Inflation dominated news headlines and American psyches in 2022. Overall, consumer prices jumped an average 7.1 percent this year, with the cost of just about everything going up, from cars to coffee and gas to groceries. The trend triggered a bitter midterm election campaign, prompted a series of aggressive interest-rate hikes from the Federal Reserve, and fears about an impending recession.
The causes were numerous, from the war in Ukraine to the post-pandemic economic recovery. But in many sectors, the specter of climate change was also lurking behind these higher costs. Extreme swings in temperature and precipitation caused shortages and soaring prices for essential utilities like electricity, heat, and water. A series of catastrophic weather disasters scrambled the supply chains for vegetables and staple grains.
Many of us tend to think that we’re still immune to the direct effects of the climate crisis, but make no mistake — those effects are already here, and they’re hitting our wallets. Here is a look at some of the ways warming came back to bite us at the cash register in 2022.
Grocery bills
Food prices rose about 10 percent this year, one of the highest rates in decades. The surge in grocery bills has been spurred by pandemic supply chain issues and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but climate change played a bigger role than many people realize. Searing heat and other extreme weather hurt crops and livestock around the globe, driving up food costs in a phenomenon known as “heatflation.”
This summer, an unprecedented heat wave in China ruined the corn and soy crops used to feed pigs, sending the cost of pork, the country’s staple meat, soaring. Spain and Italy experienced a stretch of 100-degree temperatures and drought conditions that slashed olive harvests; by November, the price of extra-virgin olive oil in Spain, the world’s largest olive oil producer, had risen 45 percent compared to the previous year. Hurricanes hurt Florida’s citrus crop and snapped Puerto Rico’s plantain trees in half; the Western U.S. baked in a drought that threatens to increase food prices for the years to come.
It’s not just anecdotes: One analysis of seasonal temperatures and price indicators in 48 countries found that hot summers had “by far the largest and longest-lasting impact” on food prices, an effect that lasted nearly a year. Experts warn that flooding, drought, wildfires, and other climate-enhanced disasters will continue to leave shoppers paying a premium in the years ahead.
Water bills
Delivering water to homes and businesses is a high-cost operation. Municipalities and utilities have to pump the water from a river or reservoir, treat it so it’s safe to drink, and send it through hundreds of miles of pipes and canals. They also have to keep repairing and upgrading all that infrastructure year after year. The cost of maintaining this delivery system stays more or less the same, but the amount of money these groups earn back depends on how much water they deliver to customers.
Dry land is exposed on the banks of Lake Oroville, the second-largest reservoir in California that provides drinking water to more than 25 million people, in 2021.
PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images
In dry years like this one, utilities have to withdraw less water from dwindling reservoirs, which means they have less to sell, and have to raise prices to make up the difference. That’s currently happening in California, where many Central Valley residents are struggling to afford water even as local wells go dry; around 12 percent of state residents are behind on their water bills, owing as much as $1 billion in payments. As municipal supplies fell this year, it meant there was also less excess water available for trading on agricultural spot markets, causing prices to soar for farmers: The Nasdaq Veles California Water index rose by around 56 percent between January and June of this year, reaching an all-time high.
Other climate-driven extreme weather has impacted water prices in other ways. In wetter areas, extreme precipitation events caused unprecedented damage to utility infrastructure and forced costly repairs – a burden most often passed down to ratepayers. And in agricultural areas around the Great Lakes, excessive heat is increasingly causing fertilizer-laden water bodies to form harmful algae blooms. According to an analysis earlier this year, for instance, the cost of treating water in Toledo, Ohio, to eradicate this bacteria is now nearly $20 per resident per year — a cost incorporated into consumers’ water bills.
Insurance premiums
We rely on home insurance to help us recover after a disaster, but policies are getting more expensive and harder to obtain as floods, fires, and hurricanes intensify. These changes were acutely felt this past year. According to Policygenius, an insurance marketplace, 90 percent of U.S. homeowners saw their premiums increase from May 2021 to May 2022, with an average jump of $134 annually.
Homeowners in flood-prone areas all over the country saw huge price hikes in recent months. The National Flood Insurance Program, or NFIP, which insures more than 5 million properties, is in the process of rolling out a new pricing system, raising rates in many coastal areas to more accurately reflect existing flood risk. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the federal group that administers the NFIP, estimated that some 66 percent of policyholders would see their premiums jump by up to $10 per month under the new risk scale, 7 percent by up to $20 per month, and 4 percent more than $20. The hikes have been so severe that hundreds of thousands of homeowners have dropped their NFIP policies altogether.
A house flooded by water due to Hurricane Ian at Stillwright Point in Key Largo, Florida, September 29, 2022.
Daniel A. Varela/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Also this year, half a dozen insurers in Florida collapsed after their financial backers grew too concerned about hurricane risk; the state is now seeing the consequences of this breakdown, with price hikes in the wake of Hurricane Ian. On the opposite coast, several national insurance companies tried dropping customers in fire-risky areas of California to reduce their exposure to future disasters. As these insurers disappear, coverage gets more expensive, putting homeowners in a bind: They must either pay skyrocketing prices or drop their policies and live without a safety net.
Utility bills
Climate change is impacting the frequency and severity of heat and cold spells in different parts of the United States – and in 2022, these periods of extremes made it harder for people to afford their home heating and cooling costs. One in six U.S. households are currently behind on their utility bills.
Let’s start in the winter: Around 90 percent of U.S. households use either electricity or natural gas as their main source of heat. This past January, average household electricity rates soared by 8 percent, the highest increase in over a decade. Parts of the country experienced severe cold that month as warming temperatures in the Arctic destabilized the polar jet stream, sending frigid air southward. This winter, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that average household heating costs for natural gas will increase by 28 percent, in part due to forecasted colder-than-average temperatures.
This past summer, millions of Americans also dealt with stretches of extreme heat, which strained electric grids and caused household energy and air conditioning bills to skyrocket. The National Energy Assistance Directors Association estimated that Americans’ electric bills increased 20 percent due to the heat waves, jumping to an average $540.
Low-income families of color, both in urban and rural settings, are being hit the hardest. Black, Latino, and Indigenous households are more likely than white households to have their power cut off due to unpaid utility bills. “You have to choose between having a normal holiday season or maybe paying this bill or that bill. It’s all about survival,” said Linnea Jackson, General Manager of the Hoopa Valley Tribe’s Public Utilities District in Northern California. “Those increased costs are really impacting tribal communities.”
Jackson says that in addition to higher energy costs from summers and winters with periods of hotter highs and lower lows, also known as weather whiplash, climate-driven disasters like wildfires, drought, and powerful storms all disrupt service and drive up costs. “It’s only getting worse. People are struggling to come up with the cost to afford basic electricity,” Jackson said.
Kirstie Allemand arranges cardboard above an air conditioning unit in her window during soaring temperatures on July 28, 2022 in Ellensburg, Washington.
David Ryder/Getty Images
In Bethel, Alaska, Sophie Swope, a Yup’ik environmental activist, says that thawing permafrost is causing houses to shift and crack, forcing people to spend more money on heating. Higher fuel costs also weigh heavily on communities like Swope’s, where many essential supplies have to be shipped in. “Everything is just so much more expensive,” Swope said.
Electricity prices
High energy bills this year weren’t just a result of heat waves and cold fronts. The cost of power itself spiked all over the country. That’s in large part due to Russia’s war in Ukraine, which drove a scarcity in natural gas supply around the world and upped the cost of producing electricity from power plants. The Energy Information Administration estimates that residential customers paid 8 percent more for electricity, on average, than in 2021.
The war may be the primary cause, but some parts of the country also saw rate hikes due to climate-related extreme events like storms, drought, and wildfires. In June, 1 million customers in Louisiana saw fees added to their bills, as much as $25 for some households, to help the electric utility Entergy recover costs related to storm damage from hurricanes Laura, Delta, Zeta, and Ida, as well as Winter Storm Uri in February 2021.
In California, customers of the largest utility in the state, Pacific Gas & Electric, or PG&E, started the year off with a rate increase that was driven in part by the costs of wildfire prevention. It didn’t end there. Just two months later, PG&E bumped its rates again to cover the rising cost of natural gas. The company said it had eaten up a lot of its natural gas supply the previous summer when the drought was limiting hydropower output, and had to buy more.
The Western Area Power Administration, a federal agency that sells power from government-owned hydropower dams to utilities throughout the West, told Grist that reduced hydropower generation this year due to the megadrought put “upward pressure on power rates in some pockets of the West.”
Jake Bittle, Kate Yoder, Joseph Lee, Brett Marsh, and Emily Pontecorvo contributed to this story.
Last week, the federal government announced it will spend a quarter of a billion dollars over four years to clean up what remains of the Salton Sea, a lake in southern California that has been shrinking due to climate change-driven drought.
For decades, communities living near the sea have been afflicted by health problems caused by algae blooms and dust storms spurred by wind kicking up drying sediment from the sea’s ever-widening shores. The government’s new plan aims to help remediate some of those health impacts while simultaneously encouraging farms in the region to reduce their reliance on water from the Colorado River.
The $250 million will come from $4 billion earmarked for drought funding in the Inflation Reduction Act, the climate and energy security bill passed by Democrats and signed by President Joe Biden in August. The new money is meant to complement more than half a billion dollars the state of California has already committed to restoration and dust-suppression projects in the area.
The Salton Sea, a body of water that formed by accident more than a hundred years ago when the Colorado River overtopped an irrigation channel and flooded an empty lake bed, has become a controversial flashpoint in California’s ongoing efforts to conserve its increasingly limited water supply from the Colorado River basin.
For around half a century, the brimming Salton Sea attracted tourists, anglers, and celebrities like the Marx Brothers and the Beach Boys to its shores. But the sea was only directly fed by the Colorado River for a period of two years starting in 1905. Since then, it has been sustained indirectly by agricultural runoff from farms in the Imperial Valley that use water from the Colorado River to irrigate their crops. As water evaporates from the sea’s surface into the atmosphere, the body of water has become more concentrated with pesticides and other farming byproducts, and algae have proliferated in its tepid, shallow waters. The approximately 650,000 people living nearby suffer from headaches, nosebleeds, asthma, and other health issues.
The Department of the Interior, the government agency that is managing the restoration agreement, has made it clear that there are strings attached to the federal funding. The department’s Bureau of Reclamation will provide California with $22 million in new funding between now and the end of next summer to spend on restoration projects around the sea, conduct research on current and future cleanup projects, and hire two representatives from the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indian Tribe to help implement those projects.
The remaining $228 million is contingent on the state following through on its commitment to conserve 400,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water every year starting in 2023. Specifically, the Imperial Irrigation District, or IID, the public utility that supplies the Imperial Valley and its 500,000 acres of farmland with Colorado River water, will need to take on additional conservation measures in order to help California meet that target. A day after the Interior Department announced its $250 million plan, the IID board voted 3-2 to approve it, signaling that the district agrees, at least for now, to conserve 250,000 acre-feet of river water per year as part of the state’s wider goal.
“This landmark agreement demonstrates much-needed federal commitment to the Salton Sea and IID’s commitment to improving Basin resilience,” Michael Cohen, senior associate at the Pacific Institute, a water conservation think tank, said in a statement.
Conserving all that water comes with tradeoffs for the Salton Sea. An IID projection shows that by 2027, the measures will expose an additional 8,100 acres of dusty shoreline. That’s where the funding for restoration and cleanup from the federal government comes in.
Jenny Binstock, a senior campaign representative at the Sierra Club, told Grist that she considers the new funding a “shot in the arm” for the efforts to fix the sea’s problems, though she said more can be done. Binstock wants federal and state agencies to thoroughly consult surrounding communities before approving new projects and, looking further ahead, figure out a way to pump new water into the sea. “Moving forward it will be essential that federal partners continue to work with the state, water agencies, and local communities to ensure that the Salton Sea remains a major priority as part of the complex water challenges facing the Western U.S.,” she said.
It’s not easy enforcing water regulations in the West. Just ask the officials in California who have been trying for almost a decade to penalize a man who took water from the river system that feeds San Francisco and bottled it for sale to stores like Starbucks.
It sounds like a tall tale, but it’s illustrative of just how hard it is to stop scofflaws from using water the rest of the state needs during a water crisis.
In 2015, at the height of a severe drought, California’s state water agency received a series of complaints about water theft on a small tributary of the Tuolumne River, the source of the Hetch Hetchy reservoir that supplies most of San Francisco’s water.
G. Scott Fahey, the owner of a water bottling company called Sugar Pine Spring Water, was siphoning water from the spring and loading it on trucks, the complainants said. Fahey’s company had been tapping the spring for more than a decade—he supplied water to a company named on Starbucks’s list of water bottle suppliers at the time—but the state had imposed drought restrictions on the Tuolumne that year, which barred Fahey from using it.
The state issued a cease-and-desist order to Fahey within weeks, and a few months later investigators began gathering information to prosecute him. It looked like a slam-dunk case. In the end, though, it would take the state more than six years to complete the prosecution—long enough for the 2015 drought to end and another drought to begin. During that time Fahey would appeal the state’s initial decision and sue the state for wrongful prosecution, dragging the case out for years in an effort to avoid paying $215,000 in damages.
In the fall of last year, just as the state was nearing the end of the prosecution, officials received another complaint about Fahey—according to the complainant, he was stealing water from the same river again, undeterred by the full force of California’s prosecution.
Across the West, major water users are subject to strict regulations that govern how and when they can draw water from rivers and streams. These rights vary from state to state, but the general principle is always the same: older water users have stronger rights than newer users, and the state has the authority to curtail water usage during drought periods. (Thanks to the colonial foundations of water law, tribal water rights date from the creation of tribal reservations, not from when a tribe started using a water source. In theory these rights are senior to those of private water users, but in practice many tribes face steep barriers to realizing these rights.)
But enforcing those rules is easier said than done. Over the past decade, as more states have clamped down on water usage, water managers across the west have found themselves struggling to monitor all potential violations, and to implement water rights law that they’ve never had to use before. Even a large and well-funded state like California can’t keep track of all illegal water diversions, and attorneys often have trouble prosecuting even those violations they do identify. Even when the state has an airtight case, its enforcement powers are limited, and the punishments it can mete out often aren’t severe enough to deter potential violators.
That means that many water users who violate drought restrictions may get off with just a slap on the wrist, if the state notices them at all. This makes it difficult or impossible to protect vulnerable waterways from being overtapped.
“Their capacity is minuscule compared to what they’re expected to do, and I think the water rights unit has been systematically underfunded from day one,” said Felicia Marcus, the former chair of California’s State Water Resources Control Board, also known as the “Water Board,” which regulates water in the state.
The first challenge the state faces is measuring water withdrawals in the first place. An investigation from the Sacramento Bee found that the state has just a thousand working water gauges to monitor almost 200,000 miles of river, and furthermore found that just 11 percent of water users comply with a 2015 law that requires them to report their water usage. Without an accurate sense of who’s using what, it’s hard to know where to look.
But the bigger problem for the Water Board is that its enforcement staff is too small to enforce even the portion of water violations that it does end up detecting. The Water Board’s enforcement division has only 50 permanent staff members, and just three are dedicated to enforcing water rights violations. The division receives hundreds of complaints a year, but it can only investigate a few of them, and only 10 percent of received complaints lead to any enforcement action.
Representatives for the Water Board argue this is in part because the department receives a high volume of repeat complaints, but also acknowledge that the state can’t investigate everything.
“Just like the IRS doesn’t audit every single taxpayer, we do not conduct a detailed enforcement investigation into tens of thousands of water rights,” said Ailene Voisin, a spokesperson for the Water Board. “We use our limited resources and our enforcement discretion to conduct investigations where circumstances warrant it.”
During drought periods, investigators focus on monitoring streams where the state has issued restrictions, but even then it’s difficult for them to check on more than a fraction of all the water users under restriction.
Still, some divisions have more resources than others. Of the fourteen cease-and-desist orders the state has issued since the last drought, seven were issued to cannabis growers. That’s because the cannabis enforcement unit has a bulkier budget, as well as five dedicated employees, compared to three for all other rights violations. When California voters approved a recreational marijuana referendum in 2016, the state government plowed extra funds into regulating the newly legal pot market. In fact, many of the water enforcement actions against producers result from unrelated drug busts against illegal grow operations.
Even when the state knows who’s breaking the rules, bringing offenders to heel can be difficult. That’s in large part because the state’s water rights system is large and multifaceted, and officials have never comprehensively quantified and sorted all the different kinds of rights in the state. This has made it difficult to enforce the letter of the law during drought periods.
The Fahey case was a textbook example. Investigators found Fahey had diverted about 25 acre-feet of water illegally—as much as 25 to 50 households use in a year, but not an enormous amount in the grand scheme of things. State officials managed to schedule a hearing date for Fahey within a few months of getting the first complaints. But thanks to the complexities of the water rights system, and the historical quirks of Fahey’s specific water rights, it took another three years for the administrative board to reach a decision ordering Fahey to pay the state back for his theft in the form of either water or cash. The facts of Fahey’s diversion were clear, but the complex nature of the water rights system made it difficult to arrive at a swift decision, and even after the decision came down, Fahey appealed for a reconsideration of his case. It took until March of this year for the board to refuse his request, again because of the legal complexities involved. Now Fahey is suing the state water board over its decision, which will lead to yet another trial, this one in civil court.
This process took so long that it may have allowed Fahey to violate the law again. In October of last year, the state received another complaint that Fahey was diverting it illegally. Records obtained by Grist show that a complainant said they “witnessed water trucks going and coming from [the] Sugar Pine facility.”
“Have been following his case through the water board,” the anonymous complainant wrote, “and last [I]looked, he had been ordered to cease and desist.”
In theory, state officials should have investigated the complaint, but Fahey was in the middle of petitioning for reconsideration, and the state couldn’t enforce its cease-and-desist order while his case was in legal limbo. State officials told Grist they decided not to investigate the new complaint against Fahey so as to avoid derailing the ongoing prosecution from the last drought. The state’s powers were so limited, and the enforcement process was so time-consuming, that the state couldn’t stop Fahey from violating drought restrictions, even after it had caught and prosecuted him for doing so. (Starbucks stopped sourcing spring water from California a few months after the case began. Fahey could not be reached for comment.)
“California, which prides itself on being ahead of other states on a lot of issues of climate change and water quality, is way behind when it comes to the water rights system,” said Marcus. “Having tried to implement it during that last drought, it’s very difficult to do. They don’t have enough staff to be able to manage a wieldy system, let alone an unwieldy system.”
The limitations of the state’s enforcement power were on display again this year during a conflict between ranchers and indigenous tribes over a vulnerable river in the northern part of the state.
This past summer, the Water Board imposed drought restrictions on the Shasta River, a winding mountain waterway near the Oregon border. The state has conflicting responsibilities on the Shasta: it must release some water from the river every summer to irrigate farms and ranches in nearby valleys, but it also has to hold back enough water in the mountains to protect vulnerable salmon populations. In drought times, the salmon are supposed to take priority.
This summer, the ranchers upset that balance. After the state imposed the curtailment on the Shasta, the irrigated fields in nearby valleys started to dry up, jeopardizing the health of crops and cattle. A group of ranchers decided to violate the order on purpose, and wrote a letter to the state announcing their intentions to start diverting water in violation of the curtailment. They turned on their spigots and drained water from the river, filling up the ponds and fields on their property. Within hours, the water level at the river’s main gauge had dropped precipitously, and it continued to drop over the coming days, throwing the survival of the salmon into jeopardy.
Leaders from the state-recognized Karuk tribe of Indigenous people, who are the stewards of the mountain salmon, pleaded with the state to intervene and stop the ranchers’ violation of water law. As with Fahey, the state issued a cease-and-desist order almost at once, but the order was toothless. For the first twenty days after an order is issued, the state can only impose fines of around $500 a day, which the ranchers were more than capable of paying. A few days after they turned on the water, the ranchers turned it off, claiming victory.
The case was emblematic of the shortcomings Marcus identifies. Even when there was clear evidence of wrongdoing, the state didn’t have a big enough “stick” to enforce the letter of the law. The Shasta case set a disturbing precedent for future drought years: if there’s no real punishment for violating water rights, why shouldn’t everyone just take what they want?
The ranchers seemed to understand this too.
“At $500 a day, it would probably be worth it, I’ll be quite honest,” one of the ranching association leaders told CalMatters in August when asked about potential fines from the violation. “It’d probably be more than affordable.”
A few months later, in November, the state hit the ranchers with a fine of $4000, or about $50 per rancher. It was the maximum allowable fine.
Fodor’s, the popular travel company that built its business on telling you where to go and where to stay, eat and drink once you’re there, has just released a list of places around the world you should skip in 2023.
The company’s 2023 “No List” isn’t advising you to avoid these destinations because of bad food, lousy attractions, or risk of danger, but because the presence of large numbers of tourists in these places is causing unsustainable ecological, cultural, and social harm.
The “No List” focuses on global tourism’s impact on three key areas: unique and sensitive natural environments increasingly degraded by tourists, “cultural hotspots” facing overcrowding and strained housing and infrastructure, and destinations in the midst of water crises that already heavily burden local communities.
Lake Tahoe, California, and Antarctica made the list of natural wonders that deserve a respite from tourists due to their ecologically sensitive environments. As for cultural destinations on the list, Venice and the Amalfi Coast in Italy; Cornwall, England; Amsterdam, Netherlands; as well as Thailand, were noted as experiencing strained infrastructure and higher costs of living that are increasingly pushing out locals.
Global tourism, through a combination of food consumption, accommodation, transportation, and the purchasing of souvenirs, contributes eight percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. After a brief respite in the first months of the pandemic, tourism numbers have exploded, exceeding even pre-pandemic numbers.
But the pandemic-induced downtown in tourism gave locals, environmental activists, and government officials in places like Thailand the chance to witness something seemingly unimaginable: the revival of their local ecologies and communities that had been devastated by the social and environmental costs attributed to the industry. In April, the Southeast Asian country’s government banned styrofoam packaging and single-use plastics from national parks. The minister of natural resources and environment also ordered that all national parks in Thailand be closed for one month a year.
Amidst global droughts and depleting reserves, water is central to understanding some of the pushback from local communities against mass tourism. On the Hawaiian Island of Maui, which also made the “No List,” many Native Hawaiians have become increasingly vocal about how mass tourism is negatively impacting their access to increasingly scarce water resources. This past June, mandatory water restrictions were put in place in parts of Maui most visited by mainland and international tourists. The order prohibited non-essential use of water, including irrigation, lawn watering and washing vehicles. But as local households were forced to adjust or face hefty fines, hotels and other tourism facilities were exempt from these cutbacks.
“When they stay in a destination, tourists essentially become temporary residents,” said Justin Francis, the co-founder and CEO of travel company Responsible Travel, in an email. “That can place an additional strain on local services and facilities.” Francis advocates for more tourism taxes, which he says can boost funding for infrastructure development – roads, access to clean water, energy provision – that benefits local communities as well as tourists.
Pushback against mass tourism has also extended to policies on housing availability and affordability. On Oahu, Hawaii’s most populous island, the mayor of Honolulu signed a bill in April restrictions on short-term rental properties and Airbnbs in an attempt to help alleviate the local housing crisis. The proliferation of these properties, particularly in densely populated cities like Amsterdam and Barcelona, has become one of the most controversial issues not only among housing advocates and travel experts, but also official marketing and tourism officials. “They’re literally decimating communities – pricing local people out of their homes and areas they’ve lived their whole lives in,” said Francis. Amsterdam’s left-wing city council attempted to ban Airbnb rentals in three central districts of the city, but it was overturned by local courts last year.
The city of Honolulu’s policy includes limiting the number of Airbnbs and short-term rental properties as well as increasing the minimum length of stay required for visitors who use these services. The majority of homeless on the streets of the city are Native Hawaiians, who experience disproportionate levels of poverty throughout the state.
Of course, many communities most vulnerable to the negative social and environmental impacts of mass tourism are also dependent on it for their livelihoods. Simply boycotting travel can also hurt groups that are most vulnerable, including women, migrants, and people of color.
Some destinations are seeking to make the most of the economic benefits of tourism while minimizing its cultural and environmental impacts simply by restricting travel to “high value” tourists – i.e, those with more disposable income. The Himalayan nation of Bhutan is a prime example. Visitors are charged a daily $200 fee, which doesn’t cover the cost of hotels or other services. Bhutan’s government says that the fee supports sustainable tourism development and training, as well as carbon offsetting.
As for Antarctica, some experts argue that its inclusion on Fodor’s list is complicated, due to the fact that the landmass has no local population that would benefit from visitors. On the other hand, thoughtful and sustainable tourism could arguably protect more of the environment there, which could serve as a buffer against more destructive economic industries like mining. “Tourism here cannot be allowed to grow without limits and mandatory environmental measures,” said Francis from Responsible Travel. However, The Antarctic Treaty, which prohibits economic and military exploitation of the region, will likely continue to protect the area’s environment and resources.
The big takeaway from Fodor’s list is that travel can be a force for good – both for nature and for local communities. The key is not necessarily to stay away, said Francis, but to always make informed choices that minimize harm and maximize benefits to local communities first.
“As an industry we need to do better than ‘leaving nothing but footprints’, and actively work towards creating positive impacts,” he said.
In early November, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case brought by the Navajo Nation that could have far-reaching impacts on tribal water rights in the Colorado River Basin. In its suit, the Navajo Nation argues that the Department of Interior has a responsibility, grounded in treaty law, to protect future access to water from the Colorado River. Several states and water districts have filed petitions opposing the tribe, stating that the river is “already fully allocated.”
The case highlights a growing tension in the region: As water levels fall and states face cuts amid a two-decade-long megadrought, tribes are working to ensure their water rights are fully recognized and accessible.
On average, 15 million acre-feet of water used to flow through the Colorado River every year. For scale, one acre-foot of water could supply one to three households annually. A century ago, states reached an agreement to divide that water among themselves. But in recent decades, the river has supplied closer to 12 million acre-feet. Scientists say water managers in the basin need to plan for closer to 9 million acre-feet per year, a 40 percent decrease in a water source that supports 40 million people, due to climate change and aridification.
No states have made plans to accommodate this drop. Meanwhile, tribal nations are legally entitled to between 3.2 and 3.8 million acre-feet of ground and surface water from the Colorado River system.
There are 30 federally recognized tribes in the river’s basin, and 12 of them, including Navajo Nation, still have at least some “unresolved” rights, meaning the extent of their rightful claims to water have yet to be agreed upon.
Grist / Jessie Blaeser / Amelia Bates
Ultimately, Indigenous nations in the Colorado River Basin could be serious power brokers in crucial water negotiations to come — but they face historical, legal and practical obstacles. The Navajo Nation, for example, has rights to almost 700,000 acre-feet of water annually across New Mexico and Utah, along with unresolved claims in Arizona. But, because of a lack of infrastructure, up to 40 percent of Navajo households don’t have running water. For the Navajo Nation and other tribes with allocations in the basin, building and improving infrastructure means providing citizens with access to a fundamental human right: water.
But tribal water use is taken out of state allocations, meaning the more water tribes use, the less states have. It also means that states have less incentive to work with tribal leaders or recognize pending water rights claims. This conflict is not new. It has been built into a century of policies that have excluded and divested from Indigenous nations.
Tribes often hold senior water rights, meaning their allocations are the last to be cut in a shortage, and states in the basin are beginning to reckon with this fact. A fundamental shift in how the river is governed — to a system that acknowledges tribes’ sovereignty and gives them greater say — will be key to sustainably and equitably distributing water in the years to come.
