Forecast flow through the Azotea Tunnel, which provides New Mexico’s San Juan-Chama Project supplies of Colorado River water to Albuquerque and central New Mexico, are forecast to be 152,000 acre feet for the 2016-17 water year, the highest flows of the 21st century.
Audubon has an excellent new report on risks to birds, and all that go with them, along the rivers and arid landscape lakes across western North America. Lots there, but I think this bit is especially important:
Without reform, today’s water management framework could lead to severe water shortages to large numbers of people and economic production, likely resulting in political crisis. In that circumstance, it will grow increasingly difficult to advocate successfully that water should remain or be restored in rivers for nature’s sake. An important step in protecting the birds of the Colorado River Basin is thus to improve the reliability and resiliency of the water supply for people as well as nature.
This is a critical point in thinking about contemporary water/environmental politics. It’s not enough to simply say “But the birds!” Environmentalists’ greatest chance for success requires helping ensure reliable supplies for the people, because without that the environment will always take the hit.
I’ve got a post up over at Better Burque about downtown crime, buses, Summerfest, and Albuquerque’s public spaces. I quoted Jane Jacobs, as one does:
“eyes on the streets”, y’all
Wandering the neighborhood on this morning’s bike ride, I ran across this sign:
city permit needed for amplified events
I’m reading Robert Ellickson’s 1991 book Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes. It’s a fascinating bit of legal scholarship about how residents of Shasta County, in California, manage the problems posed by cattle wandering off the ranch and onto other folks’ ranchettes, or alfalfa pastures.
The legal structures, distinctions between “open range” and “closed range” and related rules about fencing requirements and liability, are byzantine. So what Ellickson found was that, rather than resort to courts and laws, residents just kinda sorted things out in practical ways that tended to respect cultural norms of neighborliness. Framed in the context of the economist Ronald Coase, the “transaction costs” of taking the lawyerly path are just too damned high. Framed in terms of game theory, repeated interactions with your neighbors make the lawyerly path awkward and unproductive.
This seems not to be working in the Fair West neighborhood.
Native American lands have some of the poorest water infrastructure in the country: 13 percent of homes on reservations lack access to clean water or sanitation, a significant number compared to 0.6 percent for non-Native Americans. On the Navajo Nation, home to 250,000 people, 40 percent of people lack access to running water and depend on water deliveries or wells contaminated by radioactive industrial waste. In Alaska, some native villages lack any water infrastructure, and traditional fisheries are being threatened by water contamination. Geographic isolation, extreme temperatures, and lack of funding make infrastructure in these villages prohibitively expensive. Across the country, Native American lands are often subject to environmental injustices like dumping and pollution, as well as hazardous sites and high-risk facilities such as mines and pipelines.
That’s from “An Equitable Water Future”, a new white paper from the US Water Alliance (pdf). It raises important questions about equity in both water quantity and quality in the United States. While, as the report points out, broad availability of safe and reliable water is one of the Unites States’ great achievements, water challenges in terms of obtaining safe water, or water at all, remain “a daily reality for some communities”.
This is a classically “wicked” problem in the sense that the definition of the problem itself fundamentally constrains the kind of solutions on offer, sometimes poorly. This is what was so brilliant about journalist Laura Bliss’s great work two years ago on East Porterville, the poster child for the impact of drought in California’s Central Valley. The East Porterville story was often used to frame a narrative of evil farmers going deep to pump groundwater, leaving East Porterville’s poor Latino residents’ shallow wells dry. Bliss’s story instead catalogues a history of disenfranchisement of poor communities like East Porterville that left them out of incorporated cities that were able to continue to provide reliable water even in the drought. Bliss quotes Stanford’s Michelle Anderson:
Neglect by white officials, often compounded by community need to keep housing costs low, resulted in a lack of rudimentary infrastructure, including paved streets, sewers, utilities, and water.
As such, this water problem is best viewed as being nested as much within the set of problems associated with equity in the provision of societal services – health care, education, safe transportation – as it is in the “water policy” domain, where we think about things like regulation of groundwater withdrawals and river diversions.
