A first-of-its-kind program in the Colorado River Basin is paying ranchers and farmers to forgo their water rights in order to conserve the region’s rivers and lakes.
Launched in 2014, the $15-million “money-for-water program” was funded “by the four largest municipal water providers in the Colorado River Basin (which includes Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and California), along with the Bureau of Reclamation,” says High Country News. “The goal: see how complicated it would be to pay ranchers to use less water on their fields and instead let the water flow down the Green, Colorado and San Juan rivers to Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two biggest water storage buckets in the Colorado River system.”
It wasn’t clear at the start that the program would be a success, since ranchers and farmers in the drought-prone region have long been suspicious of cities trying to steal their water. Some municipal water providers have indeed bought up agricultural land for its water rights in a practice called “buy and dry.” But the project attracted 47 applicants in 2017 (up from 15 in 2015), in part because the water saved went directly back into the river itself, rather than to any city.
“The fund was spread among projects in all seven Colorado River Basin states and when the third year finishes up this fall, according to Michelle Garrison, who managed the program contracts for the Upper Colorado River Commission, it will have left an expected 21,590 acre-feet in the upper basin (and almost 98,000 acre-feet in the lower basin),” says High Country News. “True, it just a drop in the bucket for Lake Powell, which stores water from the upper basin of the Colorado River and had 15,020,378 acre-feet in it as of August 27, but it was the principle, and the experience, behind the System Conservation Program, that may prove most important.”
The pilot program is taking a break after this irrigation year to answer some fundamental questions, especially how to better ensure that the water that is conserved upstream actually makes it to its destination without being picked up or drained out by other users farther downstream.