Tribes “need to be included in every one of those conversations and considered just like a state or the federal government,” Southern Ute Tribal Council Member Lorelei Cloud said at the annual Colorado River District Seminar in September. “You cannot discount us.”
Grist / Jessie Blaeser / Amelia Bates
One barrier to equitable distribution is a glaring information gap: There is no definitive source of data on water usage among tribes in the Colorado River Basin. Historically, federal surveys have ignored tribal water use, and though tribal-led studies have begun to fill these gaps, the lack of data makes planning for a future river with shrinking flows impossible.
“If you know how much water everyone has or is allocated, then you can come up with a comprehensive solution — not just management of the river but responses to climate change,” Heather Tanana (Diné), a professor of law at the University of Utah, said in an interview.
In Arizona, for example, nearly 70 percent of the state’s water allocation belongs to tribes, and nearly all the tribal nations with unresolved water rights in the basin have at least some territory in the state. According to a joint study by tribal nations and the federal government, 10 tribes in the basin, which hold the bulk of the recognized tribal water rights, are diverting just over half of what they’re entitled to — most of which is used for agriculture. It’s unclear what water availability would look like if these tribes had basic infrastructure to get water to their citizens, or if all tribes with unresolved rights settled their cases.
Grist / Amelia Bates / Jessie Blaeser / Joseph Lee / Anna Smith
“My experience of negotiating water rights settlements in Arizona is that the state of Arizona very much approaches them as a zero-sum game,” said Jay Weiner, water counsel for the Quechan Indian Tribe and the Tonto Apache Tribe, which has been in settlement negotiations since at least 2014. That combative approach, he said, has persisted regardless of governor or political party. “It is something that seems to be deeply embedded in the fabric of Arizona and how it approaches Indian water rights settlements.”
In February, the federal government announced $1.7 billion for tribes to use for water settlements. That means more tribal citizens and communities could have access to water. It also means that states will have to work with tribes to plan for the future and adapt to climate change.
In some places, tribes and communities have already been moving in that direction, working together to find place-based solutions that use the resources and infrastructure at hand. The Pascua Yaqui Tribe and the city of Tucson, Arizona, have an intergovernmental agreement for Tucson to store and deliver potable water for the tribe, which doesn’t have the infrastructure to do so on its own. Such partnerships will only become more essential as drought and aridification continue to stress the region.
“If folks work together and partner together, the opportunity to solve the problem, I think, is enhanced,” said Robyn Interpreter, an attorney who represents the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and the Yavapai-Apache Nation in their water rights claims.
Grist / Jessie Blaeser / Amelia Bates
The federal Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project, which is building $123 million in infrastructure, is another promising example. The goal of the project is to construct water plants and a system of pipes and pumps that will deliver water to the Navajo Nation, the Jicarilla Apache Nation, and the city of Gallup, New Mexico. Crystal Tulley-Cordova, a principal hydrologist for the water management branch of the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources, said in an interview there is a new willingness to collaborate, owing to both the severity of the situation and non-tribal water users’ realization that they must work with tribes. “Now there’s a greater desire to be able to work together. So I’m encouraged by that,” she said.
Meanwhile, tribal nations are also making progress in securing their access to water. In May, the Navajo Utah Water Rights Settlement Act was finalized, granting the Navajo Nation 81,500 acre-feet of water in Utah and authorized $220 million in federal funds for water infrastructure projects. “Our families celebrate this moment in history after decades of fighting for the Navajo Utah Water Rights Settlement,” Navajo Nation Council Delegate Charlaine Tso said in a statement at the time. “It is clear drought conditions are affecting water levels across the country. Many of our elders haul drinking water from miles away while we work to get proper water infrastructure projects completed. This settlement allows us to begin connecting our water lines to the most rural areas.”
However, tribes still have no direct means of governance over the river, and, as seen in the Navajo water rights case headed to the Supreme Court, states continue to fight tribal communities seeking access to water.
Last fall, more than 20 tribes signed a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in which they pressed for direct, sustained involvement in re-negotiating the guidelines that manage the river, which are set to expire in 2026. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, last March, Haaland and Bureau of Reclamation leadership met with tribal leaders and “committed to transparency and inclusivity for the Tribes when work begins on the post-2026 operational rules,” according to a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior.
“It’s the job of political imagination to see what’s possible,” Andrew Curley (Diné), an assistant professor of geography at University of Arizona, said in an interview. “That’s something that we collectively, not just Native nations but led by Native nations, can start to articulate. What is a different vision of the river than what has been put into law and these congressional acts and Supreme Court decisions over the years?”
This story is part of the Grist series Parched, an in-depth look at how climate change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems.
Mark Kelly, the incumbent Democratic senator from Arizona, is facing a strong reelection challenge from far-right Republican nominee Blake Masters, in a race that could be key for control of the Senate. Last month, during a televised debate between the two candidates, Masters went on the attack, criticizing Kelly’s positions on several issues.
Toward the end of the debate, after skewering Kelly on inflation and the border, Masters hit him on a more niche issue: federal water cuts on the Colorado River.
“A few weeks ago the federal government cut Arizona’s water allocation 592,000 acre-feet,” Masters began. “For all you water nerds out there, that’s a lot of water. Guess how much water California had to cut? Zero. Guess what Mark Kelly did about it? Nothing.”
The attack was disingenuous — there was nothing Kelly could have done to stop the cuts, since they were negotiated well before he entered the Senate — but a few weeks later, as the election approached, the incumbent senator made a similar plea. In a letter to the Biden administration, Kelly also urged federal officials to curb water deliveries to southern California’s Salton Sea, saying that the Golden State hadn’t done enough to conserve water, and that any delay would lead “only to tougher choices and litigation” between the states.
Much of the western United States has suffered under drought conditions this year, but the impacts have been most acute in the Southwest, which relies heavily on the Colorado River to supply water for cities and farms. So it is no surprise that drought has emerged as a key issue in the region ahead of this week’s midterm elections. Senators and representatives in close races have talked about drought in debates and campaign ads, with vulnerable incumbents like Kelly touting their efforts to fight the extreme weather conditions as evidence that they’re delivering for their constituents.
While issues like inflation and abortion access still top most voters’ priority lists, the Southwest’s water shortage has nevertheless become an important talking point for western politicians as they hit the campaign trail, and could move the needle in ultra-close races like Kelly’s.
As water levels in the Colorado River continue to fall, the federal government has instituted mandatory water cuts like one Masters alluded to in his debate performance, and users from California to Colorado are scrambling to find new conservation strategies to deal with the coming crunch. In response to the growing crisis, a group of Democratic senators from western states — including Kelly, his Arizona colleague Kyrsten Sinema, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, and Michael Bennet of Colorado — secured $4 billion in drought funding as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, which passed the Senate in August. Most of that $4 billion will pay farmers along the Colorado to leave their fields unplanted next year, which will ease the burden on the river. Other funds will go to long-term water conservation strategies, reuse systems, and other drought relief measures.
Three of those four Democratic senators are up for re-election this year, and two of them — Kelly and Nevada’s Cortez Masto — are in serious danger of losing their seats. Arizona’s Kelly is polling just a few points ahead of Masters, who has gained support in recent weeks. Cortez Masto, meanwhile, is in a dead heat with her Republican challenger Adam Laxalt.
Political groups backing Kelly and Cortez Masto have touted their roles in obtaining the $4 billion in drought funding in ads on television and social media, saying it shows how the senators have delivered for their constituents. EDF Action, the political arm of the Environmental Defense Fund, spent $1.5 million on Spanish-language ads hyping Kelly’s drought record.
“It’s easy for politicians to grandstand, it’s harder for elected officials to really be problem solvers,” said David Kieve, the president of EDF Action and a former member of the Biden administration’s White House Council on Environmental Quality. “When they do, their constituents are going to notice and it’s going to be of benefit to them politically.”
U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, Democrat of Nevada, speaks to volunteers at a campaign office in Las Vegas.
Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images
Kelly and Cortez Masto have both talked up their drought credentials on the campaign trail in an attempt to show how they’ve delivered for constituents. Cortez Masto, meanwhile, has pushed the Biden administration to enforce tougher and more forward-looking water restrictions, saying the administration needs to ensure that “all states along the Colorado River take the actions that Nevada already has.” The state is relatively well-equipped to withstand the present shortage on the Colorado River thanks to its longstanding policy of banking unused water in Lake Mead, but drought is still front-of-mind for many voters in the state: Almost two-thirds of Nevadans consider dealing with water shortages to be a top priority, according to a recent EDF poll, ranking it higher than education and crime.
But while talk of fighting drought is popular on both sides of the aisle, the topic of climate change is not. To that end, Kelly and Cortez Masto are trying to separate the two issues, said Elizabeth Koebele, a professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno who has studied drought politics.
Cortez Masto, for instance, has spent much more time touting the drought investments in the Inflation Reduction Act than she has spent discussing the bill’s new investments in renewable energy. She has also insisted she doesn’t see climate-fueled water shortages as a campaign issue, and has often discussed it without mentioning global warming. That’s in spite of the fact that rising temperatures have helped to make the current western megadrought the worst in more than a millennium.
“Climate is not a priority issue for voters often, and so we’ve actually seen some of these candidates up for reelection in the West who have sort of downplayed talking about climate,” said Koebele. “Anytime drought gets attached to long-term trends in climate, it gets more politicized.”
Drought has popped up in other close congressional races as well. In California’s agriculture-heavy Central Valley, where residents have struggled with dry wells and polluted groundwater for decades, Republican Representative David Valadao has waffled on the relationship between drought and climate change.
“We’ve always had drier years and wetter years,” he told CNN, acknowledging that “there’s a possibility that [climate change] plays a role” in drought. President Biden won Valadao’s district by about 10 points in 2020, which makes Valadao one of the most vulnerable House Republicans this election season. His most prominent opponent, Democrat Rudy Salas, has not emphasized climate change as an issue in itself, but has touted his efforts in the state legislature to secure water infrastructure and support for ailing farmers.
Also in the Central Valley, a Republican farmer named John Duarte is hoping to flip a Democratic-held seat that encompasses the cities of Modesto and Merced. Duarte became famous for engaging in a long legal battle against the federal government over water regulations, and he’s spent a lot of time on the campaign trail talking about the need to build new dams to shore up California’s water supply, something environmental groups have long opposed.
The stakes around all this talk are high. The outcome of the midterms could sway the future of federal drought policy.
The current Democrat-led Congress has passed three major spending bills that all contained some kind of funding for climate action or climate resilience, with money available for drought response in each one of them. In addition to the $4 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, the group of senators led by Kelly and Sinema also secured more than $8.3 billion in long-term drought funding in last year’s bipartisan infrastructure bill. That money will go to develop new reservoirs and other water sources across the region. Nevada governor Steve Sisolak, meanwhile, has used money from the federal $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan of early 2021, also known as the COVID-19 stimulus bill, to fund water conservation efforts.
A bleached ‘bathtub ring’ on the banks of Lake Mead near Echo Bay, Nevada.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
If Democrats lose control of one or both chambers, it could imperil future spending like this. The House of Representatives passed a drought spending bill back in July that contained another $500 million for western water conservation, but the bill stalled out in the Senate for lack of Republican support. If the Republicans retake the House or the Senate, that legislation will likely be dead in the water, especially if Kelly and Cortez Masto aren’t around to advocate for it. Republican leaders have said they hope to use their new majorities to cut government spending and investigate President Biden, which takes even more drought funding bills off the table.
Meanwhile, neither Masters in Arizona nor Laxalt in Nevada have put forward any detailed proposals for drought response: bothcandidates have said they believe building new desalination plants could help increase the West’s water supply, but desalination on a large scale is difficult to achieve. Laxalt has criticized Cortez Masto for supporting funding efforts like the Inflation Reduction Act, saying she “should have demanded real change in exchange for her vote on any number of Democrat spending bills.”
Even so, says Koebele, a change in who controls Congress won’t derail the ongoing negotiations over how to solve the Colorado River crisis. Those negotiations are led not by Congress but by representatives from state water departments, many of whom are longtime civil servants, and by major water users, who aren’t politicians at all. The same goes for issues like the Central Valley’s groundwater shortage — Congress can help out, but it’s up to local leaders to find permanent solutions.
“These water managers are closer than senators and representatives to the actual water issues, so there’s going to be continued momentum,” she said. “Policymaking is still going to happen, but it might change the resources that the federal government can bring to the table.”
*Editor’s note: Environmental Defense Fund is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers play no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
Climate conditions are putting upward pressure on global food prices, as people around the world chafe under levels of inflation not seen in decades. A prolonged drought this autumn is parching the Mississippi River watershed, pushing up the cost of producing key crops in the U.S. agricultural heartland.
The lack of rain is not only hindering farm output, it’s also causing the Mississippi to slow to a trickle along parts of the massive waterway, which is burdening global supply chains by significantly slowing barge traffic critical to the global food system, a U.S. government report warned last week.
“River levels are typically lower in the fall, but this year they are even lower than normal, which is causing significant issues as [the] fall harvest is well underway,” noted the study from the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS).
In recent years, the Mississippi River basin has been responsible for producing 92 percent of U.S. agricultural exports, including 60 percent of annual U.S. grain exports, which are shipped down the river through the Port of New Orleans. The river also typically ferries 78 percent of exports in livestock feed to global markets.
But the volume of goods currently being transported on the Mississippi is down 45 percent, the NIDIS report said. Barges face stricter limits on the amount of goods they can haul when water levels are low because they run a greater risk of running aground in shallow water when carrying more than a certain amount of weight.
As a result of increased farming and shipping costs, people around the world are being priced out of food they desperately need. Since the start of last year, countries in the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia have been suffering from a cost-of-living crisis triggered by global supply chain problems that developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the U.S., for example, the rate of inflation was above 8 percent in May for the first time since 1981.
The crisis was exacerbated earlier this year by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the geopolitical fallout from the incursion. Grain markets were hit particularly hard, with both Russia and Ukraine serving as major wheat exporters in peacetime. U.S. farm goods were, therefore, in relatively high demand around the world before the Midwest and Great Plains were stricken by drought.
Certain data suggest that poor people living in countries governed by right-wing politicians will suffer most as a result, with global increases in the cost-of-living appearing to be driven by laissez-faire economic policies. Bolivia, for example, has been able to keep inflation low thanks to its socialist government’s management of the economy. State-run energy and retail operations keep consumer prices stable in the South American country by releasing supply reserves to the market when excess demand persists. Meanwhile, in countries run by governments that have embraced the neoliberal approach to deregulation in recent decades — countries such as the U.S., the U.K.and Canada — price levels have grown in concert with corporate profits, which are at record levels.
Profit incentivizes increased industry output only when markets are competitive, and monopoly power has been growing over the past two decades in higher-income countries. The corporations that dominate markets for food have been among the companies in the U.S. that have been able to pass on recent increases in costs to consumers while making a healthy profit for themselves, as a report published on November 1 by The New York Times detailed.
Whatever the cause, the trend of higher price growth is being exacerbated by a warming planet, which is creating the conditions for extreme weather events like the ongoing drought causing vegetation dependent on the Mississippi River basin to wilt. To make matters worse, the full extent of the Midwestern drought damage is unknown. AccuWeather predicted that rainfall won’t return river traffic to normal until January, and that logistical disruptions have already added $20 billion to commercial transportation costs. Low levels of precipitation over the coming months could also threaten crops that haven’t even been planted yet, NIDIS warned.
“If fall moisture is not replenished, the risk for drought continuing is increased for the next growing season, as improvements to soil moisture are limited over the winter, particularly to the north where soils are mostly frozen,” the agency said. Arid conditions have already hurt wheat, corn and soybean yields.
While the Mississippi River basin goes through regular drought cycles, scientistssay climate change causes such cycles to be more frequent and intense. Warmer conditions are also stoking historic drought conditions around the world, including in the western U.S., which has been facing a two-decade-old ongoing “megadrought” that intensified since the start of 2020. Europe, China and India are also being plagued by record low levels of rainfall, which is contributing to lower supplies and higher prices for staples like rice on world markets.
“An index of grains and soybeans is trading almost 40% above the five-year average and the surge in crop prices has been a major contributor to global inflation,” Bloomberg warned in late August. “Already, food shortages helped lead to the downfall of Sri Lanka’s government earlier this year when the country ran out of hard currency needed to pay for imports.”
Recently published studies have added to the mounting pile of evidence showing that global warming looks set to make food production a challenge in the future. A study published in Nature on October 29 found that vegetable crops can be “highly sensitive to environmental change” and that temperatures higher than 30 degrees Celsius, or 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30°C / 86°F), are “detrimental to crop yield.” Another report published on October 19 by the Environmental Defense Fund found that days with “killing-degree” heat, temperatures that begin around 84°F, are set to increase significantly throughout the U.S. agricultural heartland in the coming decades.
In other words, people in the U.S. and around the world can expect more events that put upward pressure on food prices, like the ongoing Midwestern drought. The likelihood of their occurrence will only diminish if there’s a reduction in the carbon emissions causing climate change, and the harm done to people around the world will only be minimized if governments rein in corporate power.
“With each fraction of a degree of warming, tens of millions more people worldwide would be exposed to life-threatening heat waves, food and water scarcity, and coastal flooding while millions more mammals, insects, birds and plants would disappear,” TheNew York Times noted in its report on the U.N warning. The world is currently getting a preview of what some of this will look like all along the Mississippi River.
This story is part of the Grist seriesParched, an in-depth look at how climate change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems.
In theory, the federal government can unilaterally cut water deliveries from the Colorado River’s two main reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which release more than 2 trillion gallons of water to farms and cities across the Southwest each year. In reality, this has never happened: Previous cuts have always been negotiated between the federal government and the seven states that use the river.
Late last week, however, the federal government sent its strongest signal yet that it is willing to single-handedly impose water cuts on the Colorado for the first time in history, as the U.S. West stares down the consequences of a climate-change-fueled megadrought that has parched the river.
The Department of the Interior, the federal agency that manages water in the Colorado River basin, announced on Friday that it would look into changing the rules for how it operates Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which are located in southern Utah and southern Nevada, respectively. This would pave the way for the department to impose sharp cuts on major water users in Arizona, Nevada, California, and Mexico, which receives water pursuant to a 1944 treaty.
In effect, the letter is a formal warning to the river states, telling them that if they fail to make the major cuts necessary to prevent the reservoirs from bottoming out, the feds won’t hesitate to unilaterally cut their water deliveries to do so.
The Interior Department said in its Friday letter that it would conduct an environmental review before changing the rules to impose new cuts on the states. This will give states one more chance to come up with their own voluntary reductions before the government enacts its own. According to John Fleck, a professor of water policy at the University of New Mexico, the upshot of all this is that unprecedented water reductions are all but guaranteed next year.
“Whether those cuts are imposed by a government action, or voluntary action by the states, or the fact that the reservoirs are fucking empty, they will happen,” he told Grist.
The new review comes after months of tense negotiations between the federal government and the seven basin states: California, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Nevada, and Arizona. Earlier this year, as water levels in Lakes Powell and Mead fell to historic lows, officials at the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation ordered states to reduce their water consumption. The Bureau wanted a total reduction of between 2 and 4 million acre-feet — roughly a third of all water usage on the river.
The states have not even come close to meeting that goal. Major water users in California, which is the thirstiest of the seven states by far, agreed last month to cut water withdrawals by about 400,000 acre-feet, a decision that will have major implications for the agriculture-heavy Imperial Valley as well as the Los Angeles metro area. Arizona has reduced its Colorado usage over the past two years in compliance with pre-existing drought restrictions from the feds. The four states that comprise the river’s “upper basin” — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming — have not announced any concrete steps to cut their water usage.
Meanwhile, the outlook for the river’s two main reservoirs has continued to worsen. As runoff from melting snow in the northern Rocky Mountains works its way down through the Colorado River’s tributaries and into the river’s mainstem, the Bureau of Reclamation stores this water in Lake Powell, which sits on the border of Utah and Arizona. The Bureau then releases some of this water further down the river to Lake Mead in Nevada, and then further on to water users in the Southwest.
The ongoing, two-decade drought has reduced overall precipitation and evaporated more Rockies snowmelt before it can reach the river, which has reduced inflow into both reservoirs. They now sit three-quarters empty, and the most recent federal projections show that they could each decline below a critical threshold in the next two years. In the worst scenarios, it’s possible that the reservoir dams might cease to generate hydropower, or that the water level in the reservoirs would fall lower than the pipes that release it from the dams. This would make it impossible for the Bureau to move water through the river system.
The Interior Department’s Friday announcement brought home the gravity of the situation, albeit in somewhat bureaucratic language.
“The Department currently lacks analyzed alternatives and measures that may be necessary to address such projected conditions,” wrote Tommy Beaudreau, the department’s deputy secretary. He added that the conditions “pose unacceptable risks” to the river system, and that a solution needs to be “expeditiously developed.”
The federal government technically has the authority to make changes to the amount of water it releases from the reservoirs without consulting the states, but it has never had to test that authority: the current shortage guidelines were the product of a yearslong negotiation process between the Interior Department and the states. The feds are now threatening to alter that agreement on their own, and the Interior Department’s announcement helps lay the groundwork for such an intervention. If the government does modify its guidelines, it could set a new threshold for when to stop releasing water from Lakes Powell and Mead, imposing deeper and earlier cuts than states have endured so far. The review process puts the feds on firmer legal footing in case a state water user sues over the new reductions.
The losers in such a scenario would be the lower basin states — California, Nevada, and Arizona — which rely on water that the government releases from Lake Mead, as well as Mexico, where decades of overuse caused the river delta to disappear during the twentieth century. The states use the bulk of this water for agriculture, but a significant share also flows to major cities. The upper basin states draw water from the river before it reaches the reservoir, so they would be insulated from changes to the reservoir rules.
The government’s review won’t conclude until next summer, but new rules could take effect immediately, which means painful new cuts may arrive in the Southwest as the region’s farmers are preparing for peak growing season.
“It’s never been this bad in my career,” Butler Miller of St. Louis-based barge company Robert B. Miller and Associates told St. Louis Public Radio. “The last time the river levels were this low was in the 1980s. Rain is really the only thing that will fix it.”
The low water levels are caused by the nation’s ongoing drought, which has left the region without rain for weeks. The lack of rain has dried up the Mississippi, and even revealed human remains and lost shipwrecks across the river.
Barges have been stalled or slow-moving across the river for weeks, causing major disruption in the agricultural industry at a time when farmers generally expect to move harvested grains.
Before the Mississippi dried out, grain was booming in the U.S. While Ukraine typically exports tens of millions of pounds yearly, the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war has caused the global supply of grains to stagnate. Amidst this conflict, U.S. grain prices soared early in the year, but now the main way of transporting these commodities has stalled, causing supply to build up at ports and prices to drop. According to Bloomberg, corn shipments in the Mississippi are declining by the week, with more than 2,000 ships waiting to move down the river.
Soybeans and other commodities have been left to rot outside of grain storage elevators, according to industry reports. As more and more farmers try to offload harvest commodities, space is running out as the wait to move downriver is slow moving.
“I’ve never been in a harvest where I was hoping for a hurricane. But this year, it wouldn’t hurt my feelings,” Southern Illinois farmer Adam Thomas told Farm Week Now, a division of the Illinois Farm Bureau.
The Mississippi is a crucial waterway where droughts and floods have pinpointed monumental years along its 2,300 miles. A drought in 1988 dropped water levels in the Mississippi to their previous record low, which lasted nearly two years. Three years ago, the river flooded in the summer, causing $2 billion in damages, and was the longest-lasting flood the river has seen in recent history.
According to the United States Geological Survey, climate change is causing more extreme weather events—such as regions oscillating between droughts and floods.
Weather predictions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that ongoing droughts across the Corn Belt and the West will continue into January, with little to no rain in sight. These predictions are already hampering growers who normally plant winter crops, such as winter wheat in Kansas and Oklahoma.
In addition to supply chain and agricultural woes, concerns over drinking water contamination have begun. The Gulf of Mexico is rising with sea levels, causing saltwater to make its way into the currently barren Mississippi.
This story is part of the Grist seriesParched, an in-depth look at how climate change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems.
For Anje Duckels, Florida was home. Duckels, 41, was born in the Sunshine State; her family had lived there for generations. But housing prices in Fort Myers just kept rising, so she and her wife decided to find somewhere cheaper to raise their three children. Duckels volunteered to help restore a rural estate with a small farmhouse in the Willcox Basin of southeast Arizona, near the U.S.-Mexico border. After a few years in the area, they bought the property, which was located in a Cochise County neighborhood called Kansas Settlement.
Calling the Willcox Basin “remote” would be an understatement: 2,000 square miles of sand and scrub, strewn with crop fields and lined with dusty single-lane roads, it’s nothing like the subdivided coastal paradise that Duckels was used to. Most residents live at least 30 minutes from the closest store or gas station. Many live several miles from their nearest neighbor. In most of the county there are no public services or utilities. The most famous housing development in local history was a land-fraud scam that marketed empty desert tracts to gullible northerners — a sham version of snowbird refuges like the one where Duckels had grown up.
Anje Duckels’ home in Cochise County, Arizona. Grist / Eliseu Cavalcante and Roberto (Bear) Guerra
The day the family moved to Kansas Settlement, they lost their water. When Duckels turned on the faucet, she heard a spitting noise, but nothing came out. It didn’t take long to find the source of the issue: The aquifer beneath her house had dropped below the bottom of her well. The pump was pulling on dry dirt. Duckels soon learned that many of her neighbors had lost water as well, and they’d found themselves forced to haul in jugs of water on their pickup trucks or else pay thousands of dollars to drill their wells deeper.
“Not only was our well dry, but pretty much everybody in this area has a well that was dry, or going dry, or had been dry and had to be re-drilled,” Duckels told Grist.
Anje Duckels checks on plants at her home in Pearce, Arizona. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
In times of crisis, people tend to look for a villain. It didn’t take long for Duckels to find one: Surrounding her property on all sides are farms owned by a massive dairy operation called Riverview. Over the previous decade, the Minnesota-based company had gobbled up more than 50,000 acres in Cochise County to build an expansive network of farms and feedlots, according to High Country News, which has covered Riverview and the local opposition it has engendered extensively. The dairy’s wells were far deeper than the one on Duckels’ property, and she assumed the firm was sucking all the water out from beneath her.
Riverview is hardly the only reason for the area’s water crisis — the desert aquifers had never been very robust, and a climate-change-fueled drought had made the area drier than ever — but Riverview and other large farms growing nuts and alfalfa are by far the area’s largest water users. Duckels started to look at the irrigated fields around her with fear and resentment.
“That Riverview man is literally going to try to starve us out of water,” Duckels told me, referring to the Riverview board member who runs the company’s operations in the area. “I hope every single property he owns is set on fire by someone. I hope that someone salts his ground so that nothing grows.”
Cows at the Riverview Dairy, LLC-owned Coronado Dairy farm near Willcox, Arizona.
Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
Cows look out from the Riverview-owned Coronado Dairy farm near Willcox, Arizona. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
Irrigation equipment stands over Riverview Dairy.
Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
A cloud of dust floats behind a hay truck passing between two Riverview-owned crops, left. Irrigation equipment, right, sprays water over the dairy’s crops. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
A cloud of dust floats behind a hay truck passing between two Riverview Dairy-owned crops.
Cows look out from the Riverview-owned Coronado Dairy farm near Willcox, Arizona. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
Duckels’ neighbors all feel the same way. The mounting water crisis has created a groundswell of anger in the Willcox Basin. Libertarian-minded locals who might once have kept to themselves have banded together against the dairy and other large nearby farms, channeling their frustration over dry wells into a political battle against big agriculture. Interviews with almost two dozen residents in the area paint a picture of a once-sleepy community that has erupted into turmoil: Residents have shown up at public meetings to shout at Riverview representatives, sparred in comment wars in local Facebook groups, and flown rogue reconnaissance flights over dairy facilities.
