SOUTHWEST UNITED STATES - After two decades in which the region has experienced protracted drought conditions, the Colorado River—a waterway sustaining 40 million people and one of the largest agricultural economies in the world—is running at a deficit. And a new plan to better conserve the region’s scant water resources may mean more water-saving in the short term to ensure long-term sustainability.
According to a report from NPR, authorities along the Upper Colorado River are currently focusing on a plan involving boosting snowpack with weather modification, improvements to existing reservoir management, and creating a water bank in Lake Powell. Simultaneously, authorities lower along the basin—in Arizona, California, and Nevada—are currently working on incentives to conserve water.
“Take Lake Mead,” the Upper Colorado River Commission's James Eklund told NPR. “More is being taken out than comes into it. Like your bank account, if you do that over a sustained period you will run a deficit, and if you're talking about water for 40 million people and economies that are massive—[the] fifth largest economy in the world [is what] the Colorado River Basin represents—then that's significant.”
The news source also quoted Jennifer Pitt, Colorado River Project Director for the National Audubon Society, who noted that, without modifications to current policy, reservoirs like Lake Mead and Lake Powell—the second largest reservoir in the U.S.—could become “dead pools,” effectively cutting the river off to inhabitants and economies downstream.
To read more about the efforts to save the Colorado River, including more on growers in the region and the fear of federal intervention, read NPR’s story in full, here.
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