Land subsidence occurs when large amounts of water are withdrawn from an aquifer, leading to the compaction of soils. Over time, subsidence can reveal itself in damage on the surface — to roads, infrastructure (see the California Aqueduct), buildings and even entire communities (see Windsor Park in Las Vegas).2

But subsidence can take different forms, as the paper published last week explains. In some cases, an aquifer behaves dynamically. Land recovers once water is returned to the aquifer. But in other cases, the impacts can prove far more permanent and long-lasting, resulting in an inability of the aquifer to recover.

That latter “inelastic regime” is what the research team documented in parts of the Sacramento Valley. They write “rapid and extensive land subsidence indicates severe inelastic compaction and loss of storage capacity of the underlying aquifer system, which pose a serious threat to California’s water resources and infrastructure.”

It’s an indication of how quickly intensive pumping in a drought can affect a system. But the findings also speak to physical limits on the capacity to adapt when you are operating from a deficit. The loss of storage, a consequence of overuse, can narrow the options for recovering from overuse.

Aquifers, when sustainably managed, can act like bank accounts. That is, in wet years, precipitation (deposits) can replenish water taken out in dry years (withdrawals). But losing the physical space to store water underground can put a cap on the amount of water can be placed in the account. Christian Elliott over at the Science Reporter’s Cut has a further look at the study and offers some more meditations on subsidence.

One of the things I wanted to do here with this post was connect what happens underground with what how water is allocated on the surface.

Abridged (a wonderful nonprofit outlet in the Sacramento-area) reports that a potential reason for the rapid change in the aquifer dynamics during the 2020-22 drought was a decrease in surface water availability. “Surface water availability plays a significant factor in how much groundwater is extracted,” an assistant general manager for the Yolo County Flood Control and Water Conservation District said. “Landowners had to make a choice on what would be irrigated with groundwater versus not irrigated at all.”3

Historically, groundwater and surface water have been managed separately. But the ways in which they are connected — whether through hydrology, policy, or individual choices — are multifaceted. I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past week.

Last week, the U.S. Department of the Interior released its long-awaited framework for managing the Colorado River. The basics: The department is adopting a 10-year framework that calls for new operating plans every two years. The first plan has yet to be released but initial cuts are expected to fall on the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada — with the states upstream spared from any mandatory cuts. It’s a band-aid deal, and a potential lawsuit still looms.4

I’ll write more about the Colorado River deal after the first operating agreement is released. But what is unfolding on the Colorado River is similarly a story about the challenges of adaptation amid a loss of storage, and the loss of flexibility that comes with it. While the Colorado River’s reservoirs still have the physical capacity to fill again, one day, the conversation now is about managing their depletion.

A primary goal is to keep Lake Mead and Powell above key thresholds below which physical access to hydropower and water are threatened. The cuts help to achieve this by rebalancing demand with supply, but it will be important to see how the operating plans deal with the question of where the saved water goes and how it’s accounted for. Do the savings benefit the system as a whole?

The Colorado River story is also a groundwater story. The two are connected. For years, Arizona (and Nevada) have stored excess Colorado River water in underground aquifers as a buffer against future shortages. As the Colorado River cuts loom, cities in Arizona have started to turn to their groundwater bank. Last month, the Arizona Water Banking Authority announced that it would use groundwater to make central Arizona cities whole, for at least a year, offsetting Colorado River cuts.5

A few other stories I’m reading:

• “California’s push to limit groundwater pumping could leave small farmers in the dust,” L.A Times

• “Court rules Sonoma County must study impact of water wells on fish, Russian River,” San Francisco Chronicle

• “Studies look at “less bad” options for farmers facing groundwater cutbacks,” SJV Water

• “Hacks on U.S. water supply follow years of warnings and neglect,” New York Times

A couple of months ago, I went to an antique fair in Sacramento and came home with a few boxes of unsorted conservation papers (Sierra Club, American Alpine Club and more) from the 1960s and beyond. I found the boxes on a table, and I started talking to the vendor, who had little information about the contents, part of a larger collection of items he had picked from a storage unit he purchased.

The documents were rich in history: congressional testimony, maps, meeting minutes, pamphlets. He sold the four boxes to me for $1 each. Little by little, I’m starting to sift through them. More to come on what’s inside!

But for now, I wanted to share my excitement, tinged with a little unease. How analog it can feel to be poring over old documents, surrounded by an enormous amount of digital information and the availability of facts within seconds.

Over the past couple months, as I’ve moved deeper into book work and revisited my own research, I’ve been thinking a lot about archives, and more broadly, information and knowledge (especially as these things relate to water).

It’s a weird time to do anything involving knowledge generation. The economics of it are changing faster than we can keep up. Somehow, even the word “generation” has become loaded, with generative AI models crawling through centuries of creations.

But for all the information AI has to offer, I’ve come to the conclusion that, in many cases, it miraculously, somehow, still only peeks into our world, humanity, and shared history. For me, nothing illuminates this more than going through archival materials in person.

When I was starting as a journalist, one of the books that was important for me was James Fallows’ “Breaking the News,” a critique of the industry. In it, he discusses the “streetlight effect,” a cognitive bias that sends us searching for things in places where its the easiest, though not necessarily the most optimal.

In the example, a drunk person searches for his keys under a streetlight, even though he knows he lost his keys in a dark park nearby. He’s under the streetlight because it’s easy to go there. Journalists tend to do this, and I claim no innocence. They go where there is less friction and to trending topics where clicks are likely. This is rewarded in many ways by our attention economy, the pressures to produce content, and it is now reflected through (and amplified by) AI.

With so many calls to incorporate AI into workflows, I’ve been thinking about the cautionary streetlight metaphor. AI amplifies what we have seen under a light and it goes a step further, using existing data to interpolate and generate through the dark gaps. This can be legitimately useful in the appropriate setting. But I find it amusing when you Google something obscure and qualitative, and the AI Preview tries hard to come up with an answer, any certain answer, even if there isn’t one.

These gaps are a healthy sign. They reflect the reality that information comes from sources on the ground, not from the top down. There are things we don’t know, and some of what we don’t know has yet to actually be learned and absorbed. It’s sitting out of our peripheral view, maybe even in someone’s garage.

The boxes were a healthy and happy reminder of why, even if it feels analog or old-fashioned, the friction-filled, repetitive, and time-consuming work of documentary research still matters so much, maybe even more than ever. The truth is often messy, nuanced, and ambiguous, and it takes work to untangle data to better understand it.

That this data is distributed on the ground, in archives, in fading boxes, literal nooks and crannies, post-it notes, and letters is a feature not a bug. It takes going through these kind of documents to fill gaps and understand how we got to where we are.

In contrast to an AI search, you are not going to be guaranteed to come away from an archive with a clean and certain answer, which can be genuinely frustrating, but there is something democratizing about that, too. It means that information is spread out everywhere, even at antique fairs, and it takes work to go out and find it.

What does this have to do with water?

First, thank you for reading this far. And a fair question.

Along with other methods (interviews being a major one), documentary research can be a foundational in which you can understand how water flows and why. Much of the West, though not all, uses first-come, first-served roles to prioritize water. Under such rules, your right to use water literally hinges on historical timing and context.

The past weighs heavily on water rights.

In some cases, archival material like maps, letters, testimony, and journals can prove determinative of if you can access water, how much, and in what manner. But it goes beyond that. Archives of all sorts, whether they are sitting in a garage or are sorted at a library, provide texture, atmosphere, relational information, and a snapshot of the impulses, motivations, concerns of times, places, people, and geographies.

This is valuable in understanding water systems, because while they are governed by formal legal frameworks, they also bend to social, economic, and political pressures.