The growing water shortage is driving freedom-loving denizens of the Willcox Basin to a radical solution: state regulation. In two weeks, basin residents will vote on whether to establish new restrictions on large groundwater wells, the first such referendum in state history. If voters approve the new rules, it would constitute a sea change in Arizona water politics. Not only would it be one of the first times a rural community has voted to restrict its own water usage, but it would also be a rare example of rural voters succeeding in limiting the power of large-scale agriculture.
The backlash may portend a broader political shift in the arid U.S. West. Farms are by far the largest water users in the region, and rural communities from California to Texas are watching these operations suck the water from beneath their homes. Places like Cochise County have relied on agriculture as an economic anchor, but the water crisis is drawing battle lines between rural populations and the large agricultural firms that sustain them.
“Back in the day, we used to get a lot more rain, and the theme with water was: If it’s not affecting you personally, nobody’s really gonna care,” said Esteban Vasquez, a lifelong Cochise County resident who has managed local water systems. “Now that people actually see it happening, the conversation has opened. It’s something that has hit close to home.”
Unlike the sprawling Phoenix suburbs 200 miles away, Cochise County remains mostly an undeveloped desert, almost as rural today as it was when the first prospectors and miners arrived to dig for copper more than a century ago. Most residents who spoke with Grist said they moved to the area because they wanted solitude and privacy, even if that meant roughing it. In a county where the population density is a quarter of the national average, they often see more rattlesnakes than people.
“People have to be a little bit courageous or at least ambitious,” said Christian Sawyer, who moved out to the area a few years ago in search of a quiet place where he could pursue various creative projects. “It’s people who want to do their own thing, build their own house, farm their own crops. It’s this kind of back-to-the-land libertarianism, with a bit of a hippie-type of mentality as well.”
Christian Sawyer stands inside a greenhouse at the former mineralogist’s compound where he lives outside of Douglas, Arizona. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
Cochise County has a unique “opt-out” permitting system, which allows people who own more than four acres of land to build structures without having to submit to a county building inspection. This has enabled some unorthodox abodes: Some residents have built houses with composting toilets, walls made out of volcanic rock, and frames made out of straw bale.
If the absence of local regulations made Cochise County an attractive retreat for loners and libertarians, it also made it an ideal target for large farms. There have long been small cotton and alfalfa operations in the county, but over the past ten years a number of large conglomerates have moved in to grow nuts and alfalfa; several vineyards have opened as well. The growers needed a place where they could pump water with no restrictions whatsoever, and the Willcox Basin fit the bill.
These conglomerates could afford to dig groundwater wells that are much deeper than standard residential wells, giving them a de facto monopoly on the region’s aquifers. Producers have also snapped up land in unregulated localities elsewhere in the state — like the town of Kingman, where a Saudi-backed company grows alfalfa for export back to the Middle East, and Hyder, where a conglomerate called Integrated Ag has invested $90 million to grow Bermuda grass.
Riverview-owned crops fan out near Kansas Settlement Road near Willcox, Arizona. Grist / Eliseu Cavalcante and Roberto (Bear) Guerra
Riverview made the biggest splash in the Willcox Basin. Starting around 2014, the company built or bought out several separate dairy operations in the area to the tune of $180 million, beginning in Kansas Settlement and spreading out from there. With operations in five states and hundreds of thousands of cows, Riverview is one of the largest dairy firms in the country. In other states the company has been accused of muscling out family farmers by flooding local milk markets and then underpaying desperate farmers to buy them out and swallow up their acreage.
Much of the land Riverview bought had already been used for farming, but the firm dug dozens of new wells at depths of more than 1,000 feet and pumped millions of gallons of water to grow food for its large herd of heifers. State records show that Riverview owns more than 600 wells in Cochise County. The majority were drilled before the company arrived, but the wells that Riverview drilled in recent years are by far the deepest, with some of them reaching more than 2,000 feet into the earth — so deep that the water is hot from proximity to the earth’s crust. This year alone, the company has bought or drilled at least a dozen thousand-plus-foot wells.
A groundwater well stands along Kansas Settlement Road near Riverview’s base of operations. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
Unlike other aquifers that are fed by rivers and streams, the aquifers in the Willcox Basin depend on rainfall alone for replenishment, so they have always been vulnerable to depletion during drought. But it wasn’t until large operations like Riverview moved in that residents started to notice their water disappearing. Groundwater accretes underground in basins, so if one user pumps a lot of water from a deep well, they can cause water to drop for other wells even several miles away. The best way to visualize this is to imagine two or three straws stuck in the same milkshake; the straw that plunges down deepest will get the last of the milkshake, even as the ones positioned higher end up coming up dry.
“The amount of groundwater pumping has increased exponentially because of what’s been happening with this dairy. And as that has happened, people’s wells have gone dry,” said Kathy Ferris, a research fellow at Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy. Ferris was one of the architects of Arizona’s landmark 1980 groundwater law, which limited underwater pumping in the state’s main population centers.
“I think we know what the problem is,” she added. “It’s not rocket science.”
Materials used by the Arizona Water Defenders to support regulation of groundwater in both the Willcox and Douglas Basins. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
A 2018 report from the state water department found that groundwater levels declined by at least 200 feet between 1940 and 2015 in the parts of the Willcox Basin with the most agricultural pumping — and that was before Riverview moved in. An Arizona water official who spoke to High Country News last year said the rate of decline has increased since the dairy arrived.
Other farming-heavy regions across the West are seeing similar stress on their aquifers from unrestricted agricultural pumping and an ongoing megadrought. California has recorded 1,287 dry well reports across the state this year, a 50 percent increase since 2021. One town in the Golden State’s Central Valley may run out of water altogether by the end of the year. The massive Ogallala Aquifer that runs from Nebraska to Texas has also shown signs of severe stress in recent years.
In the Willcox Basin, the groundwater crisis began in the immediate vicinity of Kansas Settlement, but it’s since spread out across the county as Riverview and other large farms expand farther out and draw from new sections of the aquifers that run through the county. The crisis has even started to affect the town of Willcox itself, one of the only incorporated settlements in the area, which is ten miles from Riverview’s operations. Esteban Vasquez spent five years helping manage the town’s water system, and he told Grist that even the town’s deep municipal wells were seeing stress as a result of agricultural pumping.
Esteban Vasquez stands by a road in Willcox, Arizona. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
“There’s seriously something going on down there,” he said. “We were dropping about nine feet a year. People used to think that since we were miles away [from the dairy], that wasn’t really going to affect us and our aquifers, but it was only a matter of time.”
When Vasquez left his job with the town of Willcox and started working for a company that manages small water systems across the county, he encountered the same dry well crisis everywhere he went. According to High Country News, at least 100 wells in the basin went dry between 2014 and 2019.
The proliferation of water issues has cast a pall over the area, making life darker and more difficult for all those who live there. Everyone knows someone whose well has gone dry, or who’s had to deepen their well, or who’s taken to hauling water rather than try to find it on their own property. Many of the haulers are elderly people who live on fixed incomes and can’t afford to invest in wells, so they haul water instead, filling up jugs at a water facility in Willcox and driving them back home multiple times a week. In a county where the median household income is just 70 percent of the national figure, options for those who suddenly find themselves without water are limited.
Even for those who still have water, the effects of the crisis are all too visible. In some parts of the basin, the overpumping of underground aquifers has led to the emergence of fissures in the ground that are dozens of feet deep, some of which have split apart roadways and forced local officials to close them for weeks. Dozens of people have left areas like Kansas Settlement over the past few years after losing water and finding themselves saddled with worthless properties. Vasquez said he knows at least 20 people who’ve left the county due to the recent water issues; Duckels gave a similar estimate.
Overpumping water can increase the risk of land fissures, right, a hazard noted by a sign, left, near the intersection of Dragoon and Cochise Stronghold roads near Cochise, Arizona. Grist / Eliseu Cavalcante and Roberto (Bear) Guerra
“A lot of people have abandoned their houses,” said Duckels. “You drive up and down our streets over here. You can see houses that are just decrepit, because the people have literally just had to leave their investments to rot.”
Even as the water crisis grew for years, many locals didn’t understand the scale of the problem. Because the population of the basin is so spread out, many people were not totally aware of the growth of agribusiness in the area. Opposition to megafarms was initially limited to just a few committed locals.
Julia Hamel, who lives about six miles north of the town of Willcox, was one of those people. She refers to dairy owners as “crooked bastards” and sees their expansion as part of a campaign to force out longtime residents like herself.
“These folks at the dairy have forced out families that have been there five generations,” she said of Riverview. “They can’t sell their land because no one wants it without water. Meanwhile [the dairy has] bought miles and miles of land. We’re the ones who get tromped on.”
About ten years ago, as a dairy company called Feria was expanding its operations in the Willcox Basin, Hamel and two of her friends decided to go on offense. They piloted a small plane from a nearby hangar to conduct aerial reconnaissance on Feria’s feedlots, looking out for potential health code violations. Hamel’s friends photographed large ponds she said were full of urine, as well as burning piles of manure, both of which she could smell from miles away. They tried to show the photos to local representatives, but nothing came of it. A few years later, Riverview acquired Feria. (Riverview representatives did not respond to Grist’s multiple requests for comment.)
Stunts like these were rare, but in recent years more people have come over to Hamel’s side. The local “Willcox chit chat” Facebook group has exploded with debates over how much of the responsibility for dry wells can be pinned on agriculture, with many residents blaming Riverview. Vandals have defaced some of the dairy’s signage, and residents have shown up at county meetings to berate public officials for supporting the dairy.
Anje Duckels said she’s concerned that violence will erupt in the area if water supplies continue to drop.
“You get people who see their moms cry because they’re too old to mortgage their house to pay for another well,” said Duckels. “These people are gonna get desperate and crazy. These people are frightening, they’re poor, and they’ve got weapons.”
Ironically, one major demonstration of this outrage was a pressure campaign against a proposal to actually increase local water access. In the years after Riverview arrived, a group of county politicians started to push for the creation of a municipal water district that could ease the burden on individual wells. Rather than having everyone pump water on their own property, the new district would pump water from a deep communal well and pipe it out to households.
A new billboard opposing the AMA was recently placed along I-10 just outside of Willcox, Arizona. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
But many residents view the proposed district with suspicion or outright hostility — not because they think it wouldn’t deliver water, but because it is supported by Riverview. Gary Fehr, a member of Riverview’s board of directors and grandson of the dairy’s founder, is one of the lead organizers behind the effort.
The water district doesn’t advertise its association with Riverview, and vice versa. But Peggy Judd, a member of the Cochise County Board of Supervisors and a supporter of the water district, told Grist the district wouldn’t have been possible without Fehr and Riverview, which she said has helped finance outreach efforts and donated office space for the endeavor.
“The power and the brainpower behind the district is the dairy, and they’re keeping it quiet. But if we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t have that gift,” she said.
As a result, many locals consider the water district part of a ploy to make the entire Willcox Basin dependent on Riverview for water access. Rumors have swirled that Fehr is laying the groundwork to build a massive new suburban development in the area: First he’ll dry out everyone’s wells, the logic goes, and then he’ll create a new water district to support the residents of his planned community.
A sign marks property for sale along Kansas Settlement Road. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
At a series of public meetings about the water district earlier this year, numerous residents cast blame for the crisis on Riverview, suggesting the dairy couldn’t be trusted to solve a problem it had allegedly created.
“The only reason we’re here today is because our water table is going down, and the biggest single reason that water table is going down is because of agricultural pumping,” said one.
“Neighborliness is one of our values in this valley, and good neighbors don’t suck their neighbors’ wells dry,” he added to laughter and applause.
For the moment, the water district project appears to have stalled amid local opposition; the volunteer committee hasn’t held a meeting since June. Fehr did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.
Even as residents of the Willcox Basin have spurned the dairy’s proposed water district, many have embraced a far more radical solution: strict regulations on groundwater usage. Decades of anti-regulation sentiment have given way to an unprecedented grassroots campaign for restrictions on new groundwater wells. These restrictions could jeopardize the future growth of industrial farming operations like Riverview.
When Arizona lawmakers drafted the state’s landmark 1980 groundwater law, they were trying to solve an over-pumping problem that had begun to threaten development around the major cities of Phoenix and Tucson. Because most of the state’s population lived in these metropolitan areas, lawmakers focused on slowing new well drilling in urban rather than rural areas. The 1980 bill established so-called “active management areas,” or AMAs, in those two cities, as well as in the agriculture-heavy county that lay between them.
For four decades now, farms and large subdivisions in these areas have been subject to stringent limits on how much groundwater they can pump. Outside these three counties, however, unlimited pumping remained fair game. People in areas like Cochise County didn’t want restrictions on their water, and the potential for overdraft in many of Arizona’s more remote regions was less immediate.
Many families in Wilcox say the supply for their wells, like this pivot well on a small alfalfa farm, have been threatened by Riverview’s water usage. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
“We knew that there are areas of the state where problems are worse than other areas,” said Ferris, the water expert who helped craft the law. However, “in many rural areas, they just said, ‘go away.’ They didn’t want regulation. They didn’t want us to be managing their groundwater.”
But buried within the 1980 law was a provision that allowed for the possibility that rural communities might change their mind: If residents of a groundwater basin gather enough signatures, the law allows them to propose a ballot question about whether to establish an AMA. If the ballot question wins a majority vote, the state then appoints a committee to supervise groundwater in the basin. The committee can impose restrictions on new irrigation activity, capping the amount of land in the basin that is fed by groundwater.
The proviso has never been used — until now.
In Cochise County, a local librarian and textile artist named Bekah Wilce learned about the clause a few years ago. She had started to worry about the impact of agricultural pumping on her town, Elfrida, which sits in the water basin adjacent to the Willcox Basin. Wilce’s husband, an independent journalist, started to talk with Arizona’s state water department about how large water users could be regulated. Those conversations led him to the 1980 statute, and to the clause allowing communities to form their own AMAs.
Wilce soon got involved with a group of local groundwater activists known as the Arizona Water Defenders. The group had been looking for a solution to the dry-well problem for a few years, and Wilce pitched them on gathering signatures for an AMA ballot question, something that had never been tried in Arizona before.
The Arizona Water Defenders want to create new Active Management Areas that will regulate groundwater in both the Willcox and Douglas Basins. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
When Wilce first started working on the AMA campaign, her neighbors warned her that it would be a long shot. Cochise County residents tend to be quite conservative — Donald Trump carried the county by 20 points in the 2020 election — and many are averse to the very idea of regulation. So Wilce was surprised that she and her fellow volunteers had no trouble getting enough signatures. In fact, they submitted 250 more signatures than they needed to get an AMA vote on the ballot — not just in the Willcox Basin but also in the neighboring Douglas Basin, where Wilce lives. Wilce told Grist that the massive growth of big agricultural interests in the area has woken up people who might not have engaged in the past.
“It’s true that it’s a fairly conservative area — and even those on the left side of the spectrum don’t really want a lot of government interference — but I do think we see the need for common-sense limits,” she said. “The dairy has been in place now for a number of years, and people have become increasingly concerned. It’s just been this snowballing tragedy, so there’s this fear.”
The scale of support for the AMA has also surprised Vasquez, the former water systems manager, who said he’s been trying to warn locals about groundwater for years without success.
Irrigation infrastructure sprays water at a family farm near Willcox, Arizona. Grist / Eliseu Cavalcante and Roberto (Bear) Guerra
“I feel like nobody really cared about water before,” he told Grist. “Water conservation was the last thing I felt in people’s minds when it came to this community. So when the AMA got a lot of positive backing behind it, I’m thinking to myself, ‘Well, that’s crazy, because everybody that I’ve talked to beforehand didn’t give two shits about water.’”
The campaign has deepened the fault lines between farmers — including many small-scale growers unaffiliated with larger newcomers like Riverview — and the rest of the county’s residents. Now that the AMA question is on the ballot, the state has paused all new irrigation in the area until the election, freezing the growth of local agriculture. It isn’t clear how strict the AMA’s ultimate restrictions would be: Should the ballot question pass, the state will appoint a committee that will study the aquifers in the basin and decide what kinds of pumping need to be curbed. Individual households wouldn’t be subject to restrictions, since their wells are too small to meet the legal threshold for regulation, but family farmers might face limits on future growth, and they would need to go through a permitting process to drill new wells. The largest operations would likely be unable to expand at all.
Jacob Collins, a fourth-generation alfalfa farmer who lives just southeast of the town of Willcox, said that the region’s farming community is very worried about new limitations on water usage. Collins farms about 360 acres in total,and there’s a chance an AMA might place a ceiling on the amount of land he can irrigate.
“There’s a lot of fear surrounding a loss of water in the valley, and there’s a lot of fear [about] having our water controlled by an outside entity that isn’t here,” he told Grist. “If we want the valley to continue to be farmable, we do have to do our best to make sure that we’re not using more water than we need, [but] there’s not really anything farmers can do to make a drought not happen.”
Jacob Collins at work on the family farm near Willcox, Arizona.
Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
Fourth-generation alfalfa farmer Jacob Collins stands in front of a tractor on his family’s land in Arizona. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
Irrigation infrastructure at the Collins family’s farm near Willcox, Arizona.
Cows look out from the Riverview-owned Coronado Dairy farm near Willcox, Arizona. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
Jacob Collins, right, drives a piece of equipment on his family’s farm, left, near Willcox, Arizona. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
Jacob Collins work on his family’s farm near Willcox, Arizona.
Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
These sentiments in the local farming community have led to a backlash against the pro-AMA campaign. A group called Rural Water Assurance, which was co-founded by the president of the county farm bureau, has put up billboards by the Interstate urging a ‘no’ vote on the ballot question. The Willcox Facebook group has seen a proliferation of posts warning of draconian water restrictions. Rural Water Assurance even filed a lawsuit against the Douglas Basin AMA effort in June, alleging that the signatures the group had collected were invalid. A court dismissed the lawsuit in August, finding that the plaintiffs had “wholly failed to demonstrate any legal basis” for the challenge.
Wilce feels confident the AMA vote will pass in the Willcox Basin, and a large chunk of the county’s most engaged voters seem to be on her side. If the outlook for the AMA campaign is bright, though, the outlook for the county’s groundwater is far darker, regardless of which way the vote goes next month.
Even the most stringent regulations might not save people like Duckels from having to leave the valley. At its strongest, the AMA can restrict almost all new pumping, but it can’t order current users to stop drawing water, which means Riverview would get grandfathered in. The dairy wouldn’t be able to expand its operations any further, but it could keep withdrawing water at its current rates. And the groundwater levels in the basin will likely keep dropping.
“You’re just trying to stop the hemorrhaging,” said Ferris.
The depletion of area aquifers will make life harder and harder for people like Duckels. More residents will have to haul water, or spend tens of thousands of dollars to dig new wells, or walk away from their homes and move somewhere else. In the absence of a water district like the one proposed by Riverview, there will be more new dry wells every year, and more people leaving the area. Plus, new limitations on large groundwater pumping will deter new farms and businesses from moving to the county, further sapping its already sluggish economy.
The irony, according to Ferris, is that the dairy can always move somewhere else if it loses water access. There’s a lot of land in the United States, and it’s a lot easier to move cows around than people. The absence of water regulations in the Willcox Basin has allowed Riverview to run down the clock on the area’s future, and the new political backlash against these companies is arriving too late to change that trajectory. Even if residents manage to stymie Riverview, there’s no guarantee the community will survive.
“Industrial ag moved into that basin, and industrial ag can move out of that basin. But everybody else is kind of stuck,” Ferris told Grist. “They’re living there, they invested their livelihood there, and I think the potential outlook is really grim. I think, unless something changes, it becomes a ghost town.”
Millions of years before dinosaurs went extinct, what is now Utah was submerged by a broad, shallow sea. Over millennia, as the water receded and tectonic plates shifted, rich organic marine material accumulated, forming thick layers of sediment that eventually became the fossil fuel deposits of the Uinta Basin in the northeastern part of the state. The formation is estimated to hold as many as 300 billion barrels of oil — more than the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia.
The basin’s immense oil-producing potential remains largely untapped. Drillers in the Uinta Basin extract about 65,000 barrels of oil per day, or just over 1 percent of the more than 5 million barrels daily drilled in the Permian Basin, which straddles West Texas and New Mexico and is the country’s most productive fossil fuel reserve. One of the biggest hurdles is the waxy and viscous quality of Uinta oil, which is so thick that it needs to be constantly heated to keep it liquid. The deposits are also trapped in tiny pores between rocks and more widely dispersed than other shale formations in the country. As a result, oil drillers have been tepid in exploring the basin, despite high gas prices and calls to boost American oil production.
A pumpjack draws oil out of the Uinta Basin. RJ Sangosti / The Denver Post
A state-owned company from the tiny Baltic nation of Estonia wants to change that. The company, Enefit American Oil, has proposed strip-mining 28 million tons of rock, heating them up to temperatures around 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and extracting a type of synthetic crude oil. Enefit plans to operate on about 7,000 acres of desert land just south of Dinosaur National Monument and produce 50,000 barrels of oil per day, almost doubling the entire basin’s production. Its novel oil extraction method is also reportedly up to 75 percent more carbon-intensive than traditional fossil fuel extraction. No operation of its kind currently exists in the United States.
But Enefit’s grand plans hinge on one crucial resource that’s in short supply all over the American West: water. The operation needs millions of gallons a day to break up the petroleum-carrying rock and extract oil. In 2011, the company purchased a water right for approximately 10,000 acre-feet — or 3.2 billion gallons — of water from the White River, a tributary of the Green River which flows into the beleaguered Colorado River.
Utah and six other Western states are overwhelmingly dependent on the Colorado for their needs, from urban drinking water to agriculture. But a yearslong megadrought fueled by climate change has left the river in dire straits, and states hold more water rights on paper than physically exist in the river. As a result, water users are making painful cuts to prevent the river’s reservoirs from reaching dangerously low levels. Historically, Utah has not used its full allotment from the river and has restricted large new appropriations for decades in order to fulfill its obligations to Native tribes and downstream states.
A complex set of rules govern the ownership and use of water in the Colorado River basin. Key among them is the “use it or lose it” principle, which dictates that a water right once appropriated must be put to “beneficial use” — such as for farming or mining — within a specific amount of time. Utah law requires that this threshold be met within 50 years, which is where Enefit ran into trouble. The water right that the company purchased in 2011 dated back to 1965 — meaning it was due to lapse in 2015. If Enefit didn’t put it to use by then, the water right would return to the state. Given the number or regulatory hurdles it needed to overcome before it could even start drilling, there was no way it would start using its water in time to keep its right.
State laws allow one exception to the 50-year rule: Public water suppliers and electrical cooperatives may apply for a 10-year extension to prove the water has been put to use. The logic is that it’s OK to hoard water rights only if it means preserving reliable water and electricity access for Utah residents.
How Enefit could claim to be promoting either of these goals is unclear. Nevertheless, the company found a way to capitalize on the loophole. With the deadline looming, Enefit transferred its water right to Deseret Generation and Transmission Cooperative, a public utility serving about 45,000 customers in northeastern Utah. The price? Just $10 for all 3.2 billion gallons. Deseret then turned around and leased the water right back to Enefit, granting it the 10-year extension it needed.
The extension application requires public entities to prove that the exception they’re requesting “is needed to meet the reasonable future requirements of the public.” An electric cooperative holding on to a water right at the behest of an oil mining company does not appear to be in line with the letter or spirit of the law, given that Deseret produces its electricity from coal shipped in from a mine in Colorado.
Michael Toll, an attorney with the conservation nonprofit Grand Canyon Trust, called the move “completely unlawful” and said that it “undermines the legislature’s intent in carving out that narrow exception to the 50-year deadline.” The Grand Canyon Trust has been protesting the water right transfer with the state water rights agency and litigating Enefit’s project in federal court. The Trust and a coalition of environmental groups argue that the water right should’ve been forfeited and returned to the state.
Jeff Peterson, a representative for Deseret Power, did not respond to specific questions about the Trust’s allegations but referenced a legal filing submitted to the Utah Division of Water Resources, in which the cooperative questioned the Trust’s standing to file an administrative protest and stated that its “legal assertions are contrary to Utah law.” The cooperative plans to build additional electricity generation units, according to the filing, and the water right in question “will play an important role in Deseret Power’s continued operation of the Bonanza Plant and its ability to meet the reasonable future electricity needs of the public.”
The stakes are high: If Enefit’s project moves forward, it is likely to worsen air quality in a region that is already one of the most polluted in the country, thanks to its mountainous topography and intensive drilling that’s already happening there. The basin is routinely out of compliance with federal smog regulations, and the state public health department has documented spikes in stillbirths in the area.
A truck drives though Uinta Basin, which is home to around some 11,200 oil and gas wells. RJ Sangosti / The Denver Post
Even beyond its local effects, Enefit’s plan would be a “climate disaster,” according to Brian Moench, president of the nonprofit Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment. Producing 50,000 new barrels of oil a day for the next 30 years would lock in the annual equivalent of carbon emissions from 63 coal plants at a time when the Biden administration is pushing to cut the nation’s carbon emissions in half by 2030.
“It’s really not an overstatement to say that this project would be one of — if not the — most harmful single industrial project in the history of industrial development on the Colorado Plateau,” Toll concluded.
Enefit’s ambitious plans to mine oil in the desert highlands of Utah depend on the Bonanza power plant in northeastern Utah, which is one of just a handful of coal plants still clinging to life in the American West. The 500-megawatt plant is owned by Deseret Power, sits just a few dozen miles from Enefit’s proposed mining location, burns 2 million tons of coal a year, and is dependent on water from the Green River to generate power. The cooperative has a pipeline that moves water from the Green River to the Bonanza plant. (According to public comments and documents submitted by Enefit and Deseret, the mining company plans to make use of this pipeline and develop its own extensive infrastructure to ferry water to its mining location about 20 miles away.)
Deseret is allowed to draw millions of gallons a day from the river, but for decades it only used a portion of its allocated water right. In particular, one 1959 water right was never put to “beneficial use.” Utah’s 50-year rule meant the right would expire in 2009 and return to the state’s public pool. Not wanting to lose its access, Deseret Power pushed legislation that would allow public water utilities and electric cooperatives a 10-year extension to the water use rule. According to the state legislator who sponsored the bill, the electric cooperative always had plans to construct a second coal unit and the water was needed for the expansion. The bill sailed through the legislature, and after it was signed into law, Deseret received the extension it was seeking.
A canyon along the Green River cuts through the Uinta Mountains.
VW Pics / Contributor via Getty Images
Deseret made use of the 10-year extension once again in 2013 — but this time to benefit Enefit. After Enefit transferred its 10,000 acre-feet water right to Deseret, the electric cooperative submitted an extension request, again citing its future plans for the Bonanza coal plant. The Uinta Basin was at the height of the fracking boom at the time, and a recent Utah Department of Transportation report projected significant growth in the region. The boom would mean increased demand for electricity both at the fracking sites and as a result of population growth. Deseret claimed that it planned to meet that need with a second coal generation unit in the next 5 to 15 years and a third unit in 15 to 25 years.
“It is anticipated that the operation of each of these generation units will require up to an additional 15 [cubic feet per second] of water, resulting in a total water demand at the Bonanza plant of approximately 45 [cubic feet per second],” the application noted. The state water division approved the request without any fuss.
