the lowest it has been at this time of year since they first began filling it in the 1930s. If it drops much further (1,075), Arizona and Nevada will have to reduce their use of Colorado River water, the first shortage since the system was built.

Good news: We’re all but guaranteed at this point (a 95 percent chance) that there the Bureau of Reclamation will release some “bonus water” from Lake Powell to help keep Mead’s levels from dropping further. Under normal operations, the rules require upstream states to release 8.23 million acre feet per year*, but this year the likely release will be 9 million acre feet.

Bad news: Despite the extra water, Mead is forecast to continue dropping – another 6 feet at the end of September compared to a year previous. How could that be?

The answer is what some people are calling the “structural deficit” (though I’ve gotten some pushback on the term). The basic rules that govern water accounting call for normal deliveries to Nevada, Arizona, California, and Mexico that, when combined with evaporation and system losses as the water moves downstream, are greater than the amount of water available:

Lake Mead Structural deficit                                           .

In the past, water users were able to ignore this problem because “bonus water” above and beyond the minimum 8.23 million acre feet was routine. But because of unprecedented drought (climate change?), the bonus water is gone. Despite the drought, the Upper Basin states have continued to meet their 8.23 million acre foot base requirement, but the days of bonus water are gone.

It seems obvious that the folks downstream would look at this situation and say, “Hey, we’ve got to stop using so much water!” And they have, to a point. In 2007, they signed a shortage sharing agreement that calls for a reduction in Arizona and Nevada’s share if Lake Mead drops below 1,075. The idea here is that they use the water while they’ve got it, and then cut back when the reservoir drops to troublingly low levels.

When basin leaders were hashing out the details of the 2007 agreement, they considered options that would have cut use sooner deeper, and sooner, but they didn’t do it, so this is where we are now.

* Lawyers will argue about this number, but for all practical purposes, that’s the way the system’s being operated.

Article VII of the Rio Grande Compact

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Article VII of the Rio Grande Compact is one of the keys to allocating the river’s supply among Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas:

Neither Colorado nor New Mexico shall increase the amount of water in storage in reservoirs constructed after 1929 whenever there is less than 400,000 acre feet of usable water in project storage….

Operationally, this is critical. It means that in drought conditions, irrigators cannot store spring runoff in essentially all upstream reservoirs for summer use. There’s been some flexibility written into the law in practice, but it only operates at the margin. It basically means that during droughts, one of the water managers’ most important tools (storage) is constrained.

Elephant Butte Dam site: foundation of dam in bed of river, third section in foreground under construction, looking west, 1914 Feb. 27, courtesy Library of Congress

Elephant Butte Dam site: foundation of dam in bed of river, third section in foreground under construction, looking west, 1914 Feb. 27, courtesy Library of Congress

If my records are correct (and don’t hold me to the date, this is me looking up stuff in my files on a Sunday morning without benefit of actually confirming with people who know, i.e. “doing journalism”), we’ve been in Article VII since July 8, 2010. But with the big last-of-Februrary-first-of-March storm, there are signs usable project storage in Elephant Butte Reservoir could rise above the magic 400,000 acre feet some time around the first of May. That would allow the Middle Rio Grande Irrigation District to sock away a bit of extra water for late summer alfalfa cuttings.

The variables here illustrate the way a big reservoir integrates across both supply and demand functions. As soon as the Elephant Butte Irrigation District downstream begins taking its water out of Elephant Butte, it’ll likely drop back below 400k and we’ll be back in Article VII. The current “official” date for the start of irrigation is June 1, but it looks like it may be earlier – like the middle of May. Depending on runoff between now and then, EBID’s start might even slip earlier, which would trigger the usual “black helicopters” north-south water war trope about how EBID and the federal government are in cahoots to keep Article VII storage restrictions in place.

I am generally skeptical of black helicopters.

In Brazil’s drought, compensating the poor

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OtPR the other day suggested compensation as drought mitigation:

If the goal is drought resilience, we could use money instead of water to keep farm communities intact until a wet year.  If it is important that farm workers in Mendota live decent lives during droughts, we don’t have to find non-existent water for their employers’ farms.  We could just hand the farm workers fat checks.

In Brazil, they’re already doing this:

Now the government is applying a income transfer programme, inspired by the Bolsa-Familia, such as Bolsa Estiagem and Garantia Safra. The first is focused on family farmers with an income of up to two monthly minimum wages living in emergency areas. About 940,000 families are receiving R$80 a month ($34,64). The Garantia Safra programme provides support to farmers who have lost at least 50% of their harvests. More than 700,000 farmers have received R$70 in five payments. So far, the federal government has spent about R$16bn to mitigate the effects of drought on the livelihood of farmers.