I’ve been lucky to visit a few library archives in the course of my work. I even had the special honor of being the first person to do research at the excellent UNLV Special Collections after they closed during the first COVID-19 lockdown.

The archive I visited that day focused on water in the Southwest not through the eyes of someone with power — lead negotiators of land sales and water exchanges — but from the periphery, through the lens of a devoted environmentalist. And yet that lens was immensely valuable in giving me a deeper understanding of the dynamics of the issue, far surpassing what a Google search (now AI search) could offer.

I’ve also had busts. A few years later, I visited a library to pull files on Miller & Lux, the industrial ranching corporation of the late-19th Century. I locked away my water bottle and went into the reading room. Hoping to find revealing correspondence, I sifted through painfully dull procedural telegrams. Another time, I ended up with folders of itemized receipts, and it was hard to find any immediate value.

Yet the time spent reading them did not go to waste. The cumulative impact gave me a sense of the tone, priorities, and context of a time period, which proved valuable in writing later on. I guess what I’m saying is, as I’ve been grappling with how AI should or should not be integrated into workflows, I’ve been reminded that friction often is a place where new learning happens. So on that note, never forget to keep on digging!

A week to watch on the Colorado River

This is an important week in Colorado River management. The federal government is stepping in with cuts and a shortage plan after negotiators failed to reach a consensus deal on new rules to share the over-allocated river in a drier future.

This week, the Department of Interior is expected to release a framework intended to address shortages over the next decade, according to what has been reported. That 10-year framework is expected to include re-evaluation periods every two years.

The framework leaves open the possibility that states could still reach a long-term deal to reconcile the river’s historic overallocation of water rights on paper that do not match the realities of a shrinking annual supply. But, for years, the states have been threatening to take those core issues to court. And the framework may not forestall the possibility of a lawsuit among the seven states and water users in the basin.

The L.A. Times has a good piece on what you might expect:

The Times has learned that federal officials have agreed with an offer made earlier this year by California, Arizona and Nevada to reduce what they take from the river by at least 3.2 million acre-feet between now and the end of 2028.

Under the plan, California will cut its use of Colorado River water by about 12% through 2028, Arizona will take about 31% less and Nevada 28% less, according to two officials at state and local agencies who spoke anonymously since details of an announcement are still being finalized.

It will also be important to watch how these cuts are funded, the nature of the cuts (temporary vs. permanent), and the role of federal funding. With cuts in the past, Lake Mead has served as something of a bank account, where water can be saved to benefit the system as a whole and individual water users. It’s worth watching what happens to conserved water in the system, and how it is credited and accounted for.

POLITICO’s Annie Snider reports on a last-minute idea from the federal government to claim control over conserved water, allowing them to move water conserved from one state to another, “prompting mass anxiety among negotiators.”

If you have the time, this is an excellent breakdown on the state of play.

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A few articles I’m reading:

• The West’s snow drought was bad. A warmer climate made it more likely. (KUNC)

• Arizona’s San Pedro River runs dry for the second time in 122 years (Arizona Republic)

• California Scientists Find Early Warning Sign of Irreversible Groundwater Damage (KQED)

• Beavers in Las Vegas? A secret garden in Sin City spotlights river restoration success (Nevada Current)

Back as a reporter in 2019, learning more about the hydrology of this area of Nevada was a big part of what got me interested in groundwater-surface water interactions, a big theme of my book and what still motivates some of the quesitons I’m looking into today. As always, let me know if you have any thoughts, feedbacks, or ideas for future posts. — Daniel

An important water case is underway in Nevada that is fundamentally about the ability of regulators to reconcile the overallocation of legal rights to use water (a common issue in many watersheds) with the realities of supply.

The case background: For years, Coyote Springs Investment, LLC wanted to pump groundwater for a new town (think thousands of homes, shops and schools) in the desert outside of Las Vegas. For years, there had been questions about groundwater availability in the area and a need for more information about aquifer dynamics. In 2020, based on the available data, Nevada regulators reduced the limits for how much water was available to sustainably pump in the area, effectively cutting the developers off from their ability to access groundwater they once counted on for the new town.

The developer sued the state for $1.5 billion, claiming a taking of its property without compensation. Six years after the lawsuit was filed, it is now going to trial. It’s a major case because a decision in favor of Coyote Springs could constrain the state’s ability to limit overuse in similar situations where there are more rights to use water than there is water available. As attorney Debbie Leonard told the Review Journal, “it’s going to be a free-for-all in terms of payouts from the state, and the state can’t afford to pay.”1

In all the discussion though, it’s worth considering why regulators reduced the limits on pumping to begin with, because it speaks to the difficulty of updating water rights to reflect scientific knowledge. Importantly, the decision did not come from nowhere. It was driven by the impacts to water rights and access on the other side of pumping.

To understand those impacts though, we have to talk about the unique hydrology of a little-discussed tributary of the Colorado River, the spring-dependent Muddy River.

The Muddy River is fed by a series of springs, which emerge from a complex regional groundwater flow system that spans roughly 50,000 acres and supports habitat for the endangered Moapa dace. The water that discharges from the springs is also valuable for where it ends up: in the Muddy River. The Muddy River flows to Lake Mead, and adds to the Colorado River, the main drinking supply for Las Vegas. As a result, the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which serves water to Las Vegas, bought priority senior water rights on the Muddy River to supplement its Colorado River allocation.2

Because the aquifer is connected to the Muddy River through the springs, excessive groundwater pumping threatens to reduce spring flow, thereby impairing habitat for the rare fish and depleting flows of the Muddy River, including those priority senior rights. So, “cutting” one right, not in use, was seen as a way to protect existing rights.

On the other side of groundwater pumping were potential cuts to senior water users, a curtailment not by regulation, but the physics of how the aquifer and river connect.

Since state water law is meant to protects existing rights, “first in right, first in time,” the state modified its sustainable limit in 2020 to protect the springs and senior rights.

The state’s goal was to bring a disconnected water law in line with physical realities based on the best-available science, evaluated through expert testimony and technical reports.3 But in making that modification, the state also functionally changed the way rights may be prioritized, ordered, and managed in the groundwater system, known as the Lower White River Flow System. And a value of water rights comes from how they are ordered and prioritized. Overall, changes to the limit meant there were far more water rights on paper to pump groundwater than there was actually water available.

The legality of the ruling, upheld by the Supreme Court in 2024, effectively halted Coyote Springs’ plans to pump, and its development plans.4 Coyote Springs accused the state of an unconstitutional taking of its property and filed suit shortly after.5

Now the case is going to trial. The case could have broad implications because so many similar situations exist in Nevada and the West, particularly as states seek to apply science as a guide to recognize groundwater and surface water as connected.

Beyond the politics of the case — and this development has a long, winding backstory — the dispute reflects how practically challenging it is to deal with overallocation when water rights are so imbalanced with actual supply, when those once promised water rights have power, money, resources, and legal arguments to fight in the courts.

What happens when scientific understanding evolves and improves?

Can state regulators limit water rights when there are undesirable results?

These are all important questions in the Muddy River. Importantly, in Nevada (like in many Western states), all water belongs to the public, and “administers water rights on the public's behalf.” In this case, it is not only the public’s interest that is at stake, but, on the other side of groundwater pumping, the senior rights of another user.

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I’ve emphasized the connection to the Colorado River here because this conflict has echoes of what is facing the basin at large. Not necessarily the takings part. But the reality is that there are more rights to use the Colorado River than there is water to go around, pitting existing uses against efforts to use water rights promised on paper. We now recognize that supply is less than what was once estimated, an issue made worse by climate change. But that recognition is only a first step. The hard part are the cuts. Yet cuts are coming, whether they are forced by physics, regulators, or are negotiated.