Almost a decade later, Deseret has not built even that second unit. In fact, in 2015 the company entered into an agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency and green groups to limit its coal consumption to 20 million tons for the rest of its plant’s operational life after 2020. Given that it burns about 2 million tons a year, that would mean the plant is due to shut down around 2030.
Deseret appears to have since leased the water right back to the mining company. In 2016, Enefit responded to the Bureau of Land Management’s environmental review of a new water pipeline the company planned to build from the Bonanza plant to its proposed mining location. In the letter, Enefit revealed that it has “an exclusive contractual right” to use Deseret’s water right. This was the first public indication that Deseret had entered into a contractual agreement with Enefit to lease the oil company its former water right.
The existence of the contract means that the electric cooperative is no longer using its 10-year extension to meet public demand for power, according to Toll, the Grand Canyon Trust attorney.
“Deseret power is not meeting its legal obligation to exercise diligence, because its contract seemingly all but forecloses Deseret Power from using the water itself,” he said. “If it really no longer needs this water to generate electricity to meet the public’s future power demand, then there is no reason that they would even hold on to it in the first place — and the water right would be forfeited if they don’t actually need it for the purpose that they said they were going to use it for.”
It’s unclear exactly how Deseret stands to benefit from the deal. The contract is not public, and both companies declined to comment on the details in the agreement. Attorneys Grist spoke to speculated that Enefit may be paying Deseret for its services, or that the Estonian company may have agreed to purchase power from Deseret when it sets up its mining operation.
In the legal filing filed with the Division of Water Resources, Deseret claims that it still has plans to build a second generation unit and possibly a third. Since the settlement with the EPA does not require it to close the Bonanza by 2030, Deseret noted that it may install additional emissions control technologies or run its existing unit on a seasonal basis, thereby extending the plant’s life beyond 2030.
“Deseret Power is currently evaluating alternative generation options at the Bonanza Plant,” the cooperative noted. “All the additional generation capacity will increase the water demand at the Bonanza Plant.”
An aerial view of the Uinta Mountains.
UCG / Contributor via Getty Images
Jared Manning, the deputy state engineer with the Utah Division of Water Resources, said that if Deseret lost its water right, the water would most likely not be reappropriated and would remain in the White River. That’s because the state has not been appropriating large new water rights in the Colorado River Basin since 1990.
“We’re not approving large applications in the Colorado River right now,” said Manning. “If this lapsed, we wouldn’t change our policy. We wouldn’t go out and approve some similar size application or anything like that.”
Manning added that, since only municipalities and public utilities can apply for the 10-year extension, his office doesn’t receive many applications requesting additional time to prove a water right has been put to beneficial use. Since the 2008 law allowing extensions was signed into law, Manning said the agency has processed nearly 450 such applications. Deseret has received three such extensions for two different water rights.
With its purchase of Enefit’s right, Deseret now has ownership of a precious and dwindling resource: Almost all waterways in the state have been fully appropriated and, since the state has not been granting large new water rights, the water that is available is typically purchased from another user. Emily Lewis, a former attorney in the Utah Division of Water Resources who is now a water rights attorney and a professor at the University of Utah, said that farmers and industrial water users — like coal plants — are some of the major water holders in the basin, and therefore hold the keys to new water-intensive projects in the area.
A 2014 map shows oil and gas wells in the Uintah Basin.
RJ Sangosti / The Denver Post
“There’s not a lot of water out there these days,” she said. “One of the biggest sources of water that’s going to become available is from retiring coal plants. That’s already happening.”
When Deseret’s 10-year extension expires in 2025, the utility will either have to show the water is being used or apply for another extension. State law requires that Deseret show both that it has a need for the water to produce power and that it has constructed infrastructure to move the water from the river to the plant. It’s unclear how the cooperative will meet these requirements if the coal unit at the plant is expected to shutter in the coming years.
Enefit’s infrastructure plans, which the company has dubbed the “South Project,” have also run into legal trouble. The company plans to build a pipeline and transmission corridor on federal lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM. In 2018, after conducting a years-long environmental assessment, the BLM approved the company’s request for seven rights of way.
The Grand Canyon Trust and a number of other environmental groups that had been following the agency’s deliberations sued in early 2019 to challenge the approvals. They alleged that the BLM had failed to adequately consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service, a federal agency in charge of protecting endangered species, among other shortcomings. The Service had not properly considered the effects of the project on four endangered fish species in the Green River, they argued, and thus BLM’s approval of the rights of way did not comply with the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. A federal court is currently weighing the environmental groups’ arguments.
If the federal court sides with the agencies’ decision and the project moves forward, Moench, the physician, said the effects could be devastating for both the natural landscape and those who live in Vernal, the closest town to the proposed mining location. He pointed to the environmental degradation in Estonia, where Enefit has already been mining . When Enefit finishes mining and processing shale oil, 45 percent of the shale is converted into fine ash, which is deposited in giant piles visible from space. The prospect of such externalities in the Uinta Basin, which already faces a plethora of environmental threats, has hardened Moench’s opposition to the project.
“We have wildfire pollution, dust pollution, particulate pollution, high volatile organic compounds, and high ozone,” Moench said. “Approving the Enefit project would be like pouring gasoline on the fire of an existing pollution nightmare.”
This story is part of the Grist seriesParched, an in-depth look at how climate change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems.
On an overcast Thursday morning in September, a team of five people slowly makes its way down Broadway Avenue, a residential street in the city of Huntington Park, California. Every couple hundred feet they park their pickup trucks, loaded with 275 gallon water tanks, hop out, and fan out along the street, dousing the roots of young trees lining the strip between the sidewalk and the road.
The watering team, from the nonprofit TreePeople, is responsible for thousands of newly planted trees in seven low-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles County, including Watts, South Gate, and Lynwood; each tree comes with a guarantee that the nonprofit will provide water and other maintenance for at least 3 years.
“Last week we were out in the heat wave and it was brutal,” says Eileen Garcia, senior manager of community forestry with TreePeople. Around her, crew members in wide brim hats and long sleeved shirts haul 5-gallon buckets across lawns fading from green to brown. “We had to start at 5am to avoid the danger.” A few blocks over, Garcia points out a Brisbane box tree, planted by the team three years ago. The leaves look crinkled and crispy at their edges. “That one is struggling,” she says. But most of the young trees planted by TreePeople are doing well – “that’s because we’re here watering them.”
Huntington Park, a three-square-mile, 96-percent Latino city, has a ratio of just 0.7 park acres per 1,000 people; the recommended standard is 2 acres per 1,000. It’s one of the many cities across the country, in partnership with nonprofits and federal and state agencies, trying to increase its urban canopy as global temperatures rise and the risk from excessive heat worsens. Phoenix, Arizona and Las Vegas, Nevada aim to double their forest canopies within the next decade; San Diego wants to go from 13 percent to 35 percent cover by 2035. Los Angeles has a goal to increase its canopy cover to 50 percent by 2028 in places where historic underinvestment and redlining has left communities of color and low-income communities without shade.
A member of the TreePeople maintenance crew waters a lemon bottlebrush tree in the residential parkway strip.
Blanca Begert
But young trees require a lot of water – posing a challenge for planting programs in the U.S. Southwest, where historic megadrought conditions are drying up rivers and reservoirs.
Water has always been a problem for tree planting in the region, where areas can go for nine months a year without rain. “When I first started, I told a reporter there were two main constraining issues for tree canopy growth in Los Angeles,” said Rachel Malarch, LA’s city forester appointed in 2019. “Water and space.” As drought becomes even more severe and evaporation increases, water has become even more of an issue. The same 5-gallon bucket won’t go as far.
Newly planted trees require the most water during their establishment phase of 3 to 5 years. The TreePeople team, caring mostly for drought-tolerant species like gold medallion tree, Chitalpa, and lemon bottlebrush, recommends 15 gallons, poured slowly onto the base of the tree, every week for the first three years. The nonprofit asks residents to help with watering but ultimately, its staff members check every young tree; if it looks thirsty, they water it.
“During a drought, the team increases the number of visits they make,” said Garcia. “When we know there’s a heat wave coming, it is especially important to water beforehand to increase the likelihood of survival.” But watering isn’t something that all organizations and municipalities have the resources to do, even during non-drought times.
Cities and partner organizations have long been able to drum up funding and energy for tree planting. But maintaining and watering new trees over the long run – an expensive and less glamorous, yet critical, activity – has garnered less support. Most cities have systems in place to water trees in parks and medians, but for watering residential parkway strips, where the majority of trees in the urban canopy are located, cities have largely relied on residents, with mixed results.
On Stafford Avenue, trees planted three years ago are already casting much-needed shade. Blanca Begert
“About 25 percent of the agencies we work with take on watering trees in the public right of way,” said Mike Palat, vice president of operations for Southern California and the Southwest at West Coast Arborists, a contractor that maintains trees for about 350 municipalities in California.
In the past several years, nonprofits and governments have started to rethink how they get water to trees, and a movement towards investing more dollars in watering, especially during critical heat and drought times, is underway, even if progress is slow.
Palat said he’s worked on all sorts of programs to encourage residents to water: asking people to sign volunteer agreements, sending text reminders, and running educational programs in different languages about the importance of tree care. For a resident, the cost of watering a young tree is less than $10 a year, but it can still be a struggle to get people to do it, especially in places occupied by mostly renters who move away over time. “I’ll be honest,” said Palat, “the best success we’ve had in the end is paying someone to water.”
“I got my start with an organization that did volunteer tree care and that’s a beautiful model for community building and connecting people with plants,” said Malarich. “But to really shift the landscape at the speed we need to, you have to have crews moving in tandem.” She added that tree planting used to be considered an amenity. “We made the shift to talking about trees as critical infrastructure in the ‘90s, but some of our structures still reflect the era of beautification in that trees are not treated as a ‘must have.’”
Part of the problem, Malarich says, is that hiring someone to water is expensive. And many organizations that apply for tree planting grants will opt to rely on residents in order to appear more competitive and get more trees in the ground at a lower cost. Local governments with wealthy tax bases are the ones that can allocate watering funds in their budgets. “You’re looking at $700 to $1000 a day to get 100 to 200 trees watered,” said Palat. “A lot of cities aren’t in a position to do that, which is why we have open areas on maps that aren’t being planted.”
CAL FIRE, the main granting agency in California for urban forest projects, has started to address this issue by granting dedicated funds for maintenanceand allowing grantees to apply for additional cycles of maintenance funding past the end of the typical four-year grant period. “We weren’t seeing the survival rate we wanted to see with grantees who relied on residents,” said Henry Herrera, CAL FIRE’s LA County grant administrator. The agency expects a 10 percent mortality rate for new projects, but based on Herrera’s observations, projects that relied only on residents to keep the trees alive saw rates of 20 to 25 percent. “Part of the solution was to provide the cities with the money to care for the trees,” he said. Still he recognizes that not every funding agency offers funds for tree maintenance.
“We’re having conversations about how we should be providing water to trees in lower income areas,” said Aimee Esposito, who runs a tree planting non-profit in the Greater Phoenix area and collaborates with government agencies to grow the urban tree canopy. “But it’s a pipe dream, it’s not something in the works in Phoenix.”
Once trees develop a mature root system, they can access groundwater, which makes them more capable of living on their own. But when groundwater runs low during a drought, like the one raging in the Western U.S. right now, older trees also start to struggle.
A TreePeople watering team fills up 5-gallon buckets. Young trees should receive 15 gallons of water each week for its first three to five years. Blanca Begert
“The old rules don’t apply,” said Esther Margulies, a research lead on the Urban Tree Initiative at the University of Southern California. “Mature trees can usually access groundwater but when things are this dry, the game changes.” She added that during the last major drought in 2015, tree die off continued to happen years after drought conditions improved, when trees that had become water stressed finally succumbed to pests.
Already, foresters are seeing signs of stress across the state. “A healthy pine tree has enough sap to eject a beetle, but without water, it doesn’t have the sap,” said Palat, noting how the goldspotted oak borer is devastating drought-stricken oak forests across the Southwest. “We’re seeing more fungus and pathogens get into trees.”
Because trees also calculate how much to grow based on the amount of water they receive, the same species of tree can become dependent on different amounts of water. A sharp cutback – like when a park shuts off lawn sprinklers – can have a shocking effect. That’s why it’s important to give trees the right amount of water from the get-go and avoid overwatering, says Malarich.
Drought makes it harder for the urban canopy to grow, but once trees are established they can help ameliorate drought. Urban forests capture thousands of gallons of rainwater in their canopies and trickle it back into the ground. They shade soil, slow the evaporation of water, and improve soil quality, inviting fungi and bacteria that make the soil more porous so that it can store more water and carbon. A strategically placed tree means you don’t have to use as much air conditioning to cool a home.
For all of these reasons, even as Southern California instituted unprecedented water conservation restrictions to deal with the drought in June, water agencies spread the message that trees were exempt and should be hand watered.
Funding for urban forests is only increasing. The Inflation Reduction Act sets aside $1.5 billion to be spent over the next decade. With new bills in California for schoolyard greening and wildfire and climate resilience, CAL FIRE this year has an unprecedented $167 million for urban forestry projectst, over five times last year’s urban forestry budget. Phoenix and Tucson recently created city forester positions to coordinate across the various agencies that engage with trees. While urban foresters across the country stress the importance of maintenance, San Francisco is the only city that has established a dedicated fund for maintaining, including watering, all street trees in perpetuity.
As the climate changes, and 65 percent of urban trees experience drought conditions dangerous for their survival, cities are rethinking the types of trees they plant. “A lot of popular California natives, like coastal live oak, are not actually the most drought-tolerant species,” said Natalie Love, a doctoral student studying urban forests at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. The most drought-tolerant natives are small. They don’t cast a lot of shade. So her team is looking into other species that might be suitable for Southern California streets, like the Australian rusty gum. Then it’s a matter of encouraging the nursery trade to grow them.
Garcia also emphasized the importance of tree diversity for forest resilience, which is being prioritized in Huntington Park. There the team has planted about 25 different species, including Hong Kong orchid trees, Marina strawberry trees, and crape myrtle alongside natives like ‘Desert Museum’ palo verde.
A few blocks away, on Stafford Avenue, some of the first trees planted for the project are already casting shade. “I definitely have hope that we will grow the canopy here,” said Garcia. “Because we’re here, we’re watering. Just looking at this street I can see the fruit of this partnership.”
Reports of low water levels at a few big hydropower plants in the West over the last few years have made it seem like hydropower is becoming less reliable. Last summer, officials in California were forced to shut down the Edward Hyatt Powerplant when water levels in Lake Oroville, the reservoir that feeds the plant, dropped below the intake pipes that send water into its turbines. In March, water levels dropped to historic lows in Lake Powell, the reservoir that supplies the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona, bringing warnings of a potential plant shutdown in the near future.
These reports are alarming, because hydropower is a major source of carbon-free energy for the West — during a wet year, it can meet 30 percent of the region’s annual electricity demand in the West.
But a recent study by scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory challenges the idea that hydropower’s role as a backbone for the electric grid is fading. The authors looked back at the historical record to see how the western hydropower fleet has been affected by periods of drought over the 20th and 21st centuries. What they found shows that the reality is more complex, and that even during a serious drought, hydropower is more reliable than people might think.
“I think the misconception about hydro is driven by these marquee cases like Glen Canyon and the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River,” said Sean Turner, a hydrologist and water resources engineer and one of the authors of the study. “Those are really big and significant plants, but they’re a very, very small part of the overall Western hydropower fleet, which consists of hundreds of plants across the entire western region, contributing to an interconnected power grid. You need to study the whole system.”
Sean Turner
Andrea Starr / Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
The Edward Hyatt Power Plant intake facility at Lake Oroville (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images) and a photo of Sean Turner (Andrea Starr / Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
Intake gates at the Edward Hyatt Power Plant intake facility at Lake Oroville
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
I spoke with Turner about his findings, and about whether hydropower’s past performance is a good predictor of how reliable it will be in the future.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Q.What was the driving question behind your recent study on hydropower and drought?
A.The question was, what does drought actually mean for hydropower in the West? How does it affect different regions? We’re talking about 11 states, an enormous area, and diverse climates throughout the West. We’ve got the data to answer that question really rigorously.
Q.What did you find?
A.Even during the most severe droughts of the last 20 years, the Western hydropower fleet still maintained 80 percent of its average annual output — equal to the total output from all other renewables combined in the West. The reason you get this reliability is that despite the West’s notoriously volatile climate, there’s climate diversity. Drought in one region may be associated with wet conditions in another region, and so you’re unlikely to see the entire hydropower fleet affected by drought at the same time.
Q.Is the past a good predictor of the future in this case, because of climate change?
A.It depends. The reservoirs in the Southwest are totally unique. They store such huge volumes of water equal to multiple years of flow in the river. On balance, it looks like the impact of climate change in this area is going to be to slightly reduce the availability of water. And you have a system that’s already on a knife’s edge, where the amount of water allocated for cities, for agriculture, is already pretty much equal to the mean flow of the basin. So over a long period of time, if you don’t change how much water’s being taken out of the system, reservoirs are going to draw down. And you can kind of say that the past is no longer a reliable predictor of the future.
There are other systems, most other systems in the West, where your reservoirs fill up and draw down over much shorter periods of time. And that can be on the order of days in some of the major plants in the Columbia River Basin. In those cases, the past is a much more reliable predictor of the future. Even minor changes to the flow regime in the Columbia River are not going to greatly impact how much power can be generated from those plants.
Q.Even though the Southwest is a small part of the overall hydropower picture in the West, will states there need to compensate for that lost electricity in other ways, looking ahead?
A.At the moment, those dams are still producing power. If drought conditions continue and there are no extreme management actions to alleviate them, then those plants may have to shut down for a period of time until the reservoir levels recover. If that occurs, certainly other resources would need to be brought online. They’re part of an interconnected grid, so electricity can be imported from elsewhere. The impact is less likely to be power cuts and lights out, it’s more likely to be increased electricity costs and potentially increased carbon emissions, because there’s likely to be more reliance on gas and other resources.
Q.Is this something those states should be more proactively worried about in terms of achieving their clean energy goals?
A.It depends on how long the impact is. If drought conditions in the Southwest become a permanent feature, then those reservoir levels aren’t going to recover. And so you’ve got permanent loss of a significant source of carbon-free electricity. If that’s not replaced by some other carbon-free source, then there’s gonna be a long-term impact on the emissions of the electricity sector.
That’s a huge if. A lot of people are confidently making projections about the demise of Western water resources, particularly in the Southwest, due to the recent conditions, due to the threat of climate change. But hydrology is notoriously difficult to predict. It wouldn’t surprise me if in five years’ time, those reservoir levels were raised back up after a significant wet period. You just don’t know. And if that occurs, then you’ve got another lengthy period of time where you can continue to rely on those resources to produce carbon-free electricity.
Q.The study warns about a repeat of the drought that occurred in 1976 and 1977. What happened then?
A.This was a really severe historical drought. Most of the hydropower fleet was built by this period, and unlike more recent droughts, it affected most of the West. The two powerhouses of hydro generation in the West are the Northwest and California. California is really sensitive to two-year droughts. 1976 was a dry year in California. Then you had ’77 which was a really dry year throughout the West. We don’t have data for all plants that were operating during that time, but from the plants that we do have, that appears to be the year with the largest number of shutdowns.
Q.Is the idea that that’s sort of a worst-case scenario for the future?
A.It could be. The climate can produce things that you haven’t seen in 50 years. There’s potential for even worse cases. It may be 100 years before you see something like that again, or maybe it’ll be next year. But even in that case, the overall impact on hydro was still 25 percent or something below average total Western generation. So even in the most extreme drought, when we look back 100 years, there’s nothing that cripples hydro in a serious way. Hydro still supplies a lot of electricity during those periods.
Q.What are you looking at next?
A.Another study, which I think will be done relatively soon, will be on trying to understand more about the impacts of climate change on drought and whether or not that increases the risk of what we call Dead Pool events, so those cases where you get reservoir levels dropping below intakes. The historical record that we’ve got — 100 years — is a short period, and in hydrological terms, you don’t get a full view of variability of what the climate could possibly produce. What happens if you have some megadrought, multi-year, and it starts causing lots of plant shutdowns at the same time? How does that then affect the power grid?
Q.So does this recent study not actually tell us much about the future for hydro under climate change? What should people take away from it?
A.It’s not necessarily the case that the West is gonna be more and more dry. The hydropower powerhouse is the Northwest, and most general climate models predict wetter conditions in the Northwest. Even in the Southwest, there’s still a debate to be had about what’s likely to happen over the next 100 years as a result of climate change, because the system is extremely complex. Warming temperatures are likely to be associated with more precipitation. It’s really the balance between the impact on precipitation and the impact on evapotranspiration. So the climate change impacts remain very uncertain.
We are really focusing on a retrospective analysis of the impact of drought. It does reveal a lot about the present and future because the hydrological system will continue to produce droughts, many of those droughts will be similar in nature to the droughts that have been experienced in the past. And those general conclusions about the importance of climate diversity throughout the West, and the resiliency of the hydropower fleet — those are going to apply for future droughts as well. I can understand why people care so much about Glen Canyon and Hoover because those are such iconic systems. It’s not the whole story. That would be the main thing I want people to grasp.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Lake Mead is America’s largest reservoir, supplying water for 25 million people across the southwest. It’s also drying up — a kind of poster child for the ongoing drought in the West. But upstream, a much larger but lesser known source of stored water is also disappearing: mountain snow.
This is how climate change is throwing one of the United States’ most critical sources of water out of whack.
During the winter, storms in the Pacific Ocean carry a lot of moisture to the land. If conditions are cold and wet enough, that precipitation falls as snow in the dozens of mountain ranges throughout the West, and stays frozen until the spring. In a typical winter, snowpack across the U.S. West stores over five full Lake Meads’ worth of water. As the weather gets warmer, that snow starts to melt slowly and steadily, feeding rivers, lakes in reservoirs and even recharging aquifers underground.
This system — one that ends up delivering water when we need it, and stores it when we don’t — is so influential that water managers often look to the mountains to predict how much water they’ll have in the summer. When the mountains are bare, that’s bad news for the seasons ahead. Climate change is making that situation more likely, increasing the odds of a lesser-known type of drought called a snow drought.
In 2015, a major snow drought hit the entire West Coast, leading to historic wildfires and water restrictions. California experienced what’s known as a dry snow drought. This is when it’s just too dry to produce any snow, regardless of how cold it gets. These dry conditions were caused by a high-pressure mass of air that some scientists dubbed a “ridiculously resilient ridge.” That winter, the system hovered over the state all season long, blocking ocean storms from making landfall, causing one of the worst snow droughts on record.
To the north, Washington and Oregon also experienced a snow drought, but for an entirely different reason. The Northwest actually received a relatively wet winter, but temperatures were just too warm, so most of that water fell as rain instead of snow. This is called a wet snow drought. And while rainy winters don’t seem like they would lead to drought conditions, all that water ends up rushing right downstream instead of staying on the mountains as snow. By the summer, that means there’s hardly any water left.
Climate change is fueling both wet and dry snow droughts, increasing the odds of ridiculously resilient ridges, and making wet winter storms even warmer — which means more rain and less snow.
Snow droughts happen all around the world and can be especially dangerous in regions that lack water infrastructure, like reservoirs. But snow drought conditions are particularly bad in the Western United States.
It’s hard to say what the future will hold for snow in the West, because mountain snow is really hard to predict. One study tried to tackle this by looking at predictions from 18 different climate models, and found some common themes.
Source: Siirila-Woodburn et al. 2021
In the near future, the West could lose about a quarter of its historical snowpack. As for the end of the century, that’s where climate models start to diverge, largely depending on how fast we end up taking action on the climate crisis.
The worst projections come under scenarios where emissions keep rising unchecked. But the good news is that many countries are already starting to cut their emissions. And if they can keep that up, regions like the West will have a better chance of avoiding that worst-case drought scenario.
The difference between those extremes represents roughly 15 trillion gallons of water, or the equivalent of 1.5 full Lake Meads.
This story is part of the Grist seriesParched, an in-depth look at how climate change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems.
In the spring of 1905, the Colorado River, bursting with seasonal rain, topped an irrigation canal and flooded the site of a dried lake bed in Southern California. The flooding, which continued for two years before engineers sealed up the busted channel, created an unexpected gem in the middle of the arid California landscape: the Salton Sea. In the decades that followed, vacationers, water skiers, and speed boat enthusiasts flocked to the body of water. The Beach Boys and the Marx Brothers docked their boats at the North Shore Beach and Yacht Club, which opened in 1959. At the time, it seemed like the Salton Sea, and the vibrant communities that had sprung up around it, would be there for centuries to come.
But the sea’s heyday was short-lived. Cut off from the life source that created it — the Colorado River — and sustained mainly by limited agricultural runoff from nearby farms, the landlocked waterbody began to evaporate. The water that remained became increasingly salty and toxic. Tourism dried up. The scent of rotten eggs, from high levels of hydrogen sulfide in the sea, filled the air. Fish died in droves from lack of oxygen, their bones washing up on the beach like sand.
Oxygen-starved tilapia float in a shallow Salton Sea bay near Niland, California
AP Photo / Gregory Bull
By the 1980s, the rich, white vacationers had fled. Today, the community is made up of predominantly Latino agricultural workers who labor in nearby fields in Imperial County, among the poorest counties in California, and Indigenous tribes that have called the region home for millennia. They suffer from a unique cocktail of health threats that stem from the Salton Sea.
The waterbody is fed by about 50 agricultural channels, carrying limited amounts of water infused with pesticides, nitrogen, fertilizers, and other agricultural byproducts. As a result, the briny lake’s sediment is laced with toxins like lead, chromium, and DDT. Climate change and the prolonged megadrought gripping the western United States are only compounding these problems. The Salton Sea is projected to lose three quarters of its volume by the end of this decade; declining water levels could expose an additional 100,000 acres of lake bottom. The sea’s surface has already shrunk roughly 38 square miles since 2003.
As the sea dries and more shoreline is exposed, the strong winds that plague this part of California kick up chemical-laced dust and blow it into nearby communities, where roughly 650,000 people live. Residents complain of headaches, nosebleeds, asthma, and other health problems.
“It’s a huge environmental justice issue,” Jenny Binstock, a senior campaign representative at the Sierra Club, told Grist. “It leads to increased asthma attacks, bronchitis, lung disease.” Hospitalization rates for children with asthma in facilities near the sea are nearly double the state average.
Beyond dust, Ryan Sinclair, an environmental microbiologist at the Loma Linda University School of Public Health in California, is concerned about bioaerosols — tiny airborne particles that come from plants and animals — that can develop from algae or bacteria in the sea’s shallow, tepid waters.
An overhead view of marinas that have become landlocked as the Salton Sea evaporates
David McNew / Getty Images
“Algae produce algal toxins and bacteria can produce endotoxins,” he said, “and both of those can aerosolize and blow into nearby communities.” When researchers exposed mice to aerosolized Salton Sea water, the mice developed a “unique type of asthma,” Sinclair noted. He’s currently working with communities around the Salton Sea to measure and document levels of nutrients and algae in the water, something that is not currently being done by state or federal agencies. “Something needs to be done about this,” he said.
But solutions are limited. The dust that gets kicked up can be suppressed, to some extent, with habitat restoration projects. The first-ever large-scale restoration project for the Salton Sea, a network of ponds on 30,000 acres of lake bed, is proposed to start this year. But the project is no substitute for the obvious: The sea is rapidly shrinking and it needs a fresh infusion of water to survive. “A perfect solution for the Salton Sea — in a world where we have an abundance of water and more reliable hydrological cycles — is we would just fill that thing back up,” Binstock, from the Sierra Club, said.
