“For the first time in more than 80 years, the U.S. has denied Mexico’s request for water from the Colorado River, escalating tensions over a water-sharing agreement between the two nations.
The State Department says it denied the request because Mexico hasn’t complied with the 1944 treaty that established the water-sharing system. That agreement requires Mexico to send 1.75 million acre-feet of water from the Rio Grande to the U.S. every five years. In turn, the U.S. must send 1.5 million acre-feet of water to Mexico from the Colorado River each year.
By the end of 2024, Mexico had delivered only a quarter of what it owed for the current five-year period, which ends in October. Mexico has been struggling with severe droughts for several years. In the first quarter of 2024, the country’s agricultural production fell by 6.1 percent, according to a report from the Bank of Mexico. Activity in the north-central regions, which includes the border states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Nuevo León, fell by 3.3 percent. The country has sought emergency water deliveries to alleviate the strain on its water systems.”
https://reason.com/2025/03/31/for-the-first-time-in-80-years-the-u-s-denies-mexicos-request-for-water/
“the freeze is just one of a series of unprecedented moves the Trump administration has made that are worrying the officials charged with keeping taps running and irrigation water flowing across a region that spans a broad swath of the West, including the cities of Denver, Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Diego.
That includes the president’s day-one executive order to boost California water deliveries that led to an abrupt release of billions of gallons that nearly flooded downstream farms.
And Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has made dramatic staffing cuts at the Bureau of Reclamation that are threatening its ability to operate the complex and aging system of reservoirs, canals and pumps that actually move water across the West in some regions.
The ongoing funding interruption is throwing a wrench into the works at a precarious moment. The states that share the perennially oversubscribed waterway are trying to write new rules to govern it — and negotiators see the next few months as the window to stave off paralyzing litigation.
The federal drought dollars were a crucial component of those negotiations.
“This is now a major, major problem,” said Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), who has sent multiple letters to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on the freeze of payments from a $4 billion pot in the Inflation Reduction Act that has been going to pay cities, farms and tribes to forgo water deliveries and funding major infrastructure projects that conserve water over the long term.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/11/water-worlds-quiet-trump-freak-out-00223964
“California, Arizona, and Nevada agreed to conserve at least 3 million acre-feet of water from the river over the next few years, or an average of about 1 million acre-feet per year. (An acre-foot fills one acre of land with one foot of water and is what two to three households use each year.)”
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“These cuts are enormous, and they will certainly help safeguard the river and all that it sustains. Yet they’re only about half of what federal regulators had originally called for. An unusually wet winter in the West brought relief to the river’s ailing reservoirs, allowing states to get away with a much less ambitious offer.
Ultimately, however, this deal is not nearly enough to save the river, experts say. Steeper cuts are likely on the horizon.”
“More than 100 years ago, the US government encouraged Americans to populate rural areas like this, build infrastructure, and farm more land, according to Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. That’s when engineers started building canals to take water from the Colorado River. At the time, the US policy was “to try to get every acre of land under the plow,” Porter said.
These canals turned the desert into a produce powerhouse. When farmland in Iowa or Nebraska is frozen and blanketed in a thick layer of snow, it’s 70 degrees and sunny in the Imperial Valley and Yuma. As soon as there was enough water in the mix, the conditions were ideal for growing crops year-round.
oday, the Imperial Valley, Coachella Valley, and Yuma together use close to 4 million acre-feet of water per year. That’s an enormous amount, equal to roughly a third of the entire flow of the river. (An acre-foot fills one acre of land with one foot of water and is roughly what two average houses use each year.)”
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“In determining the share each basin would get, water officials ignored inconvenient science and massively overestimated the river’s average flow. Western water users each got a piece of the river, but — together with water later allocated to Mexico through a treaty — those pieces turned out to be more than what it can offer in a typical year. (The 1922 decision also failed to spell out what shares would be given to the 30 or so tribal nations in the basin.)”
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“water officials didn’t factor in the possibility of a changing climate. Decades of recent warming have been drying out the West, causing less water to flow into the river.”