There is a similar physical reality to the nature of cuts on the Colorado River. Even as the seven states in the basin — who have failed to negotiate cuts — await regulatory action from the federal government, physical constraints with balancing two record low reservoirs not built for these conditions are revealing themselves as additional players how water could be distributed across the basin, with many uncertainties.6

The Muddy River, with the Virgin River, flows into Lake Mead’s Overton Arm, which has shrunk as a result of an imbalance between supply and use. It is a fitting name for the lake feature. As journalist and author Zak Podmore wrote a few months ago, “the Overton Window that frames what’s permissible in the discourse around Colorado River management has not shifted as rapidly as the Overton Arm of Lake Mead, even as recognition spreads that the river is headed into a new phase of crisis in 2026.”7

A few other stories I’m watching:

• Forget Western water war: Local managers choose partnership: Circle of Blue’s Brett Walton sees how communities are adapting to water cuts on the local level — where the risk is often concentrated — and finds a story that complicates the narrative of everyone in conflict with everyone else.

  • “At the local level, water managers are collaborating to ensure residents and businesses have adequate water supplies. They are signing multiparty deals and pursuing joint projects to share resources and keep water flowing to homes and businesses. Such dealmaking is not a remedy to all that ails the basin. But it is viewed as essential in a time of deep climate uncertainty and anxiety.”

• ‘Fiscal cliff’ for drinking water fixes: Californians with bad tap water could have a longer wait. The L.A. Times’ Ian James reports on major cuts in funding for a program meant to pay for interim solutions to provide clean, accessible, and affordable drinking water.

  • “At a meeting in Sacramento last week, state officials presented estimates that grant money to help communities get clean drinking water, including by drilling new wells or connecting to nearby water systems, could fall from $941 million in the current fiscal year to about $103 million in 2027-28.”

• Bulk water hauling for residential uses on the rise in Santa Fe County. “Data from the Santa Fe County Utilities Division — assembled by an incoming doctoral student at Stanford University who grew up in Santa Fe County — shows monthly residential use at the county’s water filling station near the jail has spiked over the last decade. Water hauling for residential uses hit just over 800,000 gallons in July of 2024 and 2025 respectively, up from roughly 300,000 gallons used that month in 2011.” More from the Santa Few New Mexican’s Cormac Dodd.

• Thousands of native cutthroat trout return to Lake Tahoe waters, from Eli Ramos at Abridged. The Washoe Tribe partnered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to re-introduce 2,000 native Lahontan cutthroat trout into Lake Tahoe, part of broad decadeslong recovery efforts for a species that was extirpated from the Truckee River watershed in the first half of the 20th Century. Thanks to Amanda Royal over at Earth Hope for flagging this story.

• Arizona regulators are approving an application to increase contaminant limits for a uranium mine near the Grand Canyon, despite increases in arsenic levels and concerns about the regional aquifer, Inside Climate News’ Wyatt Myskow and Maya McDaniel report.

• What would you give for rain? New Mexico author and journalist Laura Paskus writes about all that’s left in her reach of the Rio Grande — with an important call to action for us to think about how we prioritize and manage water. “I know we can do more than expect wildlife to live on the dregs of what we think we deserve. We can pay attention to what’s happening and hold elected leaders and institutions accountable. We can make changes — including big changes.”

Starting in January this year, I helped facilitate a graduate hydrology seminar at UC Davis on the Colorado River with two incredible collaborators, Kira Waldman and Lindsay Murdoch. Each week, we invited a speaker from the watershed to offer their insights on the basin’s past, present, and as best anyone can guess, future. Facilitating the course brought me back to my reporting roots. One of the best parts about being a journalist is getting to hear from many perspectives and then finding connections and contrasts across different disciplines. It was rewarding to share that with students.

The course was also a important reminder of how distributed and siloed knowledge can be across watersheds, even large transboundary basins like the Colorado River. It was telling that many speakers we invited wanted to sit in on sessions to hear from their colleagues. It underscored the need for water education to embrace what we call “a tributary approach,” and likely the need for more platforms to talk candidly about some of these issues. More in the post below. A big thank you to the California Water Blog for publishing our piece and its editor Christine A. Parisek.

I’ll be back with some news updates next week, but a few stories that caught my attention:

• This is a major one for desert groundwater watchers: Trump administration approves Cadiz project in the Mojave, the L.A. Times’ Ian James reports. Last week, Cadiz announced an deal to sell the water to an Arizona water agency.

• A $1.5 billion groundwater takings case is going to trial in Las Vegas. More from the Las Vegas Review Journal’s Alan Halaly on what’s at stake. This is a case about fallout from a decision to manage a regional groundwater flow system that discharges to springs, which form the headwaters of the Muddy River, a Colorado River tributary. It’s also a case about prior appropriation. It’s all connected.

• Supercharged bubbles are threatening Lake Powell’s dam. Federal officials are battling to sustain water levels, the Colorado Sun’s Shannon Mullane reports.

• Arizona cities banked Colorado River water for decades. How much will they be allowed to get back? Interesting piece on uncertainty around the rules for sharing and taking water out of a groundwater bank, KUNC’s Alex Hager reports.

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A tributary approach to learning the Colorado River

By Kira J.Z. Waldman, Daniel Rothberg, and Lindsay Murdoch

. . .

A groundwater researcher, a water modeler, and a policy nerd walk into a gravel bar (on the Yampa River)… and decide to facilitate a seminar (at UC Davis)

. . .

If watersheds are dynamic systems, changing in flow and form over time, understanding them is an exercise in moving between unique perspectives, values, and priorities. Or so we — a groundwater researcher, a water modeler, and a policy nerd — quickly learned when joining other students and professionals on rafts to paddle the Yampa River (Figure 1). This trip was organized as the fourth iteration of the Climate Adaptation Science Academy Experiential Learning Expedition (CASA ELE), a program led by Secure Water Future with the goal of bringing together an interdisciplinary group of researchers studying water in the West. After exploring the Upper Colorado River Basin with a series of site visits, we spent four days rafting one of the West’s few remaining free-flowing rivers: The Yampa. The more miles we paddled, the more we learned, and the more we realized how little we knew. Answers gave way to more questions, which led to more answers, prompting more questions. It was the most motivating headache any of us have ever had.

A tributary is a stream, river, or glacier that feeds into a larger water body, contributing to its overall flow and expanding it through connections and confluences (Langbein et al., 1947). Just as tributaries expand a river’s flow through connection, the more time we spent in the field, the more we came to see how the basin itself is shaped by a convergence of knowledge streams. Each perspective we gained, during site visits and rafting, added volume, direction and complexity. Together, we saw how these physical and informational tributaries helped form the scaffolding that informs the current state of the Basin (Colorado River crisis fails to force deal from states).

When we got off the river, our headaches had turned into heartaches, understanding the crisis facing communities and ecosystems in the Colorado River Basin. Legal rights to use the Colorado River far exceed actual supply, a problem amplified over the past two decades as a changing climate has contributed to significant declines in streamflow. We had more questions than answers, and we wanted to examine them further in the classroom. But in a dynamic, interconnected, and variable setting — with knowledge distributed across the West — how do you undam knowledge to learn about a whole Basin?

Tributaries of knowledge

The Colorado River supplies water to about 40 million people, as well as critical aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. From its headwaters to the delta, the watershed spans two countries, seven U.S. states and 30 federally-recognized tribal nations (Record of decision for the near-term Colorado River operations supplemental environmental impact statement). The Basin is home to irrigators, water managers, policymakers, lawyers, and researchers across varied geographies that range from the Alpine Rockies to the Sonoran Desert. Although the river is one of the largest in the Southwest, it is a primary example of living with global water scarcity (Madani, K. 2026). No one person or group holds all the answers.