But there’s no water to be had. One proposal is to ship saltwater in from Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, 125 miles south, but Binstock isn’t so sure the positives of that plan outweigh the negatives. “The tremendous investments in hard infrastructure, the disturbance of playa, and the public health and environmental impacts, the costs are just … it’s pretty bananas to think about,” she said.
Last week, an independent review panel appointed by the state to assess viable, long-term dust suppression options for the Salton Sea advised against importing water from the Sea of Cortez or any other nearby body of saltwater. Instead, the panel recommended the state build a desalination plant next to the sea to gradually filter out some of the lake’s salinity. It also suggested paying Imperial County farmers not to plant their fields, which would allow more water to reach the sea from the Colorado River instead of getting siphoned off by farmers. Both strategies would slowly replenish the sea with fresh water, revive its aquatic ecosystems, and allow the sea to “return to being a jewel in the Californian desert, and a place others will want to visit and live next to again,” the panel’s summary report said.
Marta Sanchez stands in her home in Mecca, California, in 2015. Sanchez says her bronchitis worsened after the family moved to Mecca in 2010. AP Photo/Gregory Bull
Mariela Loera, a policy advocate at the California-based Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, doesn’t see an adequate, long-term solution to the problem. She has been doing work with communities surrounding the Salton Sea for years. Dust suppression efforts and habitat restoration projects are a useful bandaid, she said, “but ideally, there’s a long-term, clean water solution.”
Meanwhile, the Salton Sea’s copious brine presents an unexpected opportunity: a bonanza of lithium, the highly sought-after metal.
Lithium is the key ingredient in electric vehicles batteries and clean energy storage, but it is also in short supply. Lithium prices shot up some 400 percent this year as the global appetite for EVs rose and companies became increasingly desperate to find new sources of the metal. The state of California estimates that the Salton Sea has enough lithium to supply America’s entire appetite, now and in the future, and 40 percent of the globe’s demand on top of that.
Loera and other local groups recognize the importance of the sea’s lithium stores, but they say communities affected by the region’s toxic dust and algae blooms need justice before extraction can begin. “A lot of residents have questions about potential impacts,” Loera said. Lithium mining requires copious amounts of water. Would that water come from the sea’s own limited supply? And what impacts would mining have on the state’s ongoing habitat restoration and dust suppression efforts? Those questions and others raised by the community haven’t been adequately answered yet. “There’s a lack of community engagement in the decision making process to date,” she said. “We need to have that conversation: How are we going to continue this green transition, but in an environmentally just way?”
As a young boy in the 1970s, Vishwanath Thange knew hunger. He usually lived on one meal a day, not enough when you’re working construction. But Thange had to take the work — or starve. He was born in Hiware Bazar, a village tucked deep inside the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Back then, the hamlet was a crime-ridden backwater, desperately poor and largely abandoned by government agencies. Thange’s family owned seven acres, but chronic drought prevented them from growing food to eat or sell. So Thange left, when he was 15, to look for work in nearby cities. About 20 years ago, he returned to Hiware Bazar, and today he is one of the 89 farmers there who have assets worth more than a million Indian rupees — a fortune in a country where 90 percent of the population makes less than 300,000 rupees a year. In the past 25 years, every farmer in Hiware Bazar has prospered, says Thange. “Today,” he says, “not a single person goes to bed hungry.”
Thange recently earned around 2 million rupees from his farm, the equivalent of a bit more than $25,000. The average agricultural household in India, meanwhile, earns the equivalent of $800 as farm income annually. Thange’s income has paid for a good education for his two sons — a significant feat in rural India, where virtually no one can afford education. It also meant a sturdy, comfortable home for his family, and an increase in his land holdings, from seven acres to 25 acres. The average size of a farm in India is just 2.6 acres.
Although Thange’s story is not an exception in Hiware Bazar, it is exceptional for India. Sixty-five percent of the country’s population resides in villages, where farming is the principal occupation. Farming, however, has been unprofitable in recent decades due to drought, a lack of direct integration with markets, high input costs, and low market prices.
Chirodeep Chaudhuri
Vishwanath Thange holds a flower while standing in an irrigated field in Hiware Bazar. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
Chirodeep Chaudhuri
A motorcycle and car drive by the sign for Hiware Bazar, left. Right, painted rocks sit in a village field. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
Chirodeep Chaudhuri
The failure of the agriculture sector is blamed for the epidemic of farmer suicides in the country, which claimed the lives of more than 300,000 people between 1995 and 2014. According to the latest government figures, more than one agricultural worker dies by suicide every hour in the country. Maharashtra, the state where Hiware Bazar is located, reports the highest number of such suicides in the country. Last year, Maharashtra recorded more than 4000farmer suicides, or over 11 each day.
Climate change has exacerbated India’s agrarian crisis. Last year, the country lost more than 12 million acres of cropland to extreme weather. As droughts worsen, the resurrection of Hiware Bazar holds lessons for villages across the country.
Popularly known as the “village of millionaires,” Hiware Bazar’s model is now being replicated in thousands of villages across India. Through effective watershed management, the rebuilding of natural resources, and a shift to more sustainable, less water-intensive crops — all of which hinged on the participation of residents — the village turned itself into a national “model of development.” The agricultural success has driven progress across the rest of the community, including in healthcare and education.
But Hiware Bazar’s salvation took years of hard work. No one knows this better than Popatrao Pawar, the sarpanch, or head of the village, who spearheaded the village’s transformation. “When we started, it seemed impossible,” he says. “For us, it’s paradise regained.”
Popatrao Pawar stands near a gate being constructed in Hiware Bazar. “The gate will survive even beyond us … as a commemoration of the work that we have all managed to do here,” he said. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
Hiware Bazar lies in the drought-prone Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra, and according to the most recent government data, receives less than half of the national average of rainfall each year. Agriculture there was largely rain-fed, but villagers had traditionally produced enough to feed themselves. Every home had cattle or goats, and dairy production was the primary source of income. But in the decade starting in 1972, the village faced three severe droughts, rendering the land barren, or banjar in local parlance. Wells went dry, fodder to feed livestock disappeared, and villagers turned to the forests on surrounding hills, stripping away the trees for firewood to produce liquor, both for sale and to ease the pain as their livelihoods collapsed.
By the 1980s, Hiware Bazar had lost most of its natural assets. Only a fraction of the land could be cultivated, the soil was exhausted, and there was no electricity. At first, people left the village, thinking it would be temporary. Eventually, they just stayed away. Those who remained worked on farms or at construction sites in nearby villages for low wages.
The sun beats down on a dry patch of land in Hiware Bazar. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
“When contractors came looking for workers in Hiware Bazar, villagers would fight for the jobs, beat each other up,” says Arjun Pawar, who was the head of the village between 1972 and 1977.
According to Arjun, alcohol production and sale became the primary source of income. Locals mixed black jaggery, a coarse sugar made from sugarcane juice, with ammonium chloride powder and rotten fruit, like orange and sweet lime, to produce a potent brand of desi daru, Hindi for “country liquor.” An increase in crime followed. Villagers would also assault government officers, such as the forestry officials who prohibited cattle grazing on what remained of the forested hills surrounding Hiware Bazar.
“People would tie up the forest officials to trees, and soon our village became a ‘punishment posting,’ where government policemen, teachers, and health officials were posted only if they had to be punished,” says Arjun.
Men got drunk in the local school’s empty classrooms, recollects Deepak Thange, who was a student in the 1980s. At the time, every child in his village, including him, dreamed of growing up and building a future far from the village.
“There was no hope for Hiware Bazar,” he says. “There was no hope for any of us.”
When Habib Sayyed, a 48-year-old farmer, was a child, he would spend most Saturdays during the monsoons gathering cow dung. He and other children in the village would use the dung to patch the school’s mud floor. Before lessons resumed on Monday, the dung would dry, holding the floor together until the following weekend, when it would have again turned to muck from rain seeping in from the ceiling.
The school was a small, dilapidated structure with a tin ceiling and two rooms that ran only through fourth grade. Today, a new school, Yashwant Vidyalaya, sits at the village entrance, a prominent symbol of Hiware Bazar’s progress. It was revamped in the early ‘90s after Popatrao Pawar, the village head, convinced 18 families to donate parts of their land for its construction. The new school was the first glimmer of hope in the village, says Subhash Thange, who as a young man donated his labor to help rebuild the village. “It promised a better future for the children and built faith in the new administration.”
Habib Sayyed sits on the steps of Yashwant Vidyalaya, a new school he says symbolizes the progress Hiware Bazar has made in recent years. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
And the school has delivered. The literacy rate in Hiware Bazar is 95 percent, compared to 30 percent in 1990. “Our school runs classes up to the 10th grade, and also hosts students from neighboring villages,” Sayyed says. “During the pandemic, even as schools were shut across the country, ours continued after putting a COVID-19 prevention system in place.”
Pawar was initially skeptical about running for village sarpanch. As a boy, he had moved away after fourth grade to complete his schooling; in 1987, he earned a postgraduate degree in commerce. He was not only the most educated person in Hiware Bazar, but he also had a promising career as a professional cricket player if he chose to pursue it. His achievements had earned him the respect and admiration of other villagers.
“He had played cricket with some of the top players in the country at the time, and yet he was humble, always kind and soft-spoken,” says Sakharam Padir, a teacher and one of the first to volunteer with Hiware Bazar’s new village council. Pawar’s success story, he says, gave people hope.
In 1989, some residents asked Pawar to run for office. His family, however, advised him to abandon the village and use his education to secure a white-collar job. As he considered what to do, Pawar’s mother left the village in protest, living at her father’s place for eight days. “She was adamant that I should worry about my own future, as the village did not have one,” says Pawar.
But residents kept pleading with him to help, and Pawar says their persistence, as well as a genuine concern for the place where he grew up, eventually persuaded him to stay. In late 1989, he was unanimously elected to a five-year term as sarpanch.
One of the first things Pawar did was invite villagers to share their concerns. The conversations left him wondering how he would raise the money necessary to begin solving the many problems. The village had all but collapsed; it lacked basic amenities like water, roads, sturdy homes, medical facilities, and toilets.
“It took us four days to prepare this list and it left me overwhelmed,” says Pawar. “All I knew then was that if we were going to emerge from this situation, the entire village would have to work together.”
Together with the new village council, Pawar embraced the idea of shramdaan, or “labor donation,” as a way to get villagers invested in building a better future. He went door to door, trying to convince people to contribute. If most of the villagers were inspired by Pawar and eager to work with him, there were some who resisted. After the village council built fences around its tamarind orchards, for instance, some residents unleashed their goats inside the fences to chew up the leaves and tender branches.
A motorcyclist drives by a community mural in Hiware Bazar. The broad asphalt roads of the village are a rarity in rural Indian villages. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
The council prepared a five-year development plan with education as the priority. Using donated land and labor, the village rebuilt the school. The council then started asking state agencies — like forestry, agriculture and animal husbandry — for help, using the school as evidence that Hiware Bazar was serious about changing its fortunes. The officials, still wary of the clashes they’d had with villagers over the years, were not easily convinced.
“I pleaded with them,” says Pawar.
His persistence eventually paid off. In 1992, the forest department added Hiware Bazar to the Joint Forest Management program. Begun in India in 1988, the national program helped forest communities develop and manage degraded forestland in ways that helped them meet their subsistence needs. Residents replanted 170 acres in the hills around the village, sowing tamarind, mango, arjun, and Indian gooseberry trees, all of which have economic and environmental as well as social and cultural value. The bark and fruit of the arjun tree, for instance, are widely used in ayurveda, the alternative medicine practice with deep roots in India. They started rituals, like gifting plants to newlyweds and organizing tree-planting campaigns for kids. They built water holes for the wildlife and replaced firewood with biogas generated from cattle dung.
Next, the villagers restored the depleted watershed. In 1994, Hiware Bazar joined the state government’s Ideal Village program. The idea was to build resiliency and sustainability by providing safe drinking water, creating jobs, and strengthening education and health care.
Watershed development was central to the program. Years of cattle grazing and clear-cutting in the hills had eroded the soil and depleted the groundwater. Now, with reforestation and a ban on cattle grazing, the soil began to improve. The tree cover slowed the rainwater runoff, holding the soil in place and allowing the water to percolate into the soil.
Villagers built small dams along the natural drainage lines on the hills to trap rainwater, increasing the groundwater and holding the excess as surface water. The same technique was used to trap rainwater within the farmers’ fields. “With the watershed infrastructure, the water table rose almost immediately and the area under irrigation increased,” says Pawar.
Farmers in Hiware Bazar had traditionally grown sorghum and pearl millet, and would often plant water-intensive crops like sugarcane and banana. They extracted groundwater for irrigation through deep wells, depleting the aquifers. Now, the village council started planning crops according to water availability, while also promoting dryland crops, like pulses, and less water-intensive crops, like vegetables. They abandoned wasteful flood irrigation in favor of micro-irrigation, which efficiently delivers water to crops through drip pipes and sprinklers.
Drip pipes carry water across a large field in Bhalwani village, near Hiware Bazar Chirodeep Chaudhuri
Before long, farming was working again in Hiware Bazar. By the mid-aughts, the number of trees had increased from 30,000 to 900,000. The amount of irrigated land went from 154 acres in 1994 to 642 acres in 2006. The village council helped farmers get bank loans for tractors, and secured some genetically modified seeds to boost yield, use less water, and resist pests. Farming evolved from subsistence to commercial, with villagers growing and selling wheat, oilseeds, pulses, vegetables, fruits, flowers, and fodder. Incomes rose sharply, and in 1998 the government declared Hiware Bazar to be an “ideal village.”
In the quarter century since this work began, Hiware Bazar has built on its water harvesting and watershed management initiatives. It has introduced “water budgeting,” which considers the total available water in the village from rainfall and conservation efforts, and then makes allocations for drinking, domestic use, and irrigation, while banking 30 percent each year for future use. Crops are planned according to the water budget, and villagers have continued to donate their labor to maintain the infrastructure.
A direct benefit of the village’s agricultural revolution is dairy farming, which is once again integral to Hiware Bazar’s economy. The increased income enabled many farmers to buy more cattle. In 2003, villagers constructed a veterinary clinic to ensure animal health and provide services like artificial insemination. The efforts, in turn, have increased the village’s milk production from 39 gallons a day in 1990 to more than 1,300 gallons today.
A man drives cattle down a road in Hiware Bazar Chirodeep Chaudhuri
With farming revitalized, the wealth spread throughout the community. Every home is made of concrete, as opposed to just two in 1990. The village has 87 tractors, compared to none in 1990; 368 motorcycles, compared to 10 in 1990; and 28 cars, compared to none in 1990. To ensure that the village’s development benefited its poorest citizens, most of whom did not own farmland, the village council leveraged government programs to allot land to these families, and served as guarantors for their agricultural loans.
“I think what worked was that whatever plans and schemes were implemented in Hiware Bazar, villagers did not think of them as government schemes or village council schemes,” says Sakharam Padir. “They thought them to be programs for their own development, for their own family’s welfare.”
Over the past two decades, Hiware Bazar has helped thousands of villages in India replicate its development model. According to a 2019 report bythe national government’s policy think tank, India is suffering from the worst water crisis in its history, with 600 million people facing significant water stress and some 200,000 dying every year due to inadequate access to safe water. Agriculture accounts for 90 percent of water usage in India, and most of the irrigated land depends on groundwater sources, which are rapidly being depleted. Hiware Bazar’s development model, with watershed management and water conservation at its core, holds substantial relevance for Indian agriculture.
Within three years of the implementation of Hiware Bazar’s model in Bhalwani, another drought-prone village in Maharashtra, the average income of the village’s farmers rose from 100,000 rupees in 2018 to 500,000 in 2021. In 2018, the village lost two farmers to suicide, but none in the years since.
A farmer in Bhalwani, an adjoining village to Hiware Bazar, covers harvested onions in long lengths of cloth to protect them from the elements. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
Ajay Dandekar, a professor with the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University, calls Popatrao Pawar’s contribution to Indian agriculture “immense.” But he says India’s agrarian crisis is complex, and solving it will require fundamental changes in how agricultural commodities are priced as well as in cropping patterns, which are not in line with the rainfall patterns in the country.
“Many things can be learnt from Hiware Bazar,” says Dandekar, who in a 2017 study investigated the reasons behind farmer suicides in two of India’s hardest-hit districts. “But more importantly, along with it, the government must create macroeconomic structures within the agrarian economy that will regulate the prices and benefit farmers.”
In 2020, Pawar was awarded the Padma Shri, one of the highest civilian honors in India, for his work in Hiware Bazar. Today, he is the executive director of the Maharashtra government’s Model Village Program, working to transform a thousand of the state’s most depressed villages into self-sufficient communities. Meanwhile, activists, bureaucrats, and policymakers from across the country — as well as from countries like Germany, South Africa, Bangladesh, and others — have visited Hiware Bazar to study its success.
“In Hiware Bazar, we’ve seen every type of scarcity,” says Pawar. “We know the pain that walks in with scarcity, but we have also tasted the fruits of unity and cooperation. And now, we’re sharing our lessons with the world.”
In the desert of central Oregon, east of the Cascade mountains, farmers have been working the arid soil for more than a hundred years. They were lured to the area by turn-of-the-century infrastructure projects — a network of open-air canals carved into the landscape that would carry water from the Deschutes River to their fields for irrigation.
But as the Western megadrought sucks more and more water out of these channels, farmers and water managers across this part of Oregon are struggling. Though still effective at delivering water, these century-old systems are highly inefficient. Central Oregon’s soil is sandy and porous. For every gallon of water diverted, upwards of 50 percent can seep into the ground or else evaporate into a sky made increasingly thirsty by rising global temperatures.
“You more or less have to double the amount of water you take out of the river, because you lose half of it going down this ditch,” said Steve Johnson, manager of the Arnold Irrigation District, southeast of Bend, Oregon.
Now, central Oregon’s irrigation districts are racing to implement a relatively simple, but expensive solution to save water — one that also has the potential to create a new source of clean electricity. All they have to do is turn their ditches into pipes.
“Wherever you have irrigation operations, there’s this opportunity,” said Johnson. “Each district is going to be a little bit different, each state’s going to be a little bit different, but generally, the principal’s the same. You have 100-year-old infrastructure that needs to be modernized.”
For Johnson and his neighboring districts, irrigation modernization has primarily meant one thing: converting open-air irrigation ditches into pipelines. After about five years of conducting technical studies, environmental assessments, and developing engineering plans, the Arnold Irrigation District is going to start replacing 12 miles of its primary canal with a pipeline later this year. The project is expected to save 11,083 acre-feet of water per year, or enough to fill more than 5,500 olympic-sized swimming pools.
Arnold Irrigation District manager Steve Johnson Energy Trust
In the neighboring Three Sisters Irrigation District, which spent the last two decades converting more than 90 percent of its canals to pipelines, the benefits are clear.
Three Sisters now reports saving 110 acre-feet of water per day during irrigation season, which is enough to fill 55 olympic-sized swimming pools every day. “We haven’t had to do what other places have done, which is either turn the water off entirely, or turn the water off every other week,” said Sarahlee Lawrence, an organic farmer in the district.
Because of those savings, water managers are able to keep more water in the Whychus Creek, which supplies the district. “Not too many years ago, it would run dry during the irrigation season, and this is important habitat for salmon and trout,” said Dave Moldal, senior program manager at the Energy Trust, an Oregon-based nonprofit that is helping to fund similar projects around the state. “Now because of irrigation modernization, it flows year round.”
In Three Sisters, the pipelines also helped the district and farmers cut energy costs, which is a key reason Moldal and the Energy Trust got involved. The nonprofit is funded with ratepayer fees collected by private utility companies, and exists to support energy efficiency and renewable energy projects in Oregon. Because the Whychus Creek flows at a higher elevation than the farms in the Three Sisters district, as the water flows downhill, it becomes pressurized. That means that farmers who used to have to pump water out of their ditches can just tap into the pipeline, eliminating a major energy expense. Lawrence said she is saving thousands of dollars on electricity.
The Energy Trust is also helping irrigation districts pursue a second opportunity — installing small hydroelectric turbines inside of these pressurized water pipelines that generate power. The nonprofit has supported three hydropower projects in Three Sisters, which are expected to produce about 4 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, or enough to power about 370 homes.
Part of the pipeline system in the Three Sisters Irrigation District
Energy Trust
Moldal said that the ability to develop in-conduit hydropower depends on two factors. The first is geography. If there’s not enough of a drop in elevation between where the water is diverted and where it’s used, there won’t be enough pressure in the pipes to generate electricity. The second is economics. In Oregon, the electricity generated by these small turbines doesn’t command a high enough price on the energy market to cover the costs. Energy Trust is paying these small hydro producers the difference, because part of its mandate is to support the development of renewable energy.
“The physics of it only gets you halfway,” said Moldal. “You also have to have an energy market that works.”
There are thousands of miles of irrigation canals across the west that are ripe for modernization. While pipelines may be an option in many areas, they aren’t the only solution. In central California, the Turlock Irrigation District recently announced a pilot project to cover part of its canal system with solar panels, which will reduce evaporation and generate clean energy. Some districts have looked to lining their canals with impervious materials, like concrete, to prevent seepage. But in a 2019 survey of irrigation districts, respondents reported that about 72 percent of their canals remain unlined. Cost was the most frequently cited reason.
An irrigation ditch carries a light flow of water along agricultural fields amid drought conditions on near Fillmore, California.
Mario Tama/Getty Images
With help from the Energy Trust and other funders, the Arnold Irrigation District has already spent close to $150,000 on preliminary plans and reports required before it could start construction on its new system. The 12 miles of pipeline are expected to cost another $35 million — $26 million of which will be covered by federal funding through the Department of Agriculture’s Watershed Protection and Flood Prevention Program.
But Johnson said that today, with new infusions of government money from last year’s Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act, and the recent Inflation Reduction Act, there’s an opportunity to accelerate this work around the country.
For Johnson, a lot is riding on the new pipeline. His district has had to turn off water to farmers in late July or early August for the past three years instead of letting it flow through to October. The scarcity of water has driven up the price of hay, causing livestock farmers to sell off some of their herds. “If you don’t modernize, if you don’t start improving the system, then that’s gradually what’s going to happen for most of the people that live in your irrigation district,” said Johnson. “It’s all gonna just start dwindling away.”
According to the United Nations, the worst famine of the twenty-first century is unfolding in the Horn of Africa. For months, a climate-change-fueled drought of historic proportions and supply chain disruptions caused by the war in Ukraine have combined to cause severe food shortages in Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya.
Famine experts expect the situation to deteriorate through the fall and winter. A recent report from the Food Security and Nutrition Working Group of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, a trade block representing East African countries, found that more than 25 million people across the region could be experiencing dire food insecurity by early 2023.
“The drought this year was both the most extensive on record and the most intense on record,” Chris Funk, the director of the Climate Hazards Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Grist. He said a combination of climate change and La Niña weather patterns have produced five consecutive dry seasons, which has all but destroyed the domestic food supply in Somalia and its neighboring countries.
According to the latest estimates from UNICEF, more than 7 million people in Somalia alone are already experiencing severe food shortages — around half the country’s population. That includes more than 1.5 million children under the age of five. In addition, 4.5 million Somalis are currently facing severe water shortages. More than 700 children have died in malnutrition treatment centers across the country, though experts caution that the figure is likely an undercount.
“I couldn’t get out of my head the tiny mounds of ground marking children’s graves,” UNICEF official Rania Dagash told reporters after a visit to the worst-affected areas. “I’m from this region and I’ve never seen it so bad.”
Food security experts say it’s only going to get worse from here. The Famine Early Warning System, a famine tracking program funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, projected last week that the region’s food emergency will reach the technical definition of a famine by the end of the year, which would likely mean even more widespread death and starvation “in the absence of a significant scale-up of humanitarian food assistance.” Rainfall projections for the next month show that there will be minimal precipitation in Somalia or the other worst-affected parts of the region.
Climate change has devastated Somalia’s farming sector for the past several years. A persistent drought has caused four consecutive years of missed rainy seasons, the longest dry spell in four decades; the next rainy season is expected to be just as bad. The drought has thinned out camel herds in the north part of the country, killing off a livestock animal that provides herders with meat and milk, and devastated agriculture in the south. Meanwhile, warmer temperatures have allowed locusts to spread out across the region and chew through crops; one swarm in Kenya two years ago measured 37 miles long by 20 miles wide.
Research suggests that climate change will continue to hit the Horn of Africa on multiple fronts, increasing the risk not only of prolonged drought but also of extreme heat and devastating flash floods.
“Four failed rainy seasons was already unprecedented,” said Funk. “It’s all thanks to this three-year La Niña event combined with climate change.” As climate change makes La Niña temperature events in the Pacific more intense, he added, it increases the risk of dry spring seasons around the Horn of Africa; at the same time, warmer air temperatures in the region also lead to more intense dry spells.
The war in Ukraine has further exacerbated regional food insecurity by threatening to disrupt critical grain shipments. Prior to the war, Somalia imported around 90 percent of its grain from Ukraine and Russia. Grain shipments have still been reaching Somalia, but the high prices the war has generated for staple foods have made it impossible for most households and aid groups to make necessary purchases. An ongoing civil war between the Somali government and the militant group known as al-Shabaab has also contributed to instability, displacing thousands of people from their homes and disrupting the movements of the pastoral populations in the country’s north.
The Horn of Africa experienced another drastic famine in 2011 and 2012, when two missed rainy seasons caused widespread crop failures across the southern part of the region. The Famine Early Warning System predicted that food emergency almost a year before the United Nations made an official famine declaration in Somalia, but humanitarian aid deliveries were not sufficient to prevent widespread suffering. The halting relief efforts made by rich countries were further restricted by those countries’ efforts to make sure that food supplies did not reach al-Shabaab militants.
As many as 250,000 people died across the region during the 2011-2012 famine, which lasted about 10 months. More than half of them were children.
This story is part of the Grist seriesParched, an in-depth look at how climate change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems.
Peter Hanlon, a 68-year-old farmer from Boston, has been growing cranberries in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, for decades. Cranberries are in Hanlon’s blood — his grandfather farmed them on the cape before him. But six weeks ago, Hanlon sold his farm in the town of Sandwich. None of his kids wanted to carry on the tradition, and Hanlon doesn’t blame them: Profit margins are incredibly tight, and increasingly erratic weather patterns in recent years have made cranberries more difficult to grow.
“The last two storms, in ‘15 and ‘17, scared me,” Hanlon said. He recalls seeing an 11-foot surge of ocean water coming into his farm through the woods and inundating his vines, dooming many of them to die from salt exposure.
Cranberry farmers in Massachusetts have had to contend with wildly fluctuating environmental conditions over the past several years. The 2015 and 2017 storms Hanlon referred to killed some coastal Massachusetts cranberry bogs when they flooded them with sea water, extreme temperatures and drought parched vines in 2020, and a deluge of rainfall pickled the state’s cranberry crop last year, leading to a nationwide shortage. Massachusetts is the second-largest producer of cranberries in the nation behind Wisconsin, which also had a bad growing season last year.
This year, another massive drought, fueled by climate change, has farmers like Hanlon weighing their options and making tough decisions.
A cranberry field in Massachusetts. Sanghwan Kim / Getty Images
Massachusetts and much of the rest of the Northeastern United States has been in a state of moderate to extreme drought for the better part of the summer. Dry conditions descended on the region in late spring and didn’t let up for months. Massachusetts dealt with some of the worst drought in the Northeast: As of the end of last month, 10 of its 14 counties were experiencing extreme drought, and the remaining four were experiencing severe drought. “The boom or bust scenario that climate change presents when it comes to precipitation events — the boom being the large precipitation event, the bust being long dry spells — that’s not a good thing,” Zachary Zobel, a scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts, told Grist.