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“Conserving water obviously sounds like a great idea. The problem is that farmers in these regions are already highly efficient. Water-saving technologies are also pricey, and farmers I spoke to are concerned that any future payments won’t be enough to cover them.”
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“I’ve spent the last few weeks searching for a good solution to the crisis, an end to this story. No source I found could offer one. Any effort to restore the river will mean some people (or animals) get less water, barring several more winters like this one. And there’s no way around that, no secret technology to grow food without water. “It’s just such a complicated, ugly problem,” Schwabe said.
It’s an unsatisfying conclusion. Then again, maybe that’s what climate change creates: ugly problems where everybody loses. The best thing we can do, perhaps, is to sober up to this reality — that climate change will reshape economies and human lives — and use that knowledge to prepare.
Scientists have known for decades that the Colorado River is over-allocated and that warming is drying out the basin. Yet water regulators have failed to act in a meaningful way to rebuild Lake Powell and Lake Mead, Schwabe said. They should have started overhauling the Law of the River years ago, he said, instead of always being in “crisis mode.”
“The longer you wait to act, the more drastic your action has to be,” Schwabe said. “If we had started making these cutbacks in the ’80s and ’90s, in incremental steps, we probably wouldn’t be talking about this today. The situation is dire because we failed to act previously.””
“The Colorado River, which supplies drinking water to seven states in the US and two in Mexico, is the lifeblood of the American West and beyond. It’s drying up at an alarming rate, threatening cities, industries, agriculture, and energy sources. As it shrinks, rich ecosystems across its 1,450 miles are also disappearing.”
“At issue is whether it’s fair to use century-old rules, created during an era of relative abundance, to ration water from the rapidly shriveling river now that the West is on the precipice of climate disaster. With California and its six neighbors locked in a dispute over two competing approaches to divvying up the cuts in water deliveries, whatever the administration decides will almost certainly end up in court.”
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“The current feud centers on California, a longtime Democratic stronghold, and Arizona, a newfound swing state that has proven crucial to the party’s control of the White House and Senate.
The 1,450-mile long Colorado River made much of the West inhabitable, and now supplies water to 40 million Americans from Wyoming to the border with Mexico, as well as an enormously productive agricultural industry. But climate change has shriveled its flows by 20 percent over the past two decades, and for each additional degree of warming, scientists predict the river will shrink another 9 percent.
Water levels at the system’s two main reservoirs are falling so fast, the Interior Department has said that water users must cut consumption by as much as a third of the river’s flows or risk a collapse that could cripple their ability to deliver water out of those dams. That would also cut off hydropower production that is crucial to the stability of the Western grid.
The states broadly agree that the vast majority of those immediate cuts must be made by the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada, whose decades of overuse have accelerated the crisis. But the fight is over whether California, which holds strong legal rights to the lion’s share of the Lower Basin’s water, should have to share in those reductions.”
“the Colorado River is drying up.
The river’s flow is down by about 20 percent, compared to the 1900s, and the two largest reservoirs it feeds are less than a third full. The water in Lake Mead, the nation’s biggest reservoir, has dropped more than 150 feet in the last two decades, leaving little water for the more than 40 million people who depend on the river.
Part of the reason why the Colorado River is shrinking is the dwindling amount of snow and rain. The West is in its 23rd year of drought, which research suggests could be the driest period in the last 1,200 years, made worse by climate change.
Then there is the sheer number of cities and farms that are sucking down water. About three-quarters of all water that humans consume from the Colorado River goes toward irrigating farms, which, among other things, supply nearly all of the nation’s winter veggies.
But a key reason why the Colorado River is running out of water has more to do with math than anything — bad math.
One hundred years ago, government officials divvied up water in the Colorado River among the seven states that rely on it including Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. The agreement, known as the Colorado River Compact, was based on one critically important number: the total amount of water that the Colorado River can supply yearly.
Ignoring the best science of the time, officials claimed the river could provide about 20 million acre-feet per year”
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“That number was way too high”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/12/04/rancher-colorado-river-climate-west-water-crisis-341705