As the new water year began and the fall quarter rolled in, the three of us met for a post-river libation at our usual watering hole in Davis, CA. What started as a casual beer among graduate school friends quickly turned into a deep dive into the unfolding dynamics of the basin and ideas for a graduate seminar. Dunloe Brewery sits over 600 miles northwest of the canal that delivers Colorado River water to farmers in the Imperial Valley at the southern edge of the state. This distance proved irrelevant. Central Valley water management decisions are balanced with expected water from the Colorado River. When there are bad years on the Colorado River, Southern California relies more on deliveries from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the same water used for our beer. When there are good years in Northern California, Southern California can leave water in the Colorado River system, bolstering regional resilience (When the Delta is stable, the Colorado River is stronger). We nursed our motivation-fueled headaches the following morning — residual from both the Yampa’s questions and the night before — by opening a Google Doc titled Colorado River at a Crossroads: Graduate Student Seminar. Rather than trying to answer these questions ourselves, we wanted to build a space where we might expand, discuss, and complicate what we ourselves were still processing by moving across the basin’s many knowledge tributaries.

When our class of 18 students met in January 2026, the Colorado River Basin was facing an emergency and a looming deadline. Over the past two decades, the Colorado River has seen record-low hydrology and total basin reservoir storage (Schmidt et al., 2023). As the snowpack worsened over the course of the winter, projections for inflow into Lake Powell neared record lows. At the same time, the existing rules for balancing the river’s many reservoirs are set to expire at the end of the year, and the river’s top negotiators were deadlocked on a consensus-based agreement. When we met for our weekly two-hour seminar, there were always new developments to discuss before our guest speakers arrived on Zoom to give us an hour-long presentation on their information tributary. When our speakers arrived, more often than not, they posed as many questions as they had answers. We were all learning in real-time, even the experts.

Bringing the river to the classroom

Speaker selection intentionally emphasized disciplinary, demographic, and geographic diversity, reflecting the complexity of the system itself. As the quarter progressed, contributions accumulated, converged, and often conflicted, mirroring the depth and complexity of the system we were piecing together. In this way, students moved downriver through an evolving watershed of perspectives that expanded the size and order of our shared “river” of knowledge.

Our seminar brought together students with varied experiences, from hydrology to road ecology. Some knew a lot about the Colorado River. Some knew very little. We encouraged students to apply their own expertise to grapple with the future of the Colorado River — and what it represents for our region — alongside us. Together we asked:

1. How do Colorado River negotiations reflect broader water access challenges?

2. How can systems thinking be applied to integrate diverse, and often competing, perspectives from differently-situated communities, balancing contemporary needs and values with historical commitments that dictate water allocations?

3. How does inclusion affect outcomes in fights over water? What does equity and fairness look like in a water system where significant cuts are required?

To engage these questions, the course pulled in diverse perspectives that emboldened students to probe deeply and challenge ideas. Students moved beyond understanding concepts in isolation and considered how their knowledge could be used, how it could inform questions in future classes, shape perspectives, and guide engagement. Over time, knowledge shifted from something to absorb to something to wrestle with, as the class revisited ideas, analyzed contradictions, and refined our thinking through discussion and reflection.

This transformation was most visible toward the end of the course, when students moved from absorbing to engaging critically, culminating in a 50-minute Q&A conversation with JB Hamby, Chairman of the Colorado River Board of California and the state’s Colorado River Commissioner. As the state’s top negotiator, Hamby is charged with representing California’s position in closed-door interstate talks over how to share the river. Students came prepared and facilitated the discussion, confidently asking tough questions that challenged assumptions and scrutinized status-quo governance. In other words, they held their own at the table.

Asking better questions

At the same time, the process revealed its own limitations. While certain perspectives grew stronger, particularly those grounded in systems thinking and interdisciplinary exchange, others remained underrepresented, underscoring that even as our collective understanding expanded, it did not yet capture the full breadth of voices and streams and creeks shaping the basin. In this way, the course was not about arriving at answers, but about learning how to navigate a system that rewards continued engagement. With significant interest from students, we decided to extend the seminar into spring quarter, focusing on special topics including the Salton Sea and the proposed undamming of Glen Canyon.

Teaching this course reshaped how we see ourselves as both facilitators and water scholars, less as transmitters of knowledge and more as conveners of perspectives in a fragmented system. Bringing together voices across sectors and geographies made clear how siloed information in the Colorado River Basin can be, and how rare it is to create spaces where those divides are intentionally merged. That realization was echoed by our speakers themselves, many of whom expressed curiosity about one another’s perspectives, highlighting the need for more integrative forums like this one.

The major takeaway was not just understanding the Basin’s physical or legal complexity, but recognizing how complexity is partially produced and sustained through disconnected knowledge systems. Perspectives shifted notably at key inflection points, when moving from foundational hydrology into governance, from Upper to Lower Basin tensions, and especially during discussions of Tribal water rights and binational dynamics. These moments disrupted simplified narratives and forced students to sit with contradiction, revealing that the “story” of the Colorado River is not singular, but negotiated, layered, and evolving. And the story is a bellwether for water futures across the arid and semi-arid West.

About the Authors

Kira J.Z. Waldman – the groundwater researcher

Kira J.Z. Waldman is a PhD Candidate in the Hydrologic Sciences Graduate Group at UC Davis, where she studies groundwater flow and quality, managed aquifer recharge, and the behavior of contaminants under increasingly variable hydrologic conditions. She is passionate about teaching hydrology through place-based, field-centered learning and helping students navigate curiosity, complexity, and purpose in the water world. When Kira is not thinking about groundwater, you can usually find her rafting or hiking along rivers in her beloved home state of California, although, admittedly, even then she somehow still ends up thinking about hyporheic exchange.

Daniel Rothberg – the policy nerd

Daniel Rothberg graduated with an M.S. in Environmental Policy and Management at UC Davis. He is starting a PhD at UC Berkeley in the fall, focused on researching groundwater policy in the West, the role of hydrologic science in decision-making processes, and gaps in water law around equity and access. Prior to graduate school, Daniel worked as an environmental journalist writing for The Nevada Independent and other outlets. Daniel sees stories as a way to better understand our complex world and the many ways that water connects us. He still sends out dispatches about water in a Substack called Invisible Waters.

Lindsay Murdoch – the water modeler

Lindsay Murdoch is a PhD Candidate in Water Resources Engineering and a student researcher at the Center for Watershed Sciences. Her work is application-focused, integrating modeling, planning, and decision support for environmental flow management. Before UC Davis, Lindsay worked as a coordinator for a peer-to-peer learning network for watershed restoration practitioners in the arid West

Further Reading

Colorado River Science Wiki is a collaborative clearinghouse for scientific research, datasets, tools, and syntheses related to Colorado River Basin management, designed to support researchers, decision-makers, and the broader public.

The CASA ELE Yampa crew recently authored a paper on experiential water education and interdisciplinary learning: Cliburn et al. (2026) , Cultivating Collaborative Water Leaders: The Power of Experiential Learning, Journal of the American Water Resources Association. https://doi.org/10.1111/1752-1688.70123

Looking to do a deep dive? “Essential books about the Colorado River” from Big Pivots.

The Colorado River Research Group (featuring many of our excellent speakers!!) is an independent interdisciplinary collaborative, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Law, that regularly publishes papers on topics of basinwide importance.

Developers have not done themselves many favors, both in their rhetoric and in terms of their siting decisions. Many projects begin with nondisclosure agreements, then obfuscate when the public asks legitimate questions. Then there is where data centers are looking to build. A new Guardian analysis finds “about two-thirds of upcoming datacenters, which typically require a large amount of water to operate, are set to be built in places that have been among the driest in the country over the past year.”