The Massachusetts drought has begun to ease in recent weeks, especially after this past week, when a round of soaking storms rolled into the Northeast. But it may take another round or two of wet weather to make up for the months of drought that desiccated farm fields, depleted reservoirs, and sparked wildfires in the Northeast. And this year’s drought is more evidence that farming conditions are getting less predictable.
“Farmers wake up every day and they have to face whatever the weather is going to present to them — that’s farming,” Brian Wick, executive director of the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers’ Association, told Grist. “But it’s quite clear in talking to many growers over the past several years that this change in climate is very real and it’s really starting to impact how they farm.”
Cranberries are a finicky crop. Too much water, like the state saw last year, can cause fungus to grow on cranberry vines and affect the color and quality of the fruit. But add too little water, and the vines shrivel up and die, or the berries don’t grow to full maturity.
Farmers also need access to ample fresh water in order to protect and harvest their cranberries. Cranberries grow on vines in dry fields much like grapes or any other crop during most of the growing season. But twice a year, farmers flood those dry fields with water and turn them into bogs: In the spring, when a late frost might threaten to kill their budding cranberry vines, the flooding protects the tender shoots and flowers from freezing over. In the fall, farmers turn on their irrigation systems again to harvest their berries. They use machines to shake the plants to release the berries into the bog, where they’re corralled into containers and shipped to destinations across the country.
Cranberry harvest. Abstract Aerial Art / Getty Images
So far, it looks like most cranberry farmers are going to pull through this year, thanks to the recent storms and to irrigation pumps, which farmers switched on throughout the season to pull water from local sources and make up for lost rainfall. But it was a more expensive growing season for that reason — pumps run on gasoline or propane, and fuel costs were astronomical this summer. And the drought isn’t over yet. Wick won’t breathe easy until the berries are off the vines and loaded into trucks. “We’ll see what we get for rainfall over the next few weeks,” he said. “We still have about a month before harvest to get some periodic rains.”
In general, climate change isn’t stopping the state’s cranberry farmers from growing their crop — yet. “Cranberries in Massachusetts will continue to thrive,” Wick said, “but it’s going to be more challenging and difficult, and they’re going to have to adapt. You’re not going to have that nice, consistent growing season, it just seems to be one extreme or another.”
Peter Hanlon, the cranberry farmer who sold his farm, said he’s glad he’s not trying to beat the weather odds this year or in the future. “My son tells me the weather is going to get worse,” he said. But the weather has already been so bad, Hanlon says, it’s hard to imagine an even more erratic season. “I reserve judgment on that,” he said.
Officials in California are closing in on an agreement to give up a significant portion of the water the state gets from the Colorado River, bowing to an emergency demand made by the federal government earlier this summer.
Executives from two large water districts in the Golden State, which service the Los Angeles metropolitan area and the agriculture-heavy Imperial Valley, told Grist that they’re making progress on negotiations to leave roughly 10 percent of the state’s Colorado River water allocation in reservoirs next year, or at least 100 trillion gallons. The officials indicated that they may reach a deal as soon as this month, and said they believe other states will follow suit with cuts of their own, helping the federal government achieve its goal of stabilizing the Colorado’s two drought-wracked reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
But the deal under discussion falls far short of what federal officials have demanded: Water managers who spoke to Grist indicated that states will likely be able to cut water usage by around half of the minimum conservation target set by federal officials in June. Furthermore, many of the deal’s details are still unclear, including the size of contributions from states besides California.
Nevertheless, the agreement would be transformative for the Golden State, which has never before faced any cuts to its share of the river.If it holds, the agreement could force new water restrictions across the Los Angeles metroplex and reduce the nation’s supply of winter vegetables like lettuce and asparagus. It’s the latest sign that the climate-fueled megadrought in the West is forcing major changes to how the region uses water.
“It’s huge,” said Bill Hasencamp, who manages Colorado River resources for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which services the Los Angeles area. “We’re now in a permanent shortage going forward, and we’re going to live with it.”
Even as the Colorado River crisis has reached a crescendo, forcing major cuts to water usage on the drought-ravaged waterway, California has remained untouched. The state uses by far the most water of any state that draws from the river — in part because it holds some of the most senior rights to river water, which has allowed it to draw a full share of water even as the federal government has slashed water deliveries to Arizona and Nevada for two years running.
The vast majority of the state’s 4.4-million-acre-foot water allotment is used for agriculture, and almost all that agricultural water flows to the Imperial Irrigation District, a gigantic farming organization in the southeastern part of the state that produces the lion’s share of winter vegetables grown in the United States. The remaining water flows to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, or the Met, which provides water to almost 20 million people in and around Los Angeles.
Thanks to the state’s strong water rights, Imperial and the Met have largely stayed out of the crosshairs of Western water shortages so far. The two districts have instituted water-savings programs on their own turf — the Met banked unused water in Lake Mead, and Imperial helped farmers install more efficient farming equipment in their fields — but they have never had to reduce the amount of water they draw from the river. A 2019 drought response agreement exempted the state from mandatory cuts under all but the worst circumstances.
This year, though, the proverbial dam broke. Inflow into the Colorado River’s two main reservoirs fell to historic lows, threatening the reservoirs’ ability to generate hydropower, and the federal government stepped in to engineer a solution. In a sudden announcement earlier this summer, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Camimlim Touton ordered the river states to reduce their total water demand by 2 to 4 million acre feet — as much as a quarter of all usage. If the states didn’t find a way to do this by mid-August, Touton said, the federal government would step in to institute new emergency cuts of its own.
The Bureau’s emergency demands were shocking but not surprising, according to Ellen Hanak, director of the Water Policy Center at the Public Policy Institute of California.
“The fact that there’s a structural water deficit in the basin is not new news,” she told Grist. “And it’s not like [water managers] have not been thinking about stuff they could do to reduce water usage — it’s just that people have been working on a timeline for this that turns out to have really not been fast enough.”
The states blew past the federal government’s deadline, and negotiations are now in overtime. The parties met in Denver in early August and again in Salt Lake City toward the end of the month. California has emerged from those meetings as the linchpin of a deal to meet Reclamation’s demands. Since the state is the largest water user, and since it’s never taken cuts before, other states are waiting to see what it does before they commit to their own reductions. Another meeting is scheduled later this month in Santa Fe.
While early conversations among the California districts centered around a target of 500,000 acre-feet in combined cuts from Imperial and the Met, executives from both districts told Grist that the potential range of cuts has fallen since then. Hasencamp, the Colorado River manager for the Met, said that the range could go as low as 350,000 acre-feet. (An acre-foot is equivalent to about 320,000 gallons of water.)
“The numbers continue to change, to be honest with you,” said Henry Martinez, the chief executive of the Imperial Irrigation District, who said that 500,000 acre-feet is “probably too high.”
Hasencamp said that it’s very unlikely the river states will meet Reclamation’s demand for 2 to 4 million acre-feet in total savings. The states are now angling for a lower target and hoping it satisfies federal officials.
“I just don’t think it’s practical anymore,” he said, adding that a million acre-feet of savings between the states was a more realistic total number.
The proposed voluntary cuts would be painful for Imperial, in part because they would take effect as soon as next year. The farming district has spent the past decade helping farmers make their growing operations more efficient by buying sprinklers, drip irrigation infrastructure, and water retention systems, and there’s plenty of room for further improvement — for instance, farmers could shift away from water-intensive alfalfa, much of which gets exported overseas. But these new policies would take years to ramp up, so the only short-term option is to farm less land.
That raises a big question about who will pay farmers who take their land out of service, and how much compensation the farmers should receive. The Inflation Reduction Act signed last month by President Biden gives Reclamation around $4 billion in drought response funding thanks to a last-minute intervention from Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Martinez wants to tap that money to compensate farmers for taking land out of service, but the details are thorny.
“It’s kind of a chicken and egg issue,” said Martinez. The district needs to figure out how much money it will get from Reclamation before it can figure out how many acre-feet of water it can cut and how much it can pay farmers to stop watering, but it can’t propose a funding amount to Reclamation without first figuring out how much to pay farmers to reduce their water usage. “We have not really arrived at a price,” Martinez added.
Previous voluntary conservation programs in Imperial have offered farmers close to $300 for every acre-foot of water they save, but this time growers in the district are asking for much more, Martinez told Grist. That’s in part because the overall drought in the West has jacked up prices for the crops that Imperial farmers tend to grow, which means it will cost more to induce them to stop farming.
“Markets have been very, very good for the farmers at this point,” he said, adding that farmers have to make “a comparison of getting paid X number of dollars not to plant when they can earn [high] market prices for the crops that they produce.”
Nevertheless, Martinez said, a basic outline is in place. The deal would establish a base price for water saved by any water district in the river states and add supplemental payments for hard-hit districts like Imperial, giving the district extra funding to account for the secondary impacts of the water reduction on the vulnerable farming communities in Imperial’s service area. These impacts include a loss of hydropower generation from the All-American Canal, which conveys water from the Colorado River to Imperial’s crop fields and produces electricity along the way.
Martinez told Grist he hoped to reach an agreement some time in the next month, before Imperial farmers start planting winter crops, lest the farmers sign contracts to deliver certain vegetables only to find they aren’t getting any water.
“We have communicated to the Bureau that we need something to put on the table to the farmers by the end of September at the latest,” Martinez told Grist.
Even if these voluntary talks fail, it’s only a matter of time before California sees mandatory water reductions. The drought response agreement from 2019 forces the state to take a haircut on its water allocation if the federal government declares a so-called “Tier 2b” shortage on the Colorado, which occurs when the water level in Lake Mead falls below a certain height. That seemed unlikely back in 2019, but now it looks almost certain. The federal government last month declared a Tier 2a shortage on the river, dealing further cuts to Arizona and Nevada. If reservoir levels had been even 5 feet lower, California would have taken cuts as well.
Even then, Imperial would be insulated from mandatory cuts. Because Imperial has the most senior water rights within California — having started using the river water before its neighbor districts — it wouldn’t have to fallow any land even if California took a mandatory cut. A district spokesperson told Grist that Imperial will account for only 3 percent of California’s mandatory reduction, even though it receives more than half of the state’s Colorado water.
The pain of these mandatory cuts would fall almost entirely on the Met, the water servicer for the greater Los Angeles area, which would absorb more than 90 percent of the reduction. The district has banked about a million acre-feet of surplus water in Lake Mead over the past few years, but it’s only a matter of time before those reserves run out and force the district to reduce water usage around Los Angeles. The voluntary cuts the district is negotiating with Imperial would make that happen a lot faster.
“We knew that the river was out of balance, we knew that climate change was impacting the river, and we knew that there was going to be a reckoning on the river,” said Hasencamp, “but most of us thought we would have time to adapt.” All told, the district stands to lose as much as 500,000 acre-feet between the voluntary and involuntary cuts. This would remove close to half of the district’s total Colorado River withdrawals.
The problem for the Met is that the district’s other main source of water is also in crisis. The district also imports billions of gallons every year from the so-called State Water Project, a canal system that funnels water from reservoirs in the Northern California mountains down to Los Angeles, but these reservoirs are also at historic lows thanks to the regional drought. The district is caught between a rock and a hard place: Participating in a Colorado deal will make it more reliant on an alternative water source that is also getting hammered by drought.
Hasencamp told Grist the district has a few tools it can use to save water in the near term, such as offering rebates to customers who convert grass lawns to turf. He also said that in the next few months the district’s board will likely reduce cap deliveries to member agencies, placing a ceiling on how much water cities and utilities can buy from the district. This would force each individual agency to figure out how to reduce its water consumption, such as by raising the price of water or banning outdoor lawn watering.
Still, the adjustment will be difficult, said Ed Osann, a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council who studies California water.*
“A major reduction like this would take maybe ten years to carry out if you’re trying to make for a soft landing,” Osann told Grist, “but a soft landing may not be attainable here.”
There’s no telling how long the present drought will last, and thus it’s not clear whether the cuts under discussion in California will be temporary or permanent measures. But research has shown that climate change can cause the long-term aridification of landscapes like the western United States, which could mean that low inflow to the Colorado River reservoirs will prove a persistent problem even if rainfall increases. This would ensure future shortages. If the past few years are any indication, these shortages will be painful for everyone on the river, including states like California, which have long managed to stay above the fray.
*Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
This story is published in collaboration with High Country News.
Amid historic drought in the Colorado River Basin, the Gila River Indian Community is taking a drastic step to protect their own water resources. In a statement last week, Governor Stephen Roe Lewis announced the tribe—located just south of Phoenix—would stop voluntarily contributing water to an important state reservoir. “We cannot continue to put the interests of all others above our own when no other parties seem committed to the common goal of a cooperative basin-wide agreement,” the statement reads.
Since 2021, Lake Mead, a crucial water supply for the region, has been boosted by voluntary water contributions from the Gila River Indian Community and the Colorado River Indian Tribes. The Colorado River is a crucial source of water in the West, supplying water to 40 million people across seven states and Mexico. For years, tribes and communities in those states have received river water based on a complex allocation system, but last week, the federal government announced historic water cuts that will force Arizona, the most impacted state, to reduce water withdrawals from the Lake Mead reservoir by 21 percent next year. Lake Mead’s levels are currently at a historic low of about 27 percent capacity.
By contributing their water to Lake Mead at affordable rates, the Gila River Indian Community was essentially subsidizing Arizona’s water supply while sacrificing an opportunity to sell that water at higher rates or put it to use on the reservation for agriculture or other industry. Now, facing cuts and other communities not willing to make sacrifices for the collective good, Gila River is putting its foot down. According to the statement, the lack of progress toward a sustainable water management plan left the tribe with no choice but to store the water independently rather than supporting the state water supply. “We are aware that this approach will have a very significant impact on the ability of the State of Arizona to make any meaningful commitment to water reductions in the basin state discussions,” Lewis said in the statement.
Meanwhile, the Colorado River Indian Tribes, which has also been contributing some of its water to help keep Lake Mead’s levels up, has opted to continue storing water in the reservoir. In a press release, chairwoman Amelia Flores reiterated her tribe’s commitment to an ongoing fallow and farming plan for their water allotments in response to the cuts. In other words, Colorado River Indian Tribes is sticking to a plan that forfeits the opportunity to maximize their agricultural and water revenues. “We recognize that the decades-long drought has reduced the water availability for all of us in the Basin,” Flores said. “We continue to conserve water and develop ways to use less water as we adjust to higher temperatures, more wind and less precipitation.”
These two decisions illustrate the difficult choices facing the thirty federally recognized tribes in the Colorado River Basin. Because tribes are sovereign governments, their water rights are determined with the federal government, rather than via the state, like cities and towns. Water rights allow tribes to maintain agricultural self-sufficiency, restore and steward the land, and support their communities. But to actually use their water, tribes face a unique set of challenges including inadequate infrastructure that limits some from accessing their water allocations. And for tribes still fighting to have their rights recognized, the ongoing shortage may make their battle even harder. As the region prepares for the cuts, tribes are working to ensure they have a voice during ongoing water management negotiations.
A sign shows where Lake Mead water levels were in 2002
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
A 1908 Supreme Court decision established that tribes have the right to draw from the rivers that pass through their reservations in order to enable their self-sufficiency. But in its ongoing colonization of the West, the federal government filled the needs of white settlers before those of Indigenous nations. Through the Bureau of Reclamation, founded in 1902, hundreds of dams and reservoirs were constructed to divert millions of gallons of water from the Colorado River and other waterways to serve the growing settler populations of the West. Between 1980 and 2000, the basin was thriving, with water levels at its reservoirs nearly at full capacity. But even after two decades of drought, the unprecedented 27 percent reservoir capacity took officials by surprise. The Lower Colorado River Basin, one of the Bureau’s 6 water regions, consists of the Mountain and Southwest states as well as much of Southern California and is where tensions between individual states and tribes around water conservation policies are coming to a head.
Twenty-two tribes in the basin have secured recognized water rights and allocations, which they reclaimed through a mix of legislation, settlement, and court decisions. These allocations total around 3.2 million acre-feet per year, which represents roughly a quarter of the river’s annual supply. Arizona’s total allocation is less than 3 million acre-feet per year. The Department of the Interior tasked Basin States and Tribes to come up with a voluntary water conservation plan to add 2 to 4 million more acre-feet of water to stabilize the Colorado River and its two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell.
But according to a July 22 letter to Tanya Trujillo, Assistant Secretary for Water and Science at the Department of the Interior, leaders from fourteen tribes in the Colorado River Basin argued that they were not being adequately consulted by either states or the Department of the Interior on a viable conservation plan.
The letter cites the federal government’s legal obligations to tribes, notably an executive order issued by President Clinton in 2000 that requires federal departments and agencies to consult with tribal governments when planning policies that impact their communities. “We should not have to remind you – but we will again – that as our trustee, you must protect our rights, our assets, and people in addition to any action you take on behalf of the system,” the letter said.
Nora McDowell is the former chairwoman of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe and member of the Water and Tribes Initiative. She says that tribes have been forced to follow state and federal decisions about water use, even though tribes have successfully managed the river since time immemorial. She believes it is time for tribes to have a greater voice in conservation plans. “We always have been marginalized or not even consulted,” McDowell said of the ongoing conservation planning. “But the difference here is that we have the rights to that water.”
But twelve tribes are still fighting to get all of their water rights recognized. And as competition for water grows even fiercer, these tribes are left in an even more precarious position.
“The problems have existed for a long time on the river and the current situation is just exacerbating them and making it that much more fraught to try to negotiate water settlements,” Jay Weiner, water counsel for the Tonto Apache Tribe, which currently is in settlement negotiations, said. “There are political incentives for non-Indian water users essentially to try to put obstacles in the way of tribal development because otherwise that water is coming out of someone’s bucket.”
At least six cities in Arizona have declared water shortages because of the drought. And with water at dangerously low levels in both Lake Mead and Lake Powell, tribal water—whether in the form of voluntary contributions like the Colorado River Indian Tribes continues to make, or in the form of undeveloped tribal water rights—will play an important role in the region’s water supply. Because all water users have to cut back in response to the drought, tribes attempting to reclaim their water rights face negotiators reluctant to part with any water at all. Weiner, who also serves as water counsel for the Quechan Indian Tribe, says that the ongoing shortage has only further complicated ongoing settlements, “because as a practical matter right now, water rights users in the basin rely on those unquantified or undeveloped tribal water rights.”
A woman siphons water into a bucket on the Navajo Nation.
RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images
Meanwhile, even tribes with recognized water rights face an uphill battle to fully take advantage of their water allocations. Some tribes simply lack the necessary piping infrastructure for either farming or drinking water, are too geographically spread out, or have had their water resources contaminated by extractive industry.
On May 27, 18 years of negotiations came to a close when Congress passed a bill granting the Navajo Nation 81,500 acre-feet of water annually from Colorado River Basin sources within Utah. Yet it is estimated that between 30 percent and 40 percent of households on the Navajo Nation, spanning territory in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, do not have running water. It is unclear how much these new water cutbacks will impact development of critical infrastructure for the Navajo, which will take years.
Nora McDowell of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe believes it will take a collective effort to ensure a sustainable future for the Colorado River and water access in the region. That effort will require major changes to water management and tribes’ role in it. “It’s a critical time right now and people need to wake up and see what we’re dealing with,” she said. “We can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing for the last 100 years.”
A historic drought in the southwest of China is drying up rivers, intensifying forest fires, damaging crops, and severely curtailing electricity in a region highly dependent on hydropower.
The Yangtze River, the third largest in the world, has dropped to half its average water levels, affecting shipping routes, limiting drinking water supplies, causing rolling blackouts, and even exposing long-submerged Buddhist statues. Some 66 rivers across 34 counties in Chongqing were dried up as of last week, Reuters reported. Also last week, the province of Sichuan, which gets more than 80 percent of its energy from hydropower, cut or limited electricity to thousands of factories in an effort to “leave power for the people.” Poyang Lake, the largest freshwater lake in China, is just a quarter of its normal size for this time of year.
On Friday, China issued its first national drought alert in nine years. Rainfall in the Yangtze River Basin is down 45 percent from last July, the lowest it has been since 1961, according to Bloomberg. Simultaneously, a heat wave has caused scorching temperatures across large parts of the country since early July. Dozens of cities recorded temperatures over 104 degrees Fahrenheit last week; on Monday, state meteorologists issued a “red alert” heat warning for the 11th day in a row. The relationship between heat waves and drought is complicated, but it’s known that as temperatures go up, the sky’s evaporative demand increases, causing it to absorb more water and creating drier conditions on land.
Sichuan is a major manufacturing hub and the curbing of electricity to factories has had global impacts, affecting suppliers of Toyota, Volkswagen, Tesla, Intel and Apple, as well as pesticide and solar panel manufacturers. On Monday, companies were asked to continue rationing electricity until Thursday. Toyota has slowly resumed operations using a generator; Tesla asked the government of Shanghai to ensure that its suppliers received enough power, saying it faced shortages of components as plants scaled back production. Other areas that source power from Sichuan have also made cuts, including Shanghai, China’s largest city, which turned off decorative lighting as a symbolic gesture.
Drought’s impact on the agriculture sector has also been severe, with thousands of acres of crops damaged in Sichuan and the neighboring Hubei province, according to the Associated Press. In response, the Chinese government discharged water from several large upstream reservoirs, and the Ministry of Agriculture said it will try to artificially increase rainfall through cloud seeding, as well as spray crops with a water-retaining agent. Climbing temperatures means crops need even more water than usual, as soils dry out. Forest fires also broke out last week in Sichuan and neighboring Chongqing, although officials declared them contained as of Monday.
China is the largest carbon emitter in the world (though the United States is first when considering historic emissions) and the drought will likely impact the country’s clean energy goals. As reported in the Guardian, Vice-premier Han Zheng said the country will increase its coal burning to address the electricity shortages.
Other parts of the world are also struggling with changes in power-generating capacity brought on by drought. Hydropower is the largest source of clean energy in the world, but last year dry spells in places like the southwestern United States, China, and Brazil created significant disruptions in the supply, and the International Energy Agency predicts that global hydropower expansion will slow down this decade. Brazil, which in 2021 sourced 61 percent of its electricity from hydropower had to cut water flows into hydroelectric dams to a 91-year low during its drought that year. “People always thought that water is unlimited, but it really isn’t,” José Marengo, a climatologist at the Brazilian government’s disaster monitoring center, told Reuters.
This story is part of the Grist seriesParched, an in-depth look at how climate change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems.
The Interior Department announced sweeping changes on Tuesday to the way Colorado River water is doled out in the western United States and Mexico in response to the climate change-fueled megadrought that is desiccating freshwater resources in the region.
For the first time ever, federal officials declared a Tier 2a water shortage, which requires Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico to reduce the amount of water they draw from Lake Mead starting at the beginning of next year. Arizona will have to reduce its water supply by 21 percent, Nevada by 8 percent, and Mexico by 7 percent; California, the largest water user on the river, avoided taking any cuts.
“The system is approaching a tipping point,” Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton said at a press conference. “Without action, we cannot protect the system and the millions of Americans who rely on this critical resource.”
The federal government already issued a first-of-its-kind Tier 1 shortage declaration for Colorado River operations last year. That declaration required Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico to cut their water intake from the river in accordance with a drought contingency plan signed back in 2019; Arizona took the greatest cut and had to reduce water deliveries to its cotton and alfalfa farmers. The new Tier 2a declaration imposes further cuts on the same states, and again the cuts fall hardest on Arizona. The state will lose around 80,000 additional acre-feet of water this time, on top of the 500,000 acre-feet it lost in the last round — one-fifth of its total allotment combined. (An acre-foot is equivalent to about 320,000 gallons.)
Nevada and Mexico will also see reductions in this year’s round of cuts, though far fewer. The effects on Nevada will likely be minimal, since the state has conserved an enormous amount of Colorado River water over the last several years in anticipation of a shortage, but the effects on Mexico will likely be more significant, since the country uses river water to sustain agriculture in the Mexicali Valley.
The new water cuts are determined by the latest available water data. Every month, Reclamation releases a report that forecasts water levels in the Colorado River Basin for the next two years. The August report is special; by this time of the year, the snow that accumulated over the previous winter has melted, and the federal government has a clear sense of just how much of that water has made it into the river’s two major reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. It’s the August water level in Lake Mead that determines what cuts Reclamation imposes on the Lower Basin states of Arizona, Nevada, California, and Mexico.
A buoy that reads ‘No Boats’ lays on cracked dry earth. Behind it, people carry a boat to reach the receding shoreline of Lake Mead, Nevada on July 23.
FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images
While the bulk of the cuts from last year’s Tier 1 shortage fell on Arizona farmers, this newest round of cuts will also impact other water users, including the Gila River Indian Community and the city of Phoenix. The new cuts won’t shut off any taps, but they will deprive these water users of their excess water rights, leaving them with less wiggle room to deal with future shortages, and could lead to lawn-watering restrictions as cities try to adapt to the drought. If water levels in Lake Mead fall 20 feet further, it will trigger a Tier 3 shortage, which would cut California’s massive water allotment for the first time; the Golden State water rights are senior to those of other Lower Basin states, which has allowed it to avoid water cuts in previous rounds.
(Lake Mead’s actual elevation is even lower than Reclamation announced on Tuesday, but the government is pretending for the moment that there’s some extra water in the reservoir, thanks to some creative accounting measures it imposed in June to protect Lake Powell. The true elevation of the reservoir is low enough to trigger an even further round of cuts, the so-called “Tier 2b” shortage, but the government is holding off on those cuts for now.)
Just two decades ago, a shortage of this magnitude on the Colorado River seemed unthinkable. Modern life in the western U.S. is predicated on the assumption that water will always flow in the Colorado – and that the U.S. can always engineer solutions to the occasional drought.
For more than a century, that assumption held. The years between 1980 and 2000, especially, were a time of plenty in the Colorado River Basin. Reliable seasons of rain and snowpack filled Lake Mead and Lake Powell to the brim, supplied the region’s growing populations with water and hydroelectric power, and sustained the wildlife and plants that depend on the Colorado for survival. But then drought descended on the arid West, and water managers in the seven Colorado River Basin states started talking about what would happen if the reservoirs went dry. At first, those conversations were hypothetical, but 23 years of nearly unbroken drought later, both Lake Powell and Lake Mead are at critically low levels. The megadrought in the western U.S., fueled by climate change, is officially the worst drought in 1,200 years, according to scientists. It threatens to completely transform the region.
“We are now truly out of time,” Jennifer Pitt, Colorado River program director for the National Audubon Society, told Grist. “All of the water managers in this basin are facing this moment when action is necessary.”
Further cuts may be on the horizon, and for the whole basin rather than a select few states. Earlier this summer, Touton told the seven Colorado River states that they would have to conserve between 2 and 4 million acre-feet of water in the next year in order to stabilize Lakes Powell and Mead. This would require the states to reduce their water usage by 15 to 30 percent inaddition to the reductions they’ve already made as part of the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan. If the states didn’t find 2 million acre-feet of savings by mid-August, Touton said at the time, the federal government could “act unilaterally to protect the system,” imposing long-term water restrictions over and beyond the new cuts to the Lower Basin states.
The states blew past Touton’s deadline, but it isn’t clear yet whether the federal government will intervene and force another round of cuts, or which states would absorb those cuts. At Tuesday’s press conference, Reclamation officials only issued vague calls for “basin-wide conservation” beyond the cuts brought about by the Tier 2a declarationbeyond the cut Tier 2 declaration.