One suggested short term tool to deal with the shrinking Salton Sea is to continue putting in more water. New research suggests that, for fish and birds, it won’t help.
changes in Salton Sea elevation (blue line) and salinity (red line) under current policy, courtesy Pacific Institute
“Mitigation water” is jargon for extra water currently diverted to the Salton Sea to make up for reduced agricultural runoff as efficiency improvements. (It’s hairy and I won’t try to explain the whole mess here, read my book or, if you don’t have as much time, read the Desert Sun’s recent opus, which actually does a better job on this than my book, but you should still read my book.)
As the mitigation water goes away, the sea shrinks and bad things happen, including to birds and fish. One suggestion has been to continue the flow of mitigation water past next year, when it’s scheduled to turn off. But a new analysis by a pair of Army Corps of Engineers researchers suggests that, for the birds and fish, this won’t help much, delaying but not eliminating risk to the critters as salinity in the sea keeps rising:
If no restoration action is taken in stabilizing the Sea elevation and reducing salinity but continuing QSA water transfers (at 2017 levels), i.e., scenario 2; results indicate that Salton Sea avian and fish population dynamics will be negatively impacted, although somewhat delayed.
Rivers, people, awesome in so many ways.
Speaking earlier this month at the University of Colorado’s Martz Conference, Brad Udall offered what amounted to a bibliography, both helpful and deeply unnerving, of recent scientific literature documenting what we have learned in recent years about climate change and water in the Western United States, and what it tells us about our future prospects.
With Brad’s permission and help, here it is:
Mote, Philip W., et al. “Perspectives on the causes of exceptionally low 2015 snowpack in the western United States.” Geophysical Research Letters 43.20 (2016).
….both human influence and sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies contributed strongly to the risk of snow drought in Oregon and Washington: the contribution of SST anomalies was about twice that of human influence. By contrast, SSTs and humans appear to have played a smaller role in creating California’s snow drought. In all three states, the anthropogenic effect on temperature exacerbated the snow drought.
Mann, Michael E., and Peter H. Gleick. “Climate change and California drought in the 21st century.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112.13 (2015): 3858-3859.
….the increasing co-occurrence of dry years with warm years raises the risk of drought despite limited evidence of a trend in precipitation itself, highlighting the critical role of elevated temperatures in altering water availability and increasing overall drought intensity and impact.
Lehner, Flavio, et al. “Assessing recent declines in Upper Rio Grande runoff efficiency from a paleoclimate perspective.” Geophysical Research Letters 44.9 (2017): 4124-4133.
In years of low precipitation, very low runoff ratios are made 2.5–3 times more likely by high temperatures. This temperature sensitivity appears to have strengthened in recent decades, implying future water management vulnerability should recent warming trends in the region continue.
Ayers, Jessica, et al. “Comparison of CMIP3 and CMIP5 projected hydrologic conditions over the Upper Colorado River Basin.” International Journal of Climatology 36.11 (2016): 3807-3818.
Even with projected increases in precipitation, snowmelt is projected to decrease dramatically throughout the (Upper Colorado River Basin)
Fyfe, John C., et al. “Large near-term projected snowpack loss over the western United States.” Nature Communications 8 (2017).
Observations and reanalyses indicate that between the 1980s and 2000s, there was a 10–20% loss in the annual maximum amount of water contained in the region’s snowpack. Here we show that this loss is consistent with results from a large ensemble of climate simulations forced with natural and anthropogenic changes, but is inconsistent with simulations forced by natural changes alone. A further loss of up to 60% is projected within the next 30 years.
Woodhouse, Connie A., et al. “Increasing influence of air temperature on upper Colorado River streamflow.” Geophysical Research Letters 43.5 (2016): 2174-2181.
….recent droughts have been amplified by warmer temperatures that exacerbate the effects of relatively modest precipitation deficits. Since 1988, a marked increase in the frequency of warm years with lower flows than expected, given precipitation, suggests continued warming temperatures will be an increasingly important influence in reducing future UCRB water supplies.
Goulden, Michael L., and Roger C. Bales. “Mountain runoff vulnerability to increased evapotranspiration with vegetation expansion.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111.39 (2014): 14071-14075.