Data centers require water for cooling, and that use, like many water uses, depends a lot on the local context. For one, water consumption can vary depending on cooling technology, decisions about energy use, and seasonal temperatures. In the aggregate, it’s true that data centers make up a much smaller water demand than agriculture.

But whether or not we have enough total water nationally to meet the total projected data center demand is obscures the fact that these issues play out on the local level, affecting infrastructure and the distribution of water at the local level. It’s similar to other types of industrial development (e.g., a power plant, a mine, a bottling facility).

So what is driving the concern, the more than 100 moratoriums, and water’s role in it? Local issues and contexts. Consider a sampling of voices from recent stories:

• From NPR on Project Jupiter in New Mexico: "Being that we're in a drought, and then to allow a project like this to use that much water," Estrada says, "the fear is that we're going to run out, not only for us that live here but the farmers."

• From Grist on Project Stratos in Utah on the urban heat-island and the Great Salt Lake: “What happens if you deposit that much energy continuously into a topography like this?” Davies wondered. “Right at the north end of the Great Salt Lake, a watershed that’s in collapse. A high-desert environment? A valley?”

• From the Nevada Current on data centers in an over-allocated groundwater basin: “I think the question to this board is ‘how many acre feet as a board member would you be willing to give up of Pahrump’s water to a data center’,” said Lach. “Data centers can work in certain parts of the country, I just don’t see why when you have our water problem, why Basin 162 would be a place to do it.”

Like many water stories, it’s about the water, yes. But the intensity of the data-center backlash and high levels of engagement (in Utah, residents filed ~4,000 water protests against a high-profile project) also reflects much deeper issues about our economy.

It’s a reminder that water decisions are not only about water but are often are a lens through which we discuss larger questions, with social and political dimensions about who gets access to public resources, who bears negative costs, who reaps benefits, and how changes in water use affect tax bases, land use, and the trajectory of communities.

In some cases, companies have pledged to fund water projects and invest in needed upgrades in water. Some companies have bought existing water water rights so as not to add to water overuse, maybe even reduce it. Yet, in this movement of water and in these changes to land use, there remain many concerns. Out-of-state, profit-driven companies answer to whom? Boards that don’t live in the community? AI demand?

“You can’t drink data.” AI is moving faster than our ability to grapple with it socially and politically, and this story is about that too, just reflected through the lens of water, which in the West, is often shaped by booms and busts. “I keep trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, but this has all the hallmarks of an out-of-state megaproject with little concern for the local community,” said an ecologist with Grow the Flow, a group formed to save the Great Salt Lake and has raised concerns over Project Stratos.

Reading these stories, and seeing how communities were discussing these data center projects reminded me of interviewing sources for stories about mining. Similarly, you had faraway companies who made decisions about water that directly strained local resources. There were concerns about the cycles of booms and busts (What if mineral prices drop? What if the AI bubble bursts?). There were concerns about accountability and a lack of transparency. Concerns about the distribution of benefits and costs? Concerns about whether what is offered and embedded in our tax codes or regulatory policies was fair. Some of the companies were responsive to these concerns, offering significant Community Benefit Agreements. Some companies were less responsive.

At times, these projects also confused what seem to be an ossified politics, producing coalitions that brought together groups traditionally unaligned on other issues. It was never about water use in the aggregate (mines, in total, also do not consume as much water as agriculture), but about the specific local impacts, which could be extensive.

There’s a lot to unpack here. But for now, I will end with an excerpt from essay on AI, water and much more, by the dean of California water chroniclers, Mark Arax, who makes these parallels explicit, drawing a connection between AI and the legacy of mineral extraction, an export of the Golden State that has never really gone away:

Hydraulic mining, the state’s first invention sold to the world, had blasted out an immense crater in the Sierra Nevada, a desecration that let loose a torrent of environmental ruin. In a landmark decision, a judge shut down the mining industry in 1884. The crater, a symbol of California creation and destruction, was declared a state historic park.

But the fever of gold mining did not pass.

All around me, from inland to coast, the fire of extraction still burns. I have spent more than half my life chronicling the exploitations of California, so I know delirium to be a condition of the land. It took up residence in the body of the infant state and went on to spawn further extractions – a piling-on of audacities – so that one unthinkable taking gave rise to an even more unthinkable taking, and on and on through the generations.

Now, the Golden state has spun itself into a new and more menacing age of plunder: the mining of water and the mining of our minds.

What I’m reading:

• Colorado River states have an expensive plan to live with less water. “The secretary requested a sort of wish list from those states, and they returned a wide-ranging collection of more than 80 projects with ballpark cost estimates that totaled in the tens of billions of dollars. The list, which was obtained by KJZZ, outlines more than $25 billion of potential spending in Arizona alone.” (KJZZ)

• U.S. homes show three-decade decline in indoor water use: “Between 1999, when the first residential end-use study was released, to the third edition, which was published last week, indoor water use dropped by 43 percent. The tightening of indoor water use has allowed cities to grow despite mounting concerns about water availability, especially in the western states.” (Circle of Blue)

• Letting a river act like a river: “For river ecosystems to survive dry times, they need their floods — and big, messy floodplains. In a case study recently published in Hydrological Processes, co-authors Ellen Soles, Martha Cooper and Laurel Saito demonstrate how channels formed during high flows on the Gila River connect native riparian vegetation to groundwater.” (Reasons to Be Cheerful)

• The comeback of salmon: “Along its 85-mile course, [Putah Creek] is imprisoned behind dams, siphoned off by ditches, squeezed between artificially straightened and hardened banks. Although it lacked salmon for decades, in 2025 more than 2,000 chinook returned to spawn — an improbable triumph that reflects both human-led restoration and the resilience of the fish themselves.” (HCN)

• Archetypes could accelerate agricultural adaptation to less snowpack: “… the “trillion-dollar question” isn’t how to adapt but, rather, where existing strategies may make the most—and fastest—difference to offset projected losses. Answering this question requires an approach that matches strategies to the contexts where they are more likely to succeed—one that treats basins as neither uniform nor unique.” (EOS)

• Trump’s pick for Reclamation commissioner: “Aubrey Bettencourt, a Western water and agriculture expert, is listed as principal deputy commissioner for the bureau on Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s most recent order delegating leadership authorities. The order also taps her to perform the duties of the commissioner. (E&E News)

• One to keep watching — Tribe with senior Eel River water rights shut out of White House meeting: “Federal agriculture and interior officials convened a meeting Monday at the White House with PG&E and a Southern California water district over the future of the Eel River — and the tribe with senior water rights on that river was not in the room.” (Mendocino Voice)

A few life updates:

• A dispatch from bookland: The last couple of months have been very productive for getting closer to completing the manuscript of my Great Basin/Nevada water book, which is still in the works and will hopefully be out by the end of next year.

  As many warned me, by far the hardest part has been the necessary cutting. The good news is I’ve save the materials, and hopefully I can use some of it as fodder for future writing or research. Continuing to chip away on it over the next few months, and I’m excited to share more about the process (and the book!) soon.

• What’s next: The big news in my life is that I graduated last week with my M.S. from UC Davis and I’ll be continuing my academic journey as a PhD student at UC Berkeley in the fall, focusing on groundwater policy. I’m thrilled to get started with this new chapter, building directly on my reporting work this past decade.

All the best, and I’ll write soon. Until the next dispatch, stay safe and healthy,

Daniel

It also necessarily constrains our view. In the context of drought and water shortages (and the compounding nature of both), we tend to gravitate to frames that have clear beginnings and ends. Drought or not. Shortage or not. In the “not” times, we believe all is well. But these events — and policy solutions to address them — often unravel gradually, spreading out in many ways, at different speeds and directions. Many indicators, many of them invisible.