Representatives from the Colorado River states met last week in Denver to negotiate potential water cuts, but that the meeting ended without an agreement. Participants from the meeting told the Los Angeles Times that the cuts proposed by the negotiators totaled less than the 2 million acre-feet Touton demanded in June.
The Lower Basin states use the lion’s share of Colorado River water, and they claim they’ve made generous water reduction proposals in recent weeks as the states try to meet Touton’s demands. In a press release on Tuesday, Arizona officials said that they offered to reduce the state’s water withdrawals by 2 million acre-feet next year, but said that the federal government rejected that proposal. It isn’t clear what other conditions Arizona requested as part of this offer, but the rejection appears to indicate that the federal government wanted the Lower Basin states to absorb even further cuts. Two large water districts in Southern California, meanwhile, have mulled reducing their water withdrawals by another half million acre-feet.
“Despite the obvious urgency of the situation, the last 62 days produced exactly nothing in terms of meaningful collective action,” said John Entsminger, the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, in a letter to the federal government earlier this week.
Meanwhile, the Upper Basin states — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico — have refused to make any definitive commitments; the states told the federal government in June that “additional efforts to protect critical reservoir elevations must include significant actions focused downstream [in the Lower Basin],” and promised only that the states would consider reviving some dormant water conservation programs.
The negotiations between lower and upper basin states will continue in the coming weeks and months. Pitt, from Audubon, said she was heartened by the Reclamation Bureau’s actions on Tuesday.
“It’s hard to know whether it will be ‘enough,’” she said, “but they indicate they will be taking unprecedented steps, which is what this moment calls for.”
This story is part of the Grist seriesParched, an in-depth look at how climate change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems.
The California water wars of the early twentieth century are summed up in a famous line from the 1974 film Chinatown: “Either you bring the water to L.A., or you bring L.A. to the water.” Nearly a hundred years have elapsed since the events the film dramatizes, but much of the West still approaches water the same way. If you don’t have enough of it, go find more.
As politicians across the West confront the consequences of the climate-fueled Millennium Drought, many of them are heeding the words of Chinatown and trying to bring in outside water through massive capital projects. There are at least half a dozen major water pipeline projects under consideration throughout the region, ranging from ambitious to outlandish. Arizona lawmakers want to build a pipeline from the Mississippi River more than a thousand miles away, a Colorado rancher wants to pipe water 300 miles across the Rockies, and Utah wants to pump even more water out of the already-depleted Lake Powell.
Proponents of these projects argue that they could stabilize western cities for decades to come, connecting populations with unclaimed water rights. Their detractors counter that, in an era of permanent aridification driven by climate change, the only sustainable solution is not to bring in more water, but to consume less of it. Either way, most of these projects stand little chance of becoming reality — they’re ideas from a bygone era, one that has more in common with the world of Chinatown than the parched west of the present.
The Central Arizona Project canal runs through rural desert near Phoenix. The canal diverts Colorado River water down a system of aqueducts, tunnels, pumping plants, and pipelines to the state of Arizona.
AP Photo / Ross D. Franklin
As western states grew over the twentieth century, the federal government helped them build several massive water diversion projects that would hydrate their growing urban populations: The Central Arizona Project aqueduct brought water from the Colorado River to Phoenix, for instance, and the Big Thompson system piped water across the Colorado Rockies to Denver. Each state along the Colorado River basin had the rights to a certain quantity of river water, divided among major users like farms and cities, and the projects were designed to help the states realize those abstract rights.
“States have [historically] been very successful in getting the federal government to pay for wasteful, unsustainable, large water projects,” said Denise Fort, a professor emerita at the University of New Mexico who has studied water infrastructure.
It’s easy to understand why politicians want to throw their weight behind similar present-day projects, Fort told Grist, but projects of this size just aren’t practical anymore. For one, there’s no longer enough unclaimed water to make most pipeline projects cost-effective. Additionally, building large infrastructure projects in general has become more difficult, in part thanks to reforms like the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires that detailed environmental impact statements be produced and evaluated for large new infrastructure projects.
These realities haven’t stopped the West’s would-be water barons from dreaming. The hypothetical Mississippi River pipeline, which gained new life last year amid devastating drought conditions, is a case in point. The basic idea is to take water from the Mississippi River, pump it a thousand miles west, and dump it into the overtaxed Colorado River, which provides water for millions of Arizona residents but has reached historically low levels as its reservoirs dry up. The Arizona state legislature allocated seed money toward a study of a thousand-mile pipeline that would do exactly this last year, and the state’s top water official says he’s spoken to officials in Kansas about participating in the project. Meanwhile, a rookie Democrat running for governor in California’s recall election last year proposed declaring a state of emergency in order to build a similar project.
Bathtub rings, seen here on June 8, 2022, show how low Lake Powell levels have dropped.
AP Photo / Brittany Peterson
The most obvious problem with this proposal is its mind-boggling cost. A federal report from a decade ago pegged an optimistic cost estimate for a similar pipeline at $14 billion and said the project would take 30 years to build; a Colorado rancher who championed the idea around the same time, meanwhile, estimated its costs at $23 billion. The actual costs to build such a pipeline today would likely be orders of magnitude higher, thanks to inflation and inevitable construction snags. Even at its cheapest, the project would cost about twice as much per acre-foot of water delivered than other solutions like water conservation and reuse.
Even if the sticker price weren’t so prohibitive, there are other obstacles. The project would have to secure dozens of state and federal permits and clear an enormous federal environmental review; moving the water would also require the construction of several hundred megawatts of power generation. Plus, the federal report found the water would be of much lower quality than other western water sources.
Even if the government could clear these hurdles, the odds that Midwestern states would just let their water go are slim. A multi-state compact already prohibits any sale of water from the Great Lakes unless all bordering states agree to it, and it’s almost certain that Mississippi River states would pass laws restricting water diversions, or file lawsuits against western states, if the project went forward.
“If this gets any traction at all, people in the flyover states of the Missouri River basin probably will scream,” one water official told the New York Times when the project first received attention. A man from Minnesota wrote to the Palm Springs Desert Sunearlier this month and expressed similar sentiments, warning, “If California comes for Midwest water, we have plenty of dynamite.”
Even smaller projects stand to be derailed by similar hiccups. Take for instance the so-called Water Horse pipeline, a pet project of a Colorado investor and entrepreneur named Aaron Million. Almost two decades ago, when Million was working on a master’s thesis, he happened upon a map that showed the Green River making a brief detour into Colorado on its way through Utah. It dawned on Million that Colorado had unclaimed rights to water from the Green, since the river was part of the Colorado River system, and he devised a plan to build a pipeline that would pump water around the Rockies to the city of Fort Collins, where he lives. He frames the pipeline as a complement to water-saving policies.
Entrepreneur Aaron Million, seen here in 2011, uses a map to illustrate how his proposed pipeline would run from Wyoming’s Flaming Gorge Reservoir to serve Colorado cities. Million has been pushing a $3 billion proposal to pump 250,000 acre-feet from the reservoir and Wyoming’s Green River to Colorado.
AP Photo / Ed Andrieski
“The state should do everything possible to push conservation, but that’s not going to cure the issue,” he told Grist. “Infrastructure is one of the few ways we’ll turn things around to assure that there’s some supply.”
In the 20 years since he first had the idea, Million has suffered a string of regulatory and legal defeats at the hands of state and federal agencies, becoming a kind of bogeyman for conservationists in the process. At one point, activists who opposed the project erected three large billboards warning about the high cost and potential consequences, such as the possibility that drawing down the Green River could harm the river’s fish populations. Nevertheless, Million hasn’t given up, and he’s currently working to secure permitting for the fourth iteration of the project.
This latest version would curve up through the Wyoming flatlands and back down to Fort Collins, a distance of around 340 miles. It would carry about 50,000 acre-feet of water per year, much less than the original pipeline plan but still twice Fort Collins’ current annual usage. Million told Grist that he’s secured partial funding for the project from multiple banks and the infrastructure company MasTec, but it remains unclear how much he would have to charge to make the project profitable. In any case, Utah rejected a permit for the project in 2020, saying it would jeopardize the state’s own water rights. Million sued, and he says he expects a ruling this year.
The list of projects that run on similarly magical thinking goes on: Utah wants to build a pipeline of its own from Lake Powell to the fast-growing city of St. George, but Lake Powell has almost no water left. Another businessman in New Mexico has pushed plans to pump river water 150 miles to the city of Santa Fe, but that water would have to be pumped uphill. California wants to build a $16 billion pipeline to draw water out of the Sacramento River Delta and down to the southern part of the state, but critics say the project would deprive Delta farmers of water and destroy local ecosystems.
Fort, the University of New Mexico professor, worries that the bigwigs who throw their energy behind large capital projects may be neglecting other, more practical options.
“The other alternatives have political costs, and they have costs that are maybe more likely to be borne locally,” including by farmers and other large water users, she said. “It’s much easier to [propose] a shining pipeline from the Mississippi River that will never be built than it is to grapple with this really unpleasant truth.”
Conservation alternatives are less palatable than big infrastructure projects, but they’re also more achievable. Arizona, for instance, has invested millions of dollars in wastewater recycling while other communities have paid to fix leaky pipes, making their water delivery systems more efficient. The elephant in the room, according to Fort, is agriculture, which accounts for more than 80 percent of water withdrawals from the Colorado River. If a portion of the farmers in the region were to change crops or fallow their fields, the freed-up water could sustain growing cities.
“There are no easy fixes to a West that has grown and has allocated all of its water — there’s no silver bullet,” she said. A water pipeline like Million’s would help, if he could wave a magic wand and build it, but Fort believes the present scramble over the Colorado River will likely make such projects impossible to realize.
Pipes extend into Lake Mead well above the high water mark near Boulder City, Nevada.
AP Photo / Julie Jacobson
Million himself, though, is confident that his pipeline will get built, and that it will ensure Fort Collins’ future.
“We’re not looking for the last dollar out of this project,” he told me. “We’re doing everything we can to minimize impacts, maximize benefits, and this project has a lot of benevolence associated with it.” In his vision of the West’s future, urban growth will necessitate more big infrastructure projects like his.
Still, he admits the road hasn’t always been easy, and that victory is far from guaranteed. “I’ve cowboyed enough in my life to know that you just got to stick to the trail,” he said. “We’ve had a few blizzards along the way, and some gun battles, but it is what it is.”
Scenes and pictures have been circulating of broken earth, lacking moisture, cracked and yearning. But these are not from traditional drought-stricken parts of the planet, where the animal carcass assumes near totemic power amidst dry riverbeds or desert expanses. Neither Australia nor Africa feature on these occasions – at least in a prominent way. Europe, continent of historical arable sustainability, is drying up.
This is not to say that the continent is immune to drought. The International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River notes the impacts of a number of dry and severe summers from the 1990s till 2015. In 2015 alone, “drought phenomena” were recorded in countries from Austria to Ukraine.
What makes the current crisis in Europe significant is its scale. According to the European Drought Observatory, 64% of the land in the European Union is being affected by drought, with 47% of the territory classed as having “warning” conditions, and 17% facing “alert” conditions. The European Commission Joint Research Centre (EC-JRC) has gone so far as to warn that the current drought may be the worst in 500 years.
That particularly bold assessment, to be more precise, comes from senior researcher Andrea Toreti. “Just to give you an idea, the 2018 drought was so extreme that, looking back at least the last 500 years, there were no other events similar to the drought of 2018, but this year I think it is really worse than 2018.”
The story, however, is the same across the Northern Hemisphere. Deutsche Welle showed alarm in declaring that, “from Hungary to Hawaii, from the drying Rhine River to the now-recovering Rio Grande, or from Casablanca to California, summer droughts and high temperatures are having a serious impact on everything from agriculture to the freight industry.”
The German broadcaster then goes on to note the lowering of Lake Garda’s levels, and the observation from one tourist. “We came last year, we liked it, and we came back this year.” Unfortunately, the landscape had altered. “We were a bit shocked when we arrived because we had our usual walk around, and the water wasn’t there.”
Across Europe, water levels in famed aqueous bodies have been falling and vanishing. Italy’s River Po has fallen to such a level that rice fields can no longer be watered consistently, nor clams sustained. In France, the warming of the Rhône and Garonne have made their water prohibitively hot to cool nuclear reactors.
Europe’s major waterways have been suffering a fall, producing colossal headaches for those involved in the transportation sector. (The focus on economic matters has the effect of ignoring the more attritive consequences that climate change has for both environment and species.) For countries such as Germany, which rely on suitably filled inland waterways, the signs are ominous, a point not helped by the ongoing problems with reduced delivery of Russian natural gas through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline.
The Rhine River has been so depleted that the standard number of vessels have been unable to sail with regularity and appropriate tonnage. The Rhine Waterways and Shipping Authority (WSA Rhein) confirmed that the lower water levels would lead to the passage of fewer barges transporting petrochemicals and oil products. Those that did could only make use of the river with reduced capacity.
For logistics wonks in the petrochemical business, this has meant sharp increases in costs, though a spokesperson for WSA Rhein tried to suggest that the “exceptionally low level” of water at this time of the year “was not significant.” The German logistics company HGK also urges calm, suggesting that things are “not as dramatic yet as in 2018”. The consultancy Elwis, which specialises in German waterways, disagrees. Were the water levels to fall to 20cm by mid-August, nothing would be able to navigate along the Rhine.
A spokesperson for the world’s largest chemical producer, BASF, summarised matters with gloomy precision: “The mark of 60cm of the Rhine has been undercut at Kaub. Levels in the range of 35-55cm are forecast for the next two weeks. For the predicted levels, some types of ships can no longer be used and will stop sailing; all others will sail with reduced loads.” To alleviate problems with cost, the company has been resorting to alternative modes of transport, including rail.
Another astonishing European waterway – the Danube – is also diminishing, suggesting how climate change is, quite literally, altering landscapes and transport systems. In Romania, Greenpeace activists tried to draw attention to the issue by dragging kayaks to a stretch of shoreline exposed by the retreating water. “We want Danube waves, not heat waves,” the protests declared in their banners.
In less transport related matters, scenes of parched earth have been beamed across the globe from the UK, a country famed for its rather mild climate. Parts of the country have experienced their driest July on record. Hosepipe bans have been introduced, and one can almost hear Britain’s drought-hardened cousins in Australia: shower less and shower together. Exacerbating the problem of decreased rainfall has been the unusually high temperatures, at times rising savagely beyond 40 degrees Celsius.
Globally, the earth is changing in violent, displacing fashion. Climate change will cause displacements in the order of tens of millions, if not more. Whole territories are vanishing, while other tracts of land are being exposed. Nature is not just being reordered but doing much of the reordering. What will humanity’s response be?
Could somebody please get an extension ladder to help Senator Schumer down from the ceiling? He’s stuck in the rafters in a high-pitched note of self-congratulation whilst spraining his elbow as he awkwardly and repeatedly tries to pat his own back, screaming over and over again “the greatest climate legislation of all time!”
Compared to what?
Still, one signal that something really good must be in the nonsensically titled Inflation Reduction Act is the fact that no Republican senators voted for it. Nowadays, the extreme right has the entire Republican edifice on its hands and knees, almost in a fetal position in a deadly chokehold, and they’re not about to risk voting for anything that smacks of help for ordinary Americans. Plus, as for climate-type legislation, they detest mention of global warming. It gives ‘em the willies.
Nevertheless, in spite of 100% Republican opposition, the bill is likely to pass and become law. It does a lot of really good things to help climate change/global warming. There is no doubt about this.
The real question is whether it’s enough soon enough. And, similar to all commitments by nations of the world to mitigate climate change, will it really happen? Climate change mitigation plans have a very spotty, almost zero, record of achievement.
The bill directs about $370 billion (that’s a lot) over 10 years toward promoting clean energy and climate resilience, with about two-thirds of the money coming in the form of tax credits for producing electricity from clean energy sources, investing in renewable energy technologies and addressing climate change through carbon sequestration, renewable fuel production, and clean energy manufacturing.
According to Evergreen Action, a left-of-center advocacy founded by former staffers to Gov. Jay Inslee’s presidential campaign, which advocated zero emissions by 2035 when some other candidates didn’t even know what zero emissions really meant:
The bill is an opportunity for a major breakthrough in America’s fight against climate change. This bill has the potential to be the single largest investment in clean energy in American history. Making major investments in clean energy is one of the best ways Congress can lower inflation and shield Americans from the volatility of fossil fuel markets. 1
The bill includes $60 billion to boost domestic clean energy manufacturing, including $30 billion in production tax credits for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and critical mineral processing. It also offers lower- and middle-income motorists a $7,500 tax credit for clean vehicles, while states and electric utilities would see $30 billion in grants and loans to expand clean energy. The bill also includes $60 billion for environmental justice communities and a fee on methane emissions that will rise to $1,500 a ton by 2026.
The Nature Conservancy released the following statement on August 7th:
The Senate’s approval of the Inflation Reduction Act gives us hope, and more optimism than we’ve had in years, that the U.S. Congress recognizes the urgency of the global climate crisis and is prepared to lead a meaningful response.
Almost all environmental advocacy groups favor the legislation. Indeed, it would be ridiculous to naysay the only true broad-reaching climate legislation in American history.
But, is it enough soon enough? Which may have been on the minds of legislators in Washington, D.C., assuming the nation’s intelligence agencies sent them classified notes about the most frightening climate behavior in human history; i.e., the world is drying up!
And, maybe they read the recent NASA/National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration report that the planet is trapping heat at a rate that’s twice as fast as only 15 years ago.
Carbon emissions have turned the planet into a heat machine. Compelling evidence of this tragedy is found throughout the world, as follows. It demands a much bigger Inflation Reduction Act but on a worldwide coordinated basis:
According to SPEI Global Drought Monitor, severe drought is now found throughout the planet.
A recent University of Cambridge study claims that since 2015 European drought has accelerated and intensified. In fact, the continent is experiencing the most intense drought in 250 years.
Italy’s Po River Valley, as of July 2022, has cut water for 125 towns. Drinking water is delivered via trucks to Piedmont and Lombardy, as local reservoirs no longer exist. They’re gone! Italy’s drought alert is now spreading to the central part of the country to the rivers Arno, Aniene, and Tiber where water levels are “drastically down.”
The Rhine River, Europe’s most important waterway for commerce and industry and tourism, is close to shutting down. Key shipping lanes are down to 19 inches water depth. This is happening two months before the normal seasonal lows. Transports already reduced from 6000-ton loads to 800 tons but may be forced to halt completely, depending, and making coal shipment to Germany and inclusive of all commercial goods, a horrendous challenge for upcoming winter months.
In France more than 100 towns are without drinking water and now receive water deliveries by truck. The government has established a water crisis team. Trees and bushes are prematurely shedding leaves. France’s nuclear power plants, at a time when half of its 56 reactors are offline due to maintenance and serious corrosion issues, are now threatened due to river water temperatures used to cool the reactors. Restrictions kick in 26°C. Some plants are experiencing 28°C and 30°C river water temps.
In Spain, water restrictions have been imposed on Barcelona, Malaga, Huelva, and Pontevedra. Catalonia has severe restrictions on individual liters per day. The price of olive oil is likely to spike by at least 25% as heat hits crops.
In Portugal, 99% of the country is experiencing severe drought. It’s the driest in 1,200 years. Lawn watering prohibited.
According to NASA, the worst drought in 900 years is hitting the entire Middle East. A Carnegie Endowment study as of 2022 claims water scarcity is threatening violent conflicts throughout MENA, the acronym for the Middle East and North Africa. 80-90 million people in the region will experience water insecurity within three years. The European Commission Joint Research Center, in a recent study, claims there’s a 75%-90% chance of water wars.
Santiago’s population of 6.5 M is on a severe water-rationing program with rotating 24-hour cutoffs for homes in the city. On the suburban outskirts of Santiago, water is delivered by truck to 400,000 families or 1.5M people. They are allotted 50 liters (13.2 gallons) water per day per person. Additionally, in the northern regions of Chile, precipitation is down 90%.
In Argentina, the drought is so bad that the famous Iberia wetland is at its worst levels in 80 years as fires raged earlier this year in one of the world’s largest wetlands.
In SE Asia, the Mekong River, the principal river for the entire region, is in 4-year drought, the worst in 60 years. Cambodian water for crop irrigation is down to 20% of normal.
China has informed Guangzhou (pop 15M) and Shenzhen (pop 12.5M), the country’s tech hub, to cut per capita water use from January to October of 2022. The Pearl River Basin, which serves as the water source for China’s most populous urban centers, as mentioned, has been hit with severe drought, plus the looming drinking water crisis is compounded by drought-induced saltwater intrusion.
In Japan, Matsuyama (pop 515K) and Shikokuchuo (Pop 84K) are rationing water to citizens. Some areas of the country are experiencing crippling water shortages. The country is also experiencing power shortages and intends to go to more coal.
In Africa, Ethiopia and Kenya are faced with brutal drought. Three million livestock have died under the fierce influence of heat. In the Horn of Africa, 20M people are at risk of starvation and failure of water supplies.
America’s two largest water reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell are within a few tens of feet of dead pool status defined as water no longer running downstream beyond Hoover dam and Glen Canyon dam respectively. Lake Mead dead pool is 895 feet elevation; it’s currently 1,041 feet. Lake Powell’s dead pool is 3,370 feet elevation. It is current 3,536 feet. The US Bureau of Reclamation recently informed the seven Colorado River Basin states to cut water usage on an emergency basis.
Is the Senate’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 big enough, soon enough? Probably not.
Congress really needs to go back to Biden’s initial $3.5T Build Back Better Plan. In that regard, The Economist, July 21, 2022 ran this article: “American Climate Policy is in Tatters—Manchin Single-handedly scuttled Biden’s BBB Plans for $3.5 trillion”.
The entire planet is reeling from global warming. America’s modest couple hundred billion climate plan is a drop in the world’s bucket. The whole world needs to mimic Biden’s original BBB plan, or it’s lights out. The evidence of that is compelling, unless, of course, facts don’t count any longer.
“How the Senate Climate Bill Could Slash Emissions by 40 Percent”, Scientific American, July 28, 2022.
This story is part of the Grist seriesParched, an in-depth look at how climate change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems.
On an afternoon in late June, the San Luis Reservoir — a 9-mile lake about an hour southeast of San Jose, California — shimmered in 102-degree heat. A dusty, winding trail led down into flatlands newly created by the shrinking waterline. Seven deer, including a pair of fawns, grazed on tall grasses that, in wetter times, would have been at least partially underwater. On a distant ridge, wind turbines turned languidly.
That day, the reservoir, California’s sixth-largest and a source of water for millions of people, was just 40 percent full. Minerals deposited by the receding waters had turned the reservoir’s lower banks white, like the rings on a bathtub. Discarded clothing, empty bottles, and a lone shoe sat scattered across the newly exposed, parched ground. An interactive graphic in the visitor’s center reported that this year’s snowpack — which provides the water that travels from the Sacramento River Delta into the reservoir itself — was zero percent of the yearly average.
Depending on how you look at it, California — and most of the American West — has either entered its third catastrophic drought of the past 10 years, or has been in a constant, unyielding “megadrought” since 2000. Reservoirs are emptying; lawns are turning brown; swaths of farmland that have coaxed lettuce, almonds, and alfalfa out of the dry ground for decades are going fallow. The Colorado River, which originates in the snow-capped Rocky Mountains and provides water to some 40 million people in the Southwest, has slowed to a trickle. That waterway also feeds the largest reservoir in the United States, Lake Mead, 40 miles east of Las Vegas, which in recent months has seen water levels so low that bodies have emerged from its shrinking, normally crystalline waters. The Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency responsible for many supersized water projects, has asked states to cut their use of water from the Colorado River by 2 to 4 million acre-feet, an amount close to all the water that California receives from the Colorado in a single year.
A buoy that reads ‘No Boats’ lays on cracked dry earth that was once part of Lake Mead in Nevada. In the background, people carry a boat to reach the reservoir’s receding shoreline on July 23. FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images
Throughout the West, anxiety about drought is as palpable as the dryness of the air; talk of water fills newspapers and conversations alike. “Aridification kills civilizations. Is California next?” read one Los Angeles Times headline in June. In February, scientists confirmed that the current, decades-long “megadrought” is the worst in 1,200 years. They also confirmed that rising temperatures — driven by human consumption of fossil fuels — were partly to blame.
In one sense, the climate change link seems obvious. Since 1850, global temperatures have climbed 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit); in areas of the U.S. hit hardest by drought, the increase is even higher. Temperatures in California have risen about 3 degrees F since 1896; in Arizona, they have gone up by 2.5 degrees.
But the connection between climate change and drought is not as straightforward as it seems. Some areas are likely to get wetter while others get drier. Still others may accumulate the same total rainfall, but in inconsistent patterns: More rain might fall in fewer, more intense bursts, followed by longer dry spells. “It’s complicated,” said Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at NASA and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
But scientists can say some things with certainty. As the world gets hotter, soils are getting drier; it takes more and more precipitation to water the same crops and fill the same reservoirs. Rising temperatures, therefore, are digging the American West and other arid regions into a deeper and deeper hole. The more the world warms, the more rain will be needed to compensate, and that will force people to rethink how — and where — they will live and eat when the water dries up.
One problem with linking drought and climate change is that there is little agreement on what drought actually is. “No two people — including no two scientists — really agree on even how to define drought,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. A drought, in its most general sense, is simply a lack of water relative to some long-term average — but where that dearth of water appears can change how the drought is defined, studied, and managed. Climate scientists and meteorologists talk about “meteorological drought” (a lack of rainfall), farmers worry about “agricultural drought” (a lack of soil moisture), and water managers try to avoid “hydrological drought” (a lack of groundwater or water in reservoirs).
This complexity has resulted in conflicting messages about the role of human-caused global warming in the droughts that have ravaged the American West and the rest of the world. Thanks to the science of extreme event attribution, which connects weather extremes to global warming, it has become commonplace to cite climate change as a factor in devastating heat waves or torrential floods. But droughts are trickier. Drought depends on both the rain that falls and how quickly it is evaporated and used.
On the rainfall side of things, climate change’s influence in California, Nevada, Arizona, and other Western states remains murky. In recent years, rain and snowfall in California have become more variable; the dry years are drier, the wet years wetter. In 2017, Lake Oroville served as a sobering illustration of this whiplash when — in the span of less than four months — the reservoir north of Sacramento went from less than half full to nearly overflowing, causing the main spillway to collapse. Some 188,000 local residents were evacuated. Swain and his colleagues estimate a 25- to 100-percent increase in such “extreme dry-to-wet precipitation events” in California over the next century.
But even with this volatility, total precipitation in the West is expected to stay roughly the same. Swain said scientists expect the Pacific Northwest to get somewhat wetter; Arizona and New Mexico somewhat drier. The clearest link between drought and climate change right now, therefore, is not a lack of rainfall — it’s rising temperatures.
The atmosphere is like a sponge: It sucks up water from soils, plants, rivers, oceans, and lakes. Any time rain falls, some of it will evaporate, returning back into the sky before it can be piped into homes, fields, or aqueducts. Scientists have a measure for how “thirsty” the atmosphere is, or how much water the sky absorbs: evaporative demand. As temperatures go up, evaporative demand increases. The sky gets thirstier.
Dramatically low water levels, the result of six years of drought, give the appearance of bathtub rings on Lake Powell in March 2007 near Page, Arizona. David McNew/Getty Images
“A very basic rule is that if you’re going to have a warmer atmosphere then you need more precipitation to compensate,” said Park Williams, a hydroclimatologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “If you turn the heater up in your house and you don’t give your plants extra water, you see the same thing.”
