Colorado River Water Plan Postpones Reckoning With a Drier Future

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Or sign-in if you have an account.(Bloomberg) — The US government released a plan on Friday that for now staves off catastrophic cuts to the water supply in Arizona, California and Nevada as the Colorado River climate crisis leaves reservoirs at record lows, threatening a resource supporting 40 million people and more than $1 trillion in gross domestic product. 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Experts have described the proposed curtailments as a short-term fix amid rising temperatures and plummeting precipitation. But the plan noted that cuts nearly twice as large as those advocated by the states could be necessary. Get the latest headlines, breaking news and columns.By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.The next issue of Top Stories will soon be in your inbox.We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again“Such reductions would devastate Arizona’s water users and its economy,” the Arizona Department of Water Resources said in a statement. Sharon Megdal, director of the Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona, said she expects litigation over the plan if it ultimately orders bigger cuts than the states proposed.A century-old compact divides the Colorado River’s flow among four states in the upper basin — Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah — and the three downstream states bracing for cuts from the US Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees management of the river. “Under critically dry futures, even large and unprecedented reductions may be needed,” the agency said on Friday.Those will reverberate through the economy in the years ahead, affecting agriculture, real estate, mining and data centers. “A $1 trillion regional economy is exposed, with risks that can ripple through supply chains,” according to a May report from Bloomberg Intelligence. “Consumers across California, Arizona and Nevada may face shortages.”California produces most of the nation’s winter vegetables while Arizona is a hot spot for the AI data center boom and home to major semiconductor manufacturing facilities. Unless consumption is slashed across the seven-state basin, river flows could be so diminished by 2050 that two giant reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, would be unable to supply water or electricity to Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and other cities, according to a 2025 study. “We need a permanent reduction in demand and that is really the only path we have to stabilizing the Colorado River,” said Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University.With the region suffering a historic 26-year drought, the states have been unable to agree on a replacement for an existing accord on handling water shortages that expires this year. That’s forced the Bureau of Reclamation to step in with a plan to recalculate water allocations every two years for the next decade. Colorado River flows have declined 20% since 2000 and 35% since 2020, according to Brad Udall, a senior water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University. In 2025, the states consumed 978 trillion more gallons of water than flowed through the river, further draining the reservoirs. This advertisement has not loaded yet.This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.After record-low Colorado snowpack this year, Lake Powell is at 23% of capacity, while Lake Mead stands at 27%. Rising temperatures and more frequent heat waves are also accelerating evaporation, with the reservoirs currently losing more than 230 billion gallons annually, a deficit not deducted from the states’ annual water allocations.“Clearly this evaporative load is going up,” Udall said at a recent seminar on the Colorado River crisis. “At some point, this becomes existential for water users, at which point the solutions become really, really hard.” If water levels fall another 150 feet, the reservoirs will become “dead pools,” unable to generate electricity or pump water. The Bureau of Reclamation has projected a decline of as much as 40% in hydropower generation at Lake Mead by this fall. The agency estimates that after December, the Glen Canyon Dam at Lake Powell could cease generating electricity altogether and that by March 2027, the surface of the reservoir would have fallen to a level that constrains the release of water.“It’s very likely that we’ll get to dead pool within a year to two years if this continues anything close to what we’ve been experiencing right now,” Mark Gold, a board member of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, said at the seminar. Agriculture consumes two-thirds of Colorado River water and averting dead pool may demand cuts more than twice as large as those proposed by the Bureau of Reclamation, according to Anne Castle, a former Interior Department official and a senior fellow at the University of Colorado’s Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment. “I think, very unfortunately, there are ag lands that are going to go out of production,” she said at the seminar. Arizona will absorb the largest share of the upcoming cuts due to its position at the bottom of the compact’s pecking order for water rights. Porter said the city of Phoenix relies on the Colorado River for about a third of its drinking water supply but has invested in alternative sources that should forestall shortages. Other cities, though, will be forced to rely more on already depleted aquifers, as will farmers and ranchers. “A good amount of that agriculture has turned to groundwater as an alternative supply, which is non-replenishing, and that’s really problematic for the region,” said Porter. “But getting to dead pool would be absolutely a catastrophe,” she added.Notice for the Postmedia NetworkThis website uses cookies to personalize your content (including ads), and allows us to analyze our traffic. Read more about cookies here. By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.