Most of the Western U.S. faces dry conditions, according to the drought monitor, and all parts of the West face a snow drought, with low snowpack records in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. The linked maps are helpful. They offer a snapshot of the conditions. And still, drought is a cumulative process not a binary one. Drought has not one but many definitions that incorporate multiple datasets and observations.

Water shortages similarly unfold on timescales with long tails — something I kept in mind this week while thinking about cuts on the Colorado River, often described as a “slow-moving train wreck,” one in which users keep agreeing on stopgap policies to slow down the train and lay slightly more track, but do neither to the degree required to avert a crisis. It’s been more than two decades since 2002, when the U.S. Secretary of Interior declared an “era of limits,” speaking before Colorado River users.

It’s true elsewhere too, and it’s particularly true of groundwater, where the invisibility of aquifers makes it all too easy to miss the less visible impacts of drought or the signs of water shortages — until there is a crisis and we enter in the middle.

With that, some indicators I’m thinking about this month, as I clear out my tabs.

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Indicators, trends and more:

• What happens to priority and water access when a changing climate affects the way streamflow is distributed over time? This is the question researchers from the Colorado School of Mines ask in a new Nature Water paper. Interestingly, they find that changes in the distribution of streamflow can affect water access under the West’s “first in time, first in right” priority system.

  • Coverage on this from The Colorado Sun and the press release for the paper.

• The cost of cutting back: Who pays for conservation in a crisis? States in the Colorado River Basin might be nowhere near a long-term deal on how to share a shrinking river, but many users agree on the need for federal funding. Last week, water users, Tribes, conservation groups, and governments from across the basin wrote to Congress calling for a $2 billion infusion of funding and a long-term funding mechanism to address “structural and ongoing” issues in the basin.1

  • A copy of the letter can be found here.

  • Back in the Biden administration, the federal government allocated $4 billion to fund Colorado River conservation, but much of that was frozen in 2025.

• Nevada is punting on draft curtailment order, for now: Across the West, states are figuring out how to manage the impact of groundwater overuse on streamflow in the context of a water law that often treated the two as separate, disconnected sources. In 2024, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled that regulators had the ability to regulate the two sources conjunctively. Last year, the state tried to implement a draft order on the Humboldt River that would have required pumping reductions.

  There was significant backlash, concerns over potential litigation, and concerns about the modeling used to quantify reductions. Now a new top water official is putting the effort on hold, The Nevada Independent reports. It’s a story, like many water stories, about the collision of law, science, and politics — as well as the compounding nature of groundwater impacts over time.

  • For my Nevada readers who want to dig deeper, the U.S. Geological Survey released a long-awaited professional paper this week modeling streamflow capture from groundwater pumping in the Middle Humboldt River Basin.

• Proposed cuts to a critical safe and affordable drinking water program: About 600,000 Californians lack access to safe and reliable drinking water, and the Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience program (SAFER) provides key funding to help communities close the gap. Now a change in a funding source for the program — the state’s carbon market — could mean cuts. CalMatters reports.

• Watching data centers and water (more specifically, water-energy tradeoffs):

  • Denver City Council approves one-year data center moratorium

  • Reno hit pause on approving data centers. Now what happens?

  • Texas county passes 1-year data center construction ban

  • New Mexico officials approve process to consider data center moratorium

  • Data centers are guzzling California’s water. We have no idea how much

• Fish recovery and ecosystems in a year of record low streamflows: The effects of dry conditions are already reshaping flows in the Upper Colorado River Basin.

  • Aspen Journalism, earlier this month, reported on challenges maintaining habitat in the 15-mile reach, critical fish habitat for endangered species near the confluence with the Gunnison River. At the same time, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is releasing more water to boost levels at Lake Powell, the timing of which could help to benefit endangered fish.

• More than 100 dams removed in 2025: “Last year, more sections of the country’s rivers were reconnected thanks to dam removals than at any other time in history, according to the nonprofit group American Rivers,” the New York Times reported. “In 2025, more than 100 dams were dismantled in 30 states, reconnecting around 4,900 miles of waterways, including 156 miles of a branch of the Juniata River that are now reconnected thanks to the removal of Bedford’s two dams.”

“We have no precedent to follow. There’s no manual, there’s no video,” Corpus Christi City Manager Peter Zanoni told the City Council…” — Inside Climate News, 4/23/26

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been watching the news out of Corpus Christi in South Texas (the state’s eighth largest metro area), where years of extreme drought have left combined storage in the main reservoirs at under 8% of capacity. The city, which serves water to about 318,000 residents, petrochemical plants, and nearby towns, is months away from declaring an emergency and cutting water 25% across the board, with implications for households (already under tight restrictions and banned from watering lawns), schools, hospitals, and the economy.

There are many questions about how these curtailments would be enforced. Local reporters for Inside Climate News and the Texas Tribune have helped unravel the story, the decisions that led to the crisis, and the scramble to quickly bring on new supply, including with a private desalinization plant and groundwater pumping that would mine aquifers far in excess of what is considered a safe yield.

Without any rain and assuming an increase in groundwater pumping and reduced demand due to reclaimed reuse, the city forecasts a gap between total water use (the blue line) and supply shown in the bar charts, beginning around April of next year.

It’s a story, as Grist notes, that may offer a cautionary look into the future. And it’s also one about past decisions and present water stress, water planning and priorities in a crisis: The cost of finding new water supplies, investing in infrastructure, and whose use is safeguarded first when there is no longer enough supply to go around.

To that final point, industrial facilities like plastics plants and refineries account for more than half of the demand. They will be subject to a curtailment under a water emergency, but how cuts are distributed and who pays will be important to watch.

“The city needs to tell industry: we need to give our people water,” one resident told the Texas Tribune in March. “They’re getting water first, and we’re second.”

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Movement on the Colorado River

A few updates on the Colorado River since I last wrote.

1. The federal government said it would release storage water to keep Lake Powell above safe operating levels, offering short-term relief but hardly a long-term fix.

2. States in the Upper Colorado River Basin (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming) proposed hiring a mediator to breath new life into deadlocked negotiations to reach a consensus deal on sharing shortages.

3. The Lower Colorado River Basin states (Arizona, California and Nevada) released a short-term water-savings plan to reduce use; The plan builds and expands upon existing conservation programs, while seeking federal funding to pay for the cuts.

4. Earlier this week, the federal government floated $450 million for the plan.

5. Finally, the hydrologic reality.

Experts have been drawing comparisons between this year and 2002, when the river saw record low streamflow. The Water Desk at CU Boulder has an excellent piece on this. But as one of those experts, Eric Kuhn, notes in the story, “the biggest issue is that Lake Powell and Lake Mead were relatively full in 2002.” Today they are not.

I wanted to visualize just how much reservoir storage has changed and (in an effort to sharpen my R skills), I made a couple of charts using U.S. Bureau of Reclamation data using surface storage in the system’s two main reservoirs, lakes Mead and Powell.1

There’s little buffer in the system, little storage to pull from, and there is little coming in, with a recent streamflow forecast for April-July into Lake Powell at 13% of average for 1991-2020, a period that already includes 2002 and the two-decade drought.

In the words of Brad Udall, a senior climate scientist at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center, “it’s really grim. It’s horrific. The impacts are going to be everywhere, throughout the economy and personally.”

Whether it is the federal government or a state-based consensus agreement, someone is going to have to make some hard decisions. It’s going to be a long, tough summer.

More photos and words on this from Morgan Sjogren at Wild Words:

Wild Words

Can the Colorado River Survive 2026?

How is the Colorado River doing…

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4 months ago · 20 likes · 3 comments · Morgan Sjogren

Low snowpack to low streamflow

What is unfolding on the Colorado River, in many ways, reflects broader issues facing the region. Snowpack was below-average this year across the West. And while every watershed is different, many face a common issue of overallocation (more rights to water than there is water to go around), worsened by a prolonged 20-year drought. As I was writing this, I glanced at the Nevada water supply outlook released yesterday.

