EDITORIAL

Facing down drought: We're in it together

Editorial board
The Republic | azcentral.com
The Echo Bay Marina sits abandoned in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Nevada. By next year, the amount of Colorado River water flowing into Lake Mead could fall enough to trigger cuts in Arizona’s allocation of river water by more than 320,000 acre-feet.
  • By 2060%2C some climate-change modeling predicts the flow of the Colorado River could be a trillion gallons less than today
  • Cities and states in the Colorado River basin are learning to live with less water%2C even desert-denying Las Vegas
  • Overcoming drought in the lower Colorado River basin may require urban dwellers to pay for upgrades to farms

The most dire prediction of a 2012 federal supply-and-demand study of the Colorado River may have been this one:

By 2060, the demand shortfall for Colorado River water could reach 1 trillion gallons — enough water to supply 6 million Southwestern households for a year.

So, which 6 million households do we let go dry?

Think this one through. There are fewer than 2.4 million households in all of Arizona. Fewer than 1 million in Nevada. And about 2 million in Colorado. If those worst-case scenarios of 45 years in the future prove true, Arizona, Nevada and Colorado — three states whose urban populations rely heavily on the Colorado — could lose all of it.

And there would still be more than a half million more households in other states to be squeezed of their water supply from the Colorado.

Nothing is given. But the two great megatrends impacting the American Southwest — population growth and climate change — are slowly consuming the region's liquid lifeline, the Colorado River.

A sobering, months-in-the-making report by Arizona Republic reporter Brandon Loomis comprehensively illustrates just how serious the Southwest's water issues soon may be.

His report examines how soon the region may begin feeling the effects of our decades-long drought: By next year, Colorado River flows into Lake Mead may fall enough to trigger cuts in Arizona's allocation of river water by more than 320,000 acre-feet — nearly twice as much water to supply all the households in Mesa for a year.

But the most important take-away from The Republic's examination of drought in the Southwest is that societal survival in an age of water shortage is not an issue for one community or another to overcome on its own. For that matter, it is not a challenge for any one state alone.

The receding flow of the Colorado poses a challenge for the Southwest as a whole. Urban dwellers and farmers. Large cities and small. Densely populated states and sparsely populated ones.

As the reality of a drier Southwest has taken hold, communities and states individually have acted to mitigate its effects. For decades a desert-dwelling scofflaw, Las Vegas today is slowly lowering its per-capita use of water to levels approaching those of Phoenix and Los Angeles — cities where average per-capita water use is lower than at any time in the past 40 years.

But local conservation efforts, no matter how ingenious, may not solve the problems of drought. Experts cited by Loomis expect conservation efforts to make up just a third of the difference between what we have and what we need 50 years from now.

Survival — defined as the ability to thrive as a modern society — means tackling climate change and the drought it brings on universally.

It may require urban dwellers to help pay for drip-irrigation upgrades and laser field leveling to lower water usage of the region's highest users, our farms. It also may require farmers to turn away from water-consuming crops like alfalfa. One third of Colorado River water today goes to crops that feed livestock.

And it means interstate cooperation on water-sharing efforts on an unprecedented scale.

Late last year, Arizona's supplier of Colorado River water, the Central Arizona Project, entered into an agreement with the Bureau of Reclamation, Nevada and California to "bank" water in Lake Mead to keep it from receding to a level that could prove disastrous to all three states. The cost to Arizona was 345,000 acre-feet of water, which constituted the lion's share of the 740,000 acre-feet the three states would store in Lake Mead.

That sort of cooperative effort may constitute but a down payment on the overall drought bill to the lower basin states. There may have to be water-reclamation efforts on a much greater scale, and seawater desalination on a genuinely massive scale (as well as the substantial costs of mitigating the environmental consequences of desalination).

No matter how much the waters of the Colorado recede, individual Southwestern cities will not shutter their doors for lack of water.

Survival is a challenge the entire Southwest must confront. In the face of drought, we all thrive, or wither, as one.