Christine Albano, an ecohydrologist at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, studies evaporative demand and how it might change under global warming. “A warmer atmosphere can hold more water,” she explained. And, she added, the changes are nonlinear — a small change in temperature could lead to a much larger change in how thirsty the sky is. In a paper published earlier this year, Albano and her co-authors found that evaporative demand has increased over the past 40 years, most dramatically in the U.S. Southwest around the Rio Grande River. In that region, evaporative demand increased by 8 to 15 percent — meaning that the area would require 8 to 15 percent more rainfall to maintain the same water levels.
And as temperatures warm, the situation will get even worse. “For every raindrop, we’re going to get less of that going into our streams and rivers,” Albano said.
That thirsty atmosphere has been behind most of the studies that have found a clear link between global warming and persistent droughts. The last catastrophic drought in California, which stretched from 2011 to 2017, drained reservoirs and forced farmers to pump groundwater from the state’s disappearing underground aquifers. Some scientists looked for a direct link between climate change and the lack of rainfall, but did not find convincing evidence. Those who looked at the effect of temperature on soil moisture and general aridity, however, found something more interesting: that human-caused climate change had turned what would have been a more moderate drought into a devastating one. In a paper published in 2015, Williams, Cook, and others found that skyrocketing temperatures, brought on by human-caused global warming, had made the drought 15 to 20 percent more intense.
A sign on a farm trailer reading “Food grows where water flows,” hangs over dry, cracked mud on a farm near Buttonwillow, California in 2009. The American West has been in a constant, unyielding megadrought since 2000.
Similar results have been found all over the globe. A few years ago, scientists analyzed the European drought of 2016 to 2017 — which helped spark deadly wildfires in Portugal — and found that it had been made worse by high evaporative demand. To the south, the Horn of Africa has been ravaged by a series of droughts over the last decade, causing successive crop failures and threatening millions with severe hunger and starvation. In 2015, scientists searching for ties to climate change found no connection to the region’s low rainfall. They did, however, find a link between rising greenhouse gas emissions and the high temperatures that have helped to desiccate the landscape of Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia.
Temperature has also been implicated in the study of the decades-long “megadrought” in the American West, a loosely defined term that has been used to indicate droughts that last two decades or more. Scientists have spent decades drilling holes in trees to collect tree ring records, a science known as dendrochronology, which can be used to estimate soil moisture levels going back for millennia. (Some records have even been collected from ancient wooden ladders in the cliff dwellings of Chaco Canyon.) According to those records, 19 of the last 23 years were drier than the average over the past millennium.
Williams, the UCLA scientist, says that this megadrought is being made even worse by climate change. “Forty percent of the severity of the drought conditions in this megadrought is attributable to human-caused climate trends” largely from rising temperatures, Williams said.
Sixty percent of the megadrought, Williams cautioned, could simply be seen as simply bad luck; even without humans burning fossil fuels, megadroughts have endured for decades in the past, starving the landscape and local species of water. But what was previously just bad luck is now getting a boost from climate change. “It’s only going to get warmer,” Williams said. “It’s going to take more and more good luck to bail us out of drought — and less and less bad luck to fall back in.”
An aerial view of drought-shrunken Horseshoe Lake near Mammoth Lakes, California on July 28. David McNew/Getty Images
Climate change is also undermining one of the American West’s most treasured tools for managing drought: snowpack. In the Sierra Nevadas of California and in the Colorado Rockies, snow falls during the winter and then acts as a natural reservoir, slowly releasing water as it thaws during the hot, dry summer season. But as temperatures rise, more precipitation is falling as rain instead of snow, and any remaining snow is melting more quickly and earlier in the season. By 2050, scientists estimate that the mountains of the Western U.S. will lose around 25 percent of their snowpack. In 60 years, they warn, there may be no snowpack at all.
And, as the planet heats up, megadroughts such as the one raging in California, Arizona, and New Mexico are expected to return again. And again. According to one study by Cook, the NASA scientist, and others, the risk of a 35-year-long drought hitting the American Southwest was less than 12 percent between 1950 and 2000. But if countries fail to take aggressive action to combat climate change, and the world continues to warm, the risk of such a drought will climb to more than 80 percent.
The American West is built on a strange, hodgepodge system of water that, for the last century, has somehow sustained millions of residents in the most arid parts of the country. Reservoirs, dams, and aqueducts carry water from where it is plentiful — the peaks of the Sierra Nevadas, the banks of the Colorado River — and deliver it to where it is scarce: fast-growing metropolises like Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles. In California, 75 percent of the state’s rain and snow falls north of Sacramento, but 80 percent of its water demand comes from the southern two-thirds of the state. This imbalance is corrected artificially: A long cement aqueduct carries water from the north of the state to the south, shuttling through the dry, crackling Central Valley. More comes from the Colorado River, which brings water from the east to Los Angeles and Southern California.
A golf course next to undeveloped desert in Palm Desert, California on July 13. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, more than 97 percent of the state’s land area is in at least severe drought status. Mario Tama/Getty Images
This system has faced numerous droughts before. In dry times, policymakers call for cutbacks and march down the list of water rights-holders and inform each how their supply will be curtailed. The last big drought in California, which reached its peak in 2014 and 2015, saw residents “drought-shaming” one another for maintaining lush lawns (Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti called such shaming a civic duty) and an enormous backlash against almond growers, after news broke that it takes a gallon of water to produce a single almond.
But the sheer longevity of the current dry period has even the most experienced water managers worried. That complex system of dams, aqueducts, and reservoirs that funnels water to Western states for lawns, golf courses, and farms is cracking under the strain. “We built these amazing places based on the promise of water,” said John Fleck, a professor of water policy and governance at the University of New Mexico. “And they’re good things — I don’t want to demonize what we did. But they were based on the promise of water that wouldn’t be there.”
To be sure, the current drought and even the overlapping, decades-long “megadrought” will eventually end. “I don’t expect it to be as dry as it has been the past few years forever,” Williams said. But the slow-moving disaster has demonstrated just how shaky the West’s foundation is. And it is a warning that the water system of the present may not hold for the future.
A family fishes on the shores of the San Luis Reservoir, California’s sixth-largest and a source of water for millions of people, in 2019. Today, the reservoir is just 40 percent full. Nhat V. Meyer/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images
What will happen next? Nearly 40 million people live in California alone; another 12 million reside in New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada. And, in the wake of the pandemic, southwestern states are growing fast, as people look for more affordable housing, strong job markets, and warmer weather. But that warmer weather has a darker side. Not far from Phoenix, Arizona — one of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S. — one community is already running out of water. As the Colorado River and the snowcaps of the Sierra Nevadas continue to dry up, the water flowing to the West’s sprawling suburbs and millions of acres of farmland will slow to a crawl. When that happens, communities will need to adapt. Agricultural water use will have to decline — even if that means destroying livelihoods that have continued uninterrupted for decades. Lawns will dry up; lush golf courses will disappear. The very character of the West — and of many arid parts of the globe — will be transformed. “In some ways it’s really simple,” Fleck said, of the climate-changed drought future. “The West will be less green.”
Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead is dangerously close to dead pool status for the first time since construction in the mid 1930s. A vicious hammering drought sequence for over two decades throughout the West threatens to bring America’s biggest water reservoir to its knees.
In a word, the implications are unspeakable.
America’s monuments, the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial, and Hoover Dam are the foundations of Americana, the essence of America, its character, its culture. Hoover Dam, one of the greatest engineering feats of all time, 96 lives lost during construction, defines America’s true grit during a bygone era that had to overcome great challenges tagged with the Great Depression, soup kitchens and breadlines (NYC 82 breadlines by 1932), the Dust Bowl, incipient fascism in Europe, and a brewing world war.
Yet, in the face of those overwhelming challenges, similar to a phoenix miraculously rising out of the ashes, in 1934 Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead commenced water filling in celebration of an engineering marvel. Seven years later (1941) Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead stood tall at maximum capacity of 1,220 feet elevation with sparkling blue water that shone for all to behold, becoming the most-visited dam in the world with 7 million annual visitors.
In a twist of climate change fate and echoing the 1930s, America once again is challenged by drought, irreconcilable political squabbling, 42 million SNAPs (electronic food stamps), festering homegrown armed fascism, and entanglement in a European war, as Lake Mead returns to its beginnings of 88 years ago. Today’s 1,041 feet elevation is the same as 1937, as it was then filling. But, in sharp contrast to the outlook for Lake Mead when completed in 1934 full of hope and promise, the outlook today is decidedly negative. What’s changed?
Answer: The climate system has turned upside down, whether it’s gushing massive flash floods or hard-hitting severe parched droughts there’s little middle ground. It’s behaving like the Mad Hatter gone off the deep end.
But, this time is vastly different from the past. Severe drought is now a worldwide phenomenon like never before. It’s hitting everywhere. According to SPEI Global Drought Monitor, no continent is spared the ravages of severe drought, except for Antarctica. Major urban centers in South America (Santiago) and China (Guangzhou and Shenzhen) and Europe (100 Po Valley towns) are already rationing or instituting forced reduction of water usage.
Global heat is on the verge of breaking-out. According to NASA and NOAA, the planet is trapping nearly twice as much heat as it did in 2005, which they describe as an “unprecedented increase amid the climate crisis.” NASA describes this trend as “quite alarming.”
All of which leads to a conclusion that foolhardy use of fossil fuels has created a heat-machine. The evidence of the heat-machine is found by the fact that the planet is trapping twice as much heat as 17 years ago. That’s an off–the-charts data point that should send shivers down anyone’s spine.
For evidence of the heat-machine’s powerful impact, as of June 2022, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was forced to adopt emergency measures to restrict drawdowns, instructing the seven Colorado River Basin states to reduce water usage by 2-4 million acre-feet over the next 18 months. As for recreational purposes, 5 of 6 boating ramps are now closed.
Such an emergency never happened throughout the dam’s 88-year history, until now. Something’s different, something’s wrong. What’s next for America’s important reservoirs? Is dead pool next?
Dead pool occurs when water in a reservoir drops so low that it cannot flow downstream the dam. America’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam and Lake Powell behind Glen Canyon Dam are interconnected and at high risk of dead pool.
The risks impact all of America, as 40 million people and 4-5 million acres of farmland depend upon the reservoirs for electric power and/or drinking and irrigation. Furthermore, the seven states of the Colorado Basin in large measure “feed the country.” California alone produces 33% of the country’s vegetables and 67% of the country’s fruits and nuts.
Lake Mead dead pool is 895 feet and minimum power pool 1,000 feet; its current elevation is 1,041 feet.
Lake Powell dead pool is 3,370 feet and minimum power pool 3,490 feet; its current elevation is 3,536 feet.
Minimum power pool is defined as water reservoir levels so low that turbines start losing capacity to produce power as they start to take on air along with water. Unless shut down, the turbines will suffer damage.
These massive reservoirs have steadily shrunk in concert with the relentless impact of the worst drought for the American West in over 1,000 years, now down to 1,041.30 feet for Lake Mead, as of July 18, 2022 (U.S. Bureau of Reclamation).
But, of even more concern, alarmingly and suddenly Lake Mead dropped 22 feet and Lake Powell dropped 40 feet in 2021 alone much, much faster than ever forecast. California, Nevada, Arizona and others must make big cuts to their allocations or dead pool will become reality. Nobody expected this so soon.
It should be noted that the reservoirs are shaped like giant martini glasses, thereby narrowing with depth. This feature, in part, explains Lake Mead dropping 22 feet in one year and Lake Powell 40 feet. Nevertheless, Lake Mead at 1,041 feet is only 41 feet away from minimum power pool and Lake Powell at 3,526 feet only 46 feet from minimum power pool. Yikes!
The seriousness of this crisis cannot be overly emphasized as the reality of a mega drought hits America right between the eyes. Yet, there are no quick solutions. Of course one solution would be if somebody could wave a magical wand over the Rocky Mountains to regenerate the normality of snowpack since that is the source for 90% of the water flow. But, global warming has walloped snowpack: According to the U.S. EPA’s Climate Change Indicators: Snowpack throughout the Western U.S., as of 2022: The snowpack measured in April has declined by 20-60% at most monitoring sites.
A good explanation for the sorry state of America’s largest reservoirs comes from John Matthews, executive director and co-founder of the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation: “Matthews said the water shortage on the Colorado River reflects fundamental problems in how Hoover Dam and other infrastructure projects were designed for a climate that no longer exists, and how water supplies continue to be divided under a rigid and antiquated system.”1
Matthews: “The Colorado Compact is trapped in a climate that went away in 1980 or 1990, and is not coming back for at least another millennium… I think this is an old car without airbags.”2
Scientists estimate that one-half of the decrease in water runoff of the Colorado watershed since 2000 is caused by unprecedented warming, a heat-driven erosion of water supply that’s destined to worsen as temperatures continue to rise.
The upshot is a permanent change in the climate system caused by an imbalance as Earth absorbs more energy from the Sun than it emits to space because of the blanket effect of greenhouse gas emissions, such as CO2. This worldwide nemesis is not about to change anytime soon. More likely, it will worsen.
Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., the highly touted Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, if passed, will face a predicament that’s already deeply embedded. It should be noted that Bill McKibben, of 350.org fame, writing in The New Yorker: 3
The bill penalizes oil and gas companies that fail to cut methane emissions, but it doesn’t actually pressure energy utilities to abandon coal and gas. Still, analysts say that it would cut emissions to forty per cent below 2005 levels by the end of the decade.
Thus, the bill (except for provisions that actually promote more fossil fuel usage) is not bad but also not good enough according to what’s needed to actually mitigate global warming (caused by fossil fuel usage). Accordingly, scientists’ concerns about rapid climate change know that effective mitigation requires much stronger measures, much sooner.
Fixing Lake Powell and Lake Mead
As word of mouth spread that America’s major reservoirs were close to failing, it spurred more and more suggestions of tapping the massive Mississippi River to supplement the Colorado River Basin.
Moreover, according to The Waterways Journal, suggestions to tap the Mississippi River go back decades: “The Bureau of Reclamation did a thorough study of the idea of pumping Mississippi River water to Arizona in 2012, concluding that the project would cost $14 billion (in 2012 dollars) and take 30 years to complete. As recently as 2021, the Arizona state legislature urged Congress to fund a technological and feasibility study of a diversion dam and pipeline scheme to harvest floodwater from the Mississippi River to replenish the Colorado River.”
However, it should be noted that the Trans Alaska Pipeline System was completed in June 1977, taking three years to complete the 800-mile pipeline under extremely harsh conditions. Hmm.
At this point in time, crossing one’s fingers that some relief will come soon in the West is the only short-term viable solution other than stealing water from other reservoirs, which the U.S. Reclamation Bureau was forced to do to save Lake Powell’s power generation. Yes, the Bureau had to scramble to “save” Lake Powell’s power generation capability. This fact alone is chilling.
The Bureau’s changes allow more water to flow into Lake Powell from upstream reservoirs, while releasing less water from Lake Powell downstream. In this bureaucratic scramble to find more water, Lake Mead comes up at the short end of the stick in favor of saving Lake Powell’s power generation. About 500,000 acre-feet of water will be released from Flaming Gorge Reservoir, about 455 river miles upstream of Lake Powell. Meanwhile, 480 kaf will be held back in Lake Powell by reducing Glen Canyon Dam’s annual release volume from 7.48 maf to 7.0 maf. 4
Flaming Gorge Reservoir, on the Green River in Utah and Wyoming, currently holds about 3 maf of water and is at 78% of its storage capacity. Operators started sending additional water to Lake Powell in May 2022.
Thus, the Bureau keeps the ship of state together by cut and paste methodology robbing upstream reservoirs in order to keep the lights on for 5 million electric customers and water flowing for 40 million. Obviously, the cut and paste solution cannot go on forever.
This horror story of failing reservoirs that provide crucial power and water for dense population centers and key agricultural regions represents an inexcusable failure by leadership in government and business to listen to warnings from scientists for four decades, ever since James Hansen, director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 1981-2013, testified before the Senate in 1988 that the greenhouse effect had been detected, indicating the climate system was changing, not for the better. That testimony was remarkably prophetic.
As it happens, what would have been a relatively simple solution back in the day has turned into a nightmare.
In that regard, The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the proposed Shumer/Manchin bill, is a Band-Aid, not a solution.
Postscript: “Earth is out of energy balance, more solar energy absorbed than heat radiated to space, by an astounding amount, more than any time with reliable data.” 5
Regarding the Inflation Reduction Act: “It is consistent with the long-standing ‘wishful thinking’ approach to climate policy, ask each nation to try to reduce their emissions and hope that the global results will add up to a solution. And then ignore the blatant scientific data showing that this approach is not working and will not work.” (Hanson)
“As Climate Talks Put Focus On Water Crisis, The Colorado River Provides A Stark Example”, Los Angeles Times, November 4, 2021.
Ibid.
“Congress Looks Set To Finally Pass Historic Climate Legislation”, July 31, 2022: “Taken as a whole, the bill is a triumph. It would be the most ambitious climate package ever passed in the U.S. and would allow the country to resume a credible role as an environmental leader.”
“Bureau of Reclamation Takes Drastic Steps at Lake Powell to Ensure Hydropower Generation”, S&P Global, Commodity Insights, May 3, 2022.
James Hansen, “June Temperature Update & The Bigger Picture”, July 29, 2022.
The days of the locusts have come. Nature is taking a deadly revenge on itself and us. In our instance, the swarming locusts that eat and destroy all living creatures in their paths, are ourselves, eight billion humans who have eaten, consumed, exploited and are in the process of committing matricide on the most generous parent: mother Earth. It is a self-imposed punishment, a collective suicide, the mindless destruction of our own life source. We are, indeed, the locusts.
Some of us, the ones climate-change deniers call climate alarmists, saw the Dead End signs coming for quite some time. For more than a decade we were called prophets of doom and gloom for ringing the alarm of Dying by Two Degrees. But most didn’t, or couldn’t, pay attention and listen, as they were trapped in the mindset paralysis of business as usual, or in the lunacy of denial of a human cause of climate collapse, expressed by statements such as, climate has always changed. Recently, while confronted with such a denier, torch bearer of such loony Godspell, I told him that climate has always changed as much as the earth is flat.
It’s funny how quickly things can change when a large portion of the northern hemisphere, especially arrogant Europe and North America, have been baking in temperatures around or above 40 degrees Celsius (104 F). Wait! This is not supposed to happen to us; we are for the most part melanin challenged! We don’t deserve this, right during our sacrosanct summer holidays! It is our birthright as the main vectors of an industrial civilization, which is killing us all, to burn more fuel, simply for our enjoyment, in planes, boats and cars. Soon, the melanin challenged will receive a lesson in humility from the brown and black people of the global south. As extreme heat and deserts move north, the melanin challenged should learn the Tuaregs’ survival ways.
Everyone should see that all of it is going south, upside down and in absolute turmoil. Don’t deny it or make projections. No. We do not need any more studies by climatologists. It is not coming, it is already here! The stench of decomposing corpses, big and small, lingers about. At 47 degrees Celsius (117 F), birds drop dead from the sky. What we need is worldwide emergency mitigation to save what we can and whom we can: to build countless Noah’s arks for the climate collapse. The arks could be small subterranean cities under the wasteland scorched by the deadly sun. Those cities could possibly be connected by tunnels, or survivors more simply could rediscover cave dwelling like our ancestors. By then, drinkable water will be the most valuable commodity.
When the air is so hot and thick that innocent birds and flying insects, collateral damage of human follies, fall from the sky, you know that the stench of death has landed among us. It is announcing the coming of our own extinction. How can any human be so stupid as to think that the death of the entire ecosystem supporting us, being wild animals, or trees and plants, may be restored through technological fixes?
In life or death the blunt power of nature prevails over us. After almost two months of temperatures above 100 F and no rain, even mature trees like majestic sycamores or oaks suffer. Dead leaves cover the ground as if it is autumn. Old sycamores even shed their barks leaving their white trunks exposed to the brutal heat. Trees and animals are crying for help! The few of us who care try to help, mostly in vain. The toys of the techies have no power over any of it. No apps will miraculously shade the sun or bring the salvation of rain.
Modern human’s quasi worship of technology, and so called progress, since the industrial revolution of the mid-nineteen century, is what has triggered the explosion of this rage of the machine: the imperative to extract and burn fossil fuels, or consume everything like voracious beasts. Some 170 years of an abysmal race into this madness, and we have become the lobotomized half man and half machine cyborg of the Apocalypse.
One can wonder why we, as a species, have not set up a giant and global Marshal-like plan to mitigate the climate collapse that is unfolding in real time? Trillions of dollars could be diverted from military and fossil-fuel extraction spending. The reason is simple. All major world powers are in reality run by the industrial military, energy and tech complex, including Russia and China. Therefore, even with the prospect of global destruction for all, the promise of immense profit for very few still prevails. The time of the Apocalypse has come. It is here right now. We won’t have Jesus to come back for the Rapture or some generous billionaire comic book heroes to spirit us away to their space stations. The hell on Earth of extreme weather, droughts, fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, famines and almost unlivable conditions will be our legacy to coming generations. The likely rule will be a survival of the fittest in brutal and primitive hunter and gatherer semi-nomadic tribal communities. The old, the frail, and the sick will not stand a chance.
The Horn of Africa (HoA) is once again being battered by climate change induced drought, with the UN report, over “20 million people, and at least 10 million children facing severe drought conditions.”
Desperately needed support from UN agencies (World Food Programme (WFP), UNHCR and UNICEF) is limited due to lack of donations from member states. WFP have been forced to halve food rations due to the “lowest levels of funding on record”. Leading to what UNICEF describes as a “humanitarian catastrophe……. Urgent aid is needed to prevent parts of the region sliding into famine.” The disruption caused to supply chains and food production by the war in Ukraine is adding to the crisis, dramatically increasing food prices and limiting availability.
The region’s agriculture has been decimated by year on year rising temperatures and decreasing rainfall. Food insecurity, in a region with some of the poorest people in the world, is intensifying with the threat of famine looming, and food prices have sky rocketed. Livestock have perished – in Ethiopia alone 2.1 million livestock have died and 22 million are at risk, emancipated with little or no milk production – the primary source of nutrition for young children.
Child malnutrition is increasing and huge numbers of people are being displaced. Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti and Eritrea are all impacted by the most severe drought in forty years.
The effect on rural communities, and children specifically, is devastating. UNICEF estimate 2 million children are in need of treatment for “severe acute malnutrition,” particularly in Ethiopia and in the arid lands of Northern Kenya and Somalia, where the drought is most severe.
As well as decimating food production, drought is intensifying the water crisis in the area – with, the UN say, 8.5 million people (including 4.2 million children) facing water shortages. In Ethiopia, where around 60 per cent of the population (roughly 70 million) do not have access to clean drinking water with or without a drought, the situation is dire. Streams, wells and ponds, that people living in remote areas rely on, are either drying up or are completely parched. Such sterile water sources become contaminated by animal and human waste, increasing the risk of water borne diseases, cholera and diarrhea, which are the leading causes of death among children under five in the country; cases of measles have also been increasing at alarming rates in Ethiopia and Somalia, resulting in some cases in deaths.
Desperate families are being driven to extreme measures to try to survive, with hundreds of thousands leaving their homes in search of food, water, fresh pasture for animals and assistance. This is creating and intensifying numerous issues: Access to health care, education and protection/reproductive services is made difficult, or impossible. Children are forced out of school – approximately 1.1 million; schools close (in a region overflowing with children where 15 million children are already not in school); girls and women are made more vulnerable to physical coercion, sexual/child labor and forced marriage; displacement of persons explodes. Already a massive problem throughout the region, specifically in Ethiopia, where, according to UNHCR (as of March 2022) “an estimated 5,582,000 persons” were internally displaced due to armed conflict and natural disasters.
“Natural” disaster no longer natural
As the world heats up due to greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) pouring into the lower atmosphere, the inevitability of extreme weather patterns including drought increases.
Like forest fires, heat waves and monsoon rains, drought was historically regarded as a “natural disaster”, but the frequency and intensity of such events is no longer “natural” and must now be understood to be man-made. Far from being freak happenings, such catastrophic climate explosions are becoming commonplace, and despite producing virtually none of the poisons that are driving climate change, those most affected are the poorest people in the poorest countries or regions.
The seed of the deadly drought in the HoA was planted and fed by the behavior of people in the US, in Europe, Japan and other rich countries. It is the materialistic lifestyles of wealthy developed nations (and disproportionately the richest people within such countries), rooted in irresponsible consumerism (including diets centered around animal food produce), that has caused and is perpetuating the environmental crisis. But to their utter shame the governments of such nations refuse to honor their debt, their responsibility to clean up the mess. On the contrary, because economic health is dependent on rapacious consumption, they continue to promote modes of living that are deepening the crisis.
Commitments made 12 years ago in 2009 by rich nations to give 100 billion USD a year to developing countries are yet to be fulfilled. In 2019 a high of 79.6 billion USD was reached, 71% of which was in the form of loans. Loans – for some of the poorest nations in the world, to mitigate the impact of climate change that they haven’t caused; loans that enable donor nations political and economic influence, perpetuating post-colonial exploitation and control, and ensuring Sub-Saharan Africa remains impoverished, and, more or less enslaved.
Imperial powers have outsourced the most severe effects of climate change; they either refuse to act at all or offer limited support with strings to countries and regions most at risk. At the V20 Climate Vulnerable Finance Summit in July 2021, heads of state demanded that higher income nations do more to meet their promises and called for grants not loans. UN Secretary General, António Guterres said that in order to “rebuild trust, developed countries must clarify now how they will effectively deliver $100 billion in climate finance annually to the developing world, as was promised over a decade ago.” But four months later at COP 26 in Glasgow, where climate finance was a primary issue under consideration, once again the rich nations failed. Failed to honor their word, failed to act responsibly in the interests of poorer nations, failed to stand for the collective good and the health of the planet. Shameful, but predictable. Politicians cannot be and, in fact, are not trusted; national and international climate pledges should be legally binding and enforceable.
Climate change and the environmental emergency more broadly is a global crisis; as such, it requires a global approach. This has been said many times, and yet national self-interest and political weakness continue to dominate the policies and priorities of western governments/politicians. If this crisis, which is the greatest issue humanity has ever faced, is to be met, and healing is to begin in earnest, this narrow nationalistic approach must change. As with other major areas of concern – armed conflict, inequality, displacement of persons, poverty – united, coordinated global policies and a powerful United Nations (UN) are urgently needed, but the single most significant change that is required is a fundamental shift in attitudes; a move away from tribalism, competition and division to cooperation and unity. A recognition, not intellectually or theoretically, but actually, that humanity is one, that we form part of a collective life that is the planet.
As the UN has said the men women and children in the Horn of Africa whose lives are being ravaged by drought need “the world’s attention and action, now.” Sustained action rooted in the realization of our individual and collective environmental responsibility. This requires governments to honor commitments: the $100m billion mitigation fund (as grants not loans), and making up the cumulative shortfall; it means funding the UN properly so emergency humanitarian aid can be supplied to those currently affected by drought in the HoA; it means supporting countries most at risk of man-made climate change in drawing up plans and initiating short and long term projects to minimize where possible the social and economic impact of extreme weather events; and individually, it means living thoughtful, conscious lives, in which the effect on the natural world is at the forefront of daily decisions, including diet, shopping and travel. It is our world, the people displaced by drought in Ethiopia and Somalia are our brethren, and we are all responsible for them.