From the summary:

“Streamflow forecasts continue to be below median across the region with May-July 50% exceedance forecasts ranging 21-80% in the Eastern Sierra and 3-24% for most points across the rest of Nevada. If dry conditions continue and these forecasts verify, this season’s observed streamflow volumes are likely to come close to or set new minimum May-July streamflow records across much of Nevada.”

More to digest in the coming months.

A few other stories

• “Data Centers in Nevada,” Desert Research Institute

• “Why Fairfield, Montana, is running out of water,” Montana Free Press

• “Water scientists must become agenda-setters,” Nature Water

• “Water rights request for massive Box Elder data center withdrawn after thousands of Utahns file protests,” Salt Lake Tribune

• “Amid extreme drought, New Mexico launches new water dashboard,” Source NM

• “The Potter Valley dams are coming down,” Mendocino Voice

• “EPA proposes gutting rules for handling toxic coal ash, a move that threatens groundwater,” Associated Press

• “Newsom pledges to move forward with Delta water tunnel,” L.A. Times

Rather than a steady transition, this spring has felt weird. Heat followed by pulses of precipitation. The warmest March on record. Plants are waking up weeks ahead of normal. Snowpack is running off way too early. A couple weeks ago, I drove through Donner Pass and saw barely any snow. It felt like the end of spring, when it had hardly started. After that, we had a few late-season storms and a rainy few days, even some snow in the mountains. Not enough to make up the deficit.

The changes of this spring — much more apparent than in recent years — have been for me a constant reminder of transitions, and how much uncertainty and variability can exist within these shifts. It’s made me stop to reflect on the in-between spaces. Even if, in other years, change is so subtle we miss it, these spaces are always there. This year has made me pay more attention, attention I should give every year.

I write about it here because there are resemblances to water, so often occupying a transitional place. Water is cyclical and changing, constantly. The mechanics of these transitions happen on such a granular level it can be easy to forget them, until the extremes come, a drought year or a flood year. But change is happening all the time.

Water also rewards attention to detail.

And 28 days into spring, 67 days until summer, it’s a good time to pay attention.

Visit a river, a spring, a wetland, and you glimpse only a part of a watershed at a place and point in time, connected to many other places and points hidden from view. Blink and it’s not the same. You’re witnessing water in the middle of a broader story.

Over the past few years, the time piece has become more important to me, seeing our water systems as not only as they are in the moment but shaped by time. That is, the water cycle alone is not the only player. We, too, have left our mark and influenced the shifts and transitions that we see. With dams, diversions, ditches, flood control, return flows, water rights. And these pieces of infrastructure all have their own histories.

“A Water’s History of the United States”

To that point, I wanted to share an essay I came across this week that resonated with me. It’s titled “A Water’s History of the United States” and calls us to “examine water as an active force in U.S. history rather than a backdrop to national development.”

As the paper notes, historians have long highlighted the role of land expansion and territorial conquest in the story of the U.S., touching on, and at times, emphasizing its connection to water. But the essay calls for more intentionally centering water:

“A water’s history of the United States is indeed meant to bring such an environmental historiography into conversation with the rising field of the “blue humanities”—the study of the changing relationship between human cultures and organizations and water—and move toward a more critical history of the United States, one that is better attuned to oceans, rivers, and other water resources in a way that fully acknowledges the role that water has played in carving both American progress and its innermost contradictions and paradoxes.”

The essay goes on to reject the idea that water has been a “backdrop” in U.S. history but a “driving force” in the country as it is today. I find their arguments compelling.

“In our analysis, water, through its physical properties, geographic distributions, and ecological dynamics, has actively shaped possibilities, constrained choices, and reconfigured power relations, driving institutional development and helping to determine political outcomes.”

How we present and discuss the past can inform the present and hopefully help shape the future. It illuminates the messy in-between space — where water has been and where it might be going. This feels especially true in the Western U.S. where water rights are explicitly tethered to the past. “First in time is first in right.”

Citation: Di Tommaso, Gaetano, and Dario Fazzi. 2026. “A Water’s History of the United States.” Modern American History 9(1):1–17. doi: 10.1017/mah.2025.10081.

Zooming in

Two major U.S. water developments I’m watching this week.

• The Colorado River inches toward a decision-point: The Arizona Daily Star’s Tony Davis published an excellent story on the state-of-play as the Colorado River faces an immediate shortage crisis. As early as later today, the federal government could decide on how to move water around in the system to stabilize Lake Powell, which risks falling so low it may not be able to generate hydropower or reliably deliver water downstream. The decision could be made within days, as they work to finalize a mid-month reservoir forecast report, known as the 24-Month-Study.

  • From The Land Desk: Abysmal math on the Colorado River

  • From KJZZ: A short-term fix for Lake Powell could be coming

• Senate votes to overturn mining moratorium in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters

  • From Minnesota Public Radio: “The U.S. Senate has voted to overturn a 20-year ban on mining on about 350 square miles of federal land near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, paving the way for Twin Metals to renew efforts to open an underground copper mine near Ely, on the doorstep of the wilderness area. … The vote is a major victory for Twin Metals, a subsidiary of the giant Chilean mining company Antofagasta…”

  • The close vote of 50-49 uses the Congressional Review Act to reverse mining rules for the Boundary Waters. Environmentalists, Indigenous communities and outdoor groups have pushed back against copper and nickel mining in the national forest and upstream of the Boundary Waters. They’ve raised concerns about contamination from heavy metals and sulfuric acid. (NYT)

American Rivers released its list of most endangered rivers in the U.S. Four of those rivers are in the Western U.S., including the San Joaquin River and Amargosa River in Nevada, both of which face threats from mining. More on this soon.

A few other stories I’m reading:

• Mining privately griped to governor about water regulator (Nevada Independent)

• How much water do we have? Scientists map water beneath our feet (L.A. Times)

• Fog is a vital water resource. Could it disappear in a warming world? (Science)

• Metropolitan Water District allocates $150 million for wastewater recycling project planning (Smart Water Magazine)

• The US Government Will Ask Data Centers How Much Power They Use (WIRED)

• Searsville Dam Under Official Consideration for Full Removal (CalTrout)

• New conservancy to help accelerate Salton Sea restoration (State of California)

What I’m reading on Substack:

Tangled Nature

Rejecting Overly Simple Explanations

“Um, don’t work with William.” A few people told me this about one of my colleagues when I was a junior faculty member. At first, I took the advice and avoided William. Yikes - there is too much on the line to take chances, right?! But as the years wore on, I got to know him better. He wasn’t a boogeyman. I lea…

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5 months ago · 5 likes · 7 comments · Andrew L. Rypel

Earth Hope🌎

I dream of grasshoppers

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5 months ago · 59 likes · 41 comments · Amanda Royal

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Have a short dispatch today on a proposal to re-mine the abandoned Anaconda Copper Mine in Nevada. The mine not only represents the legacies of hardrock mining on water and public land in the West, but it also highlights the intersection between groundwater demands and connected rivers in arid regions where water is already stretched thin.

And it’s a story of groups — who may have opposing views on other management issues — voicing shared concerns when a common resource faces potential threats, what has come to be a thread throughout my book research and writing. Mining has been on my mind lately because the early policies that govern it are so tethered with the development of our water rights system in the West. Recently revisited this USGS report on water for the Comstock, and it is worth its own newsletter one of these days.

Quick housekeeping note: If you find my work interesting, you can help support this newsletter by passing it along to colleagues or subscribing!

Liking posts also helps boost the newsletter on Substack. As always, please reach out if you have any tips, ideas, or suggestions.