….we found a consistent relationship between watershed ET and temperature across the Sierra Nevada; this consistency implies a potential widespread reduction in water supply with warming, with important implications for California’s economy and environment.
Cook, Benjamin I., Toby R. Ault, and Jason E. Smerdon. “Unprecedented 21st century drought risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains.” Science Advances 1.1 (2015): e1400082.
….desiccation is consistent across most of the models and moisture balance variables, indicating a coherent and robust drying response to warming despite the diversity of models and metrics analyzed. Notably, future drought risk will likely exceed even the driest centuries of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (1100–1300 CE) in both moderate (RCP 4.5) and high (RCP 8.5) future emissions scenarios, leading to unprecedented drought conditions during the last millennium.
and of course….
Udall, Bradley, and Jonathan Overpeck. “The twenty?first century Colorado River hot drought and implications for the future.” Water Resources Research 53.3 (2017): 2404-2418.
….future climate change impacts on the Colorado River flows will be much more serious than currently assumed, especially if substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions do not occur.
One of the main focuses of the class I help teach in the fall, “Contemporary Issues in Water Management“, is the nature and function of “coupled human and natural systems”. (In fact, might say it’s the main focus of the entire UNM Water Resources Program, come to think of it.)
One of the biggest difficulties in dealing with water in the 21st century is figuring out where to draw the boundaries around the problem you’re trying to solve. If you get the boundaries wrong, you end up with externalities (both in the literal economics-jargon sense, and in the broader people-and-things-left-out sense) that lead to terrible solutions. This is what is happening, for example, at the Salton Sea, where a water policy success (conserve water!) has led to an externality failure (Salton Sea shrinks, birds die, and maybe people too!).
The complex nature of these coupled systems, where the scale of human activity can alter watersheds on an unimaginable scale (quite literally unimaginable, at least within the structure of the decision-making process – we always do stuff with impacts decision-makers failed to properly imagine and incorporate).
Colorado River near Kremmling, Colorado, by John Fleck
Writing in High Country News, rancher and fishing guide Paul Bruchez describes a fascinating process of trying to build the institutions needed to fully incorporate the many pieces of one coupled system – the Colorado River Valley around Kremmling, as the river emerges from the rugged headwaters into broad valleys amenable to farming and ranching and fishing and such.
Bruchez describes the coupled nature of this system:
For decades, water utilities on the Front Range have been pumping water from the Upper Colorado, leading to devastating impacts on the health of the river. Lower flows spiked water temperature and silted in the river bottom. This smothered insect life, damaging the river ecosystem and what had been a world-class trout fishery. Agriculture also suffered as river levels dropped. My family and other ranchers in the valley saw irrigation pumps left high and dry as our operations became unsustainable.
So both the natural system and the human system around Kremmling are deeply coupled to urban growth a mountain range away.
One traditional environmental/development politic solution to a problem like this is to try to uncouple by either a) stopping the Front Range diversions, or b) ignoring the problems of diversions and screwing the river valley. Then we have a big fight.
Bruchez describes a different approach, the slow and difficult process of building an institutional framework that instead more tightly and mindfully couples the two sides of the divide. Locals, environmental advocates, and big water managers are worked together to restore stuff:
What have I learned from this project? That the interests of ranchers and farmers can align with the interests of conservation groups, state agencies, water providers and other river users. The Colorado River flows through all of our lives. By working together, we can find smart, creative solutions that keep the Colorado healthy and working for all of us.
You should read the whole thing to get a better feel for what they’ve done. It’s a hopeful example.
Bart Miller, Western Resources Advocates, on decoupling and Colorado’s push to close the gap between water supply and projected use:
If cities continue on the track they’ve been on the last 15 years, which is reducing water use per capita by about 1 percent per year, that’s going to save a large chunk of the 400,000 acre-feet, through urban conservation. So at some level, I would de-emphasize the importance of that gap, because there are several approaches that will make that gap shrink or disappear.
Via Matt Weiser and the increasingly indispensable Water Deeply.