As Colorado River reaches ‘tipping point,’ farmers and tribes will play key role

Decades of drought and overuse have pushed the Colorado River to an ecological “tipping point,” and conservationists need to work closely with farmers and tribal nations to save it, several water experts said Wednesday at a webinar organized by the Nature Conservancy’s Colorado chapter.

“Change happens at the speed of trust,” said Aaron Derwingson, water projects director at the Nature Conservancy’s Colorado River Program and a panelist at the event. “And there’s so much at stake in the [Colorado River] basin that we don’t have the luxury of solving one problem at a time.”

The Colorado River is often described as the “lifeblood” of the southwestern United States. Stretching from the Rocky Mountains in Colorado to Baja California, Mexico, it provides drinking water for roughly 40 million people and supplies irrigation water for 5.5 million acres of land. Now its flow is reaching record lows. On Tuesday, Lake Powell, the largest reservoir on the Colorado, dropped below a critical 3,525-foot threshold for the first time, raising concerns for the millions of people who rely on the dam for hydroelectric power. Last year, the Bureau of Reclamation declared a Tier 1 water shortage in the Colorado River for the first time in the agency’s history, and water deliveries have been cut to Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico.

“The story of climate change will be written in water,” said panelist Taylor Hawes, director of the Colorado River Program. Climate change is fueling an unprecedented number of drought and flood events throughout the world, she explained, including the 20-year megadrought that’s drying out the Colorado River basin. A century of misguided river management hasn’t helped. “When the river was divvied up in 1922, we had more water — it was a wet cycle — and there were less people,” said Hawes. Now, she said, “it’s pretty simple, in some regards — we are using more water than the river provides.”

The Nature Conservancy’s goal is to “protect river health and wildlife for all who rely on them,” said Hawes. To achieve that, she and Derwingson said, the Colorado River Program has collaborated closely with farmers, tribal leaders, and other stakeholders. Derwingson said he’s been working for years with farmers in Colorado, who, he noted, make up only 6.5 percent of the state’s workforce but use 86 percent of its water allotted for human use.

“If you want to do anything related to water in Colorado? Well, anything that involves water involves ag,” he said.

To improve water conservation in Colorado agriculture, Derwingson said, the state’s water infrastructure will need to be overhauled, and farmers and ranchers may face restrictions on water use. But with the right conservation strategies, he said, farmers can meet those challenges. During a Colorado River Program pilot project in Grand Valley, an agricultural region in western Colorado, a handful of landowners employed three water conservation strategies on 2,200 acres of land. They saved 6,000 acre-feet of water. “Scaling up is possible,” said Derwingson, “but to do that, we really need to have ag in the driver’s seat to develop programs that work for them.”

The Colorado River Program is also working with tribal nations, though Hawes admitted that those collaborations are more recent. Historically, native communities have been systematically excluded from Colorado River policy discussions, and many nations have spent years fighting for their water rights. Today tribal nations control or have rights to 20 to 25 percent of the water in the Colorado River basin.

“We cannot develop a path forward without their participation,” said Hawes.

Hawes highlighted the recent agreement between the Jicarilla Apache Nation, the State of New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission, and the Nature Conservancy as an example of her program’s increased collaborations with tribal leadership. According to the agreement, the Jicarilla Apache Nation will lease up to 6.5 billion gallons of Colorado River water a year to New Mexico to bolster endangered species.

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