Daniel

As land goes, the polluted mines left by the Anaconda Copper Company are among the most studied parcels in the West. By the time Anaconda Copper was purchased by the Atlantic Richfield Co. in the 1970s, the company operated numerous sites, which have required extensive clean-up. The Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana. The Leviathan Mine by Markleeville, California. The Anaconda Copper Mine in Yerington, Nevada.

Now one of those mines is looking for a future in its past. With a state-led cleanup nearing completion, a company is moving forward with the necessary steps to re-mine the Yerington Pit in western Nevada, as The Nevada Independent’s Amy Alonzo and Kate Reynolds reported this week. So far, as they report, water is a major concern.

The Anaconda Copper Mine sits in Mason Valley adjacent to the Walker River near land belonging to the Yerington Paiute Tribe. Mining ceased there in 1978, nearly 50 years ago, but the legacy impacts of mining continued to radiate in the watershed. To extract copper at the site, the mine dug below the water table. When mining stopped, the pit — roughly one-mile long and 800-feet deep — filled with groundwater. The pit lake is only a couple hundred feet away from the Walker River (see map below).

Efforts to cleanup the mine site and adjacent mine-influenced contamination in the local aquifer have a long, complicated history. But in 2016, the EPA proposed listing the 3,400-acre mine site on the Superfund list. Two years later, that listing was deferred and the EPA allowed the state to take oversee the cleanup.

To re-mine, the company has to deal with moving water. First, it will need to remove the ~43,000 acre-feet of water in the pit lake. In one technical report, the company has said this water could be treated and put into the Walker River, or infiltrated into the local aquifer. But even after that water is clear, it will need to pump groundwater to keep the pit clear as mining commences again, a practice known as dewatering. And this is where there has been some true apprehension from a range of water users.

Surface water and groundwater are interconnected in the Walker River Basin, as they are in many places. The Walker River Basin is over-allocated, with more rights to use water than there is water to go around. And apprehension about the prospect of re-mining is being raised by parties that come to the issue from different perspectives, histories, and incentives — a reminder that fault lines in water can cut into traditional coalition lines, even in places where allocations have been litigated over for decades.

In response to the mining company’s water rights applications to mine again in the Yerington Pit, the state’s top water regulator received four protests from four entities whose users rely on the river: the Walker River Paiute Tribe, the U.S. Board of Water Commissioners, the Walker River Irrigation District, and Walker Basin Conservancy.

At many times over the past few decades, these parties have fought in court over water rights on the river. But what they all have in common is that they hold decreed surface water rights to the Walker River, or represent water users who do. And so, their protests share a common concern that groundwater pumping to re-mine could deplete and affect streamflow.

From the Walker River Paiute Tribe:

Resumption of mine dewatering under applications 93718-93725 will place an additional consumptive use on the Mason Valley aquifer, exasperating regional water level drawdown and reducing Walker River baseflows and increasing river seepage loses through Mason Valley. Additional drawdown in the aquifer will jeopardize delivery of the Tribe's senior decreed Walker River water right, notably later in the irrigation season, and especially in dry years.

From the U.S. Board of Water Commissioners:

“The Applications do not provide information as to how the dewatering water will be discharged or disposed, what the options are for disposal and what the water quality of the dewatering water will be. The Board opposes any dewatering which would impact the flows or the water quality of the Walker River, its forks and tributaries or ditches used to convey decreed water rights.”

There’s a lot more to unpack here. For one, the federal government is seeking to sell land it owns at the mine to the Atlantic Richfield Company, a move watchdogs worry could reduce oversight and environmental review if mining moves forward.

I flag this story for a number of reasons. It’s not unique, and it’s worth watching with more and more mining proposals in the West.

With more pressure to mine in the U.S., what does water use and policy look like?

• Similar to siting other industrial facilities, it’s not always the aggregate amount of water that is determinative of impact, but the particulars of how water is used and how they intersect with whole watersheds. This is a fact Jonathan Thompson over at the Land Desk did a great job emphasizing in the case of Arizona last month.

How does land use and ownership intersect with water use, and vice versa?

How does the physical connection between groundwater pumping and surface water — and concerns about streamflow depletion — translate into actual policy choices?

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“No to the wall” through Big Bend

Speaking of water and shared threats, the New York Times looked at bipartisan pushback to plans for a border wall in Big Bend National Park and nearby areas:

Despite President Trump’s vow to complete a border wall along the southern frontier, the plan shocked West Texas. It also unnerved Republicans and Democrats across the state who wondered why the federal government would spend billions to build a wall through an area so remote…

A physical barrier would cut off river access, threaten crops and cattle, and disrupt migration routes, critics said. The prospect of its construction has brought together environmentalists, former national park officials, seasonal river guides, tourists and wealthy ranch owners, galvanizing support for surveillance as a preferred approach to this section of the border.

What else I’m reading:

• Balancing growth and conservation in Nevada’s water future (Sierra Nevada Ally)

• Near the shrinking Salton Sea, children’s lungs may pay a price (L.A. Times)

• Will data centers threaten California’s water? It’s complicated (PPIC)

• Desalination plants in the Middle East are increasingly vulnerable (MIT Technology Review)

• Endangered salmon returned to California’s far north — then the money dried up. (CalMatters)

• New Mexico officials, tribes accuse feds of rushing to reverse Chaco Canyon drilling ban (Source New Mexico)

• A botanist searches for the seeds of the rare Death Valley Sage (NPR)

• The GAO says better data should be kept about weather modification efforts (Nevada Public Radio)

Zooming way out…

I’ve been mesmerized watching the Artemis II lunar flyby, and so I wanted to end with a picture and a quote from mission specialist Christina Koch:

“The thing that changed for me, looking back at Earth, was that I found myself noticing not only the beauty of Earth, but how much blackness there was around it and how it just made it even more special. It truly emphasized how alike we are, how the same thing keeps every single person on planet Earth alive. We evolved on the same planet, and we have some shared things about how we love and live that are just universal. And the specialness and preciousness of that really is emphasized when you notice how much else there is around it.”

In my old job, as a full-time journalist, one of the last stories I wrote each year came out of the Colorado River Water Users Association conference held every December. At each conference, I’d ask: Has anything really actually here? Or is it the same story?

To be sure, in that time, the status-quo governance system (seven states negotiating compromises, usually facing the threat of federal action or real physical hydrological constraints) produced collaborative compromises, layered on top of existing rules, that stabilized management in moments of acute crisis. But for every step forward, there were signs the status-quo system of deferring to seven-state compromises, as climate change drove 21st-century flows far below the 100-year average, was showing cracks.

The public signs might have seemed small and relational, but they snowballed. In tone and in consequences. Negotiators declining to sit on the same panels, hosting dueling press conferences. Then missed deadlines after missed deadlines to reach a consensus.

The divisions reflect longstanding fundamental differences in foundational quesitons about how governance documents allocate water in times of shortage. They also show (and foreshadow) difficulties of adapting to climate change, more broadly. As they say, we’re stuck with 19th Century law, 20th Century infrastructure, 21st Century climate. In the past, negotiations made room for compromise to avoid these legal questions.

In this round, though, it seems that the scale of the cuts necessary drove the stakes of losing out on water to such a high level it was impossible to agree to disagree. Some states appear to now believe they can achieve a better outcome through litigating in court, despite it increasing risk for all involved — on a river that supports 40 million people — and potentially (if it doesn’t not turn out their way) risk for those states, too.

But the system needs stable governance now, not at the conclusion of a court case.

The snowpack this winter is grim. Median peak snowpack (marked with a green x on the chart below) usually comes in April. This year it peaked in early March. Peak runoff is expected to come earlier too, and runoff is forecast to be about one-third of average, or just 2.3 million acre-feet for a river where rights to use water are seven times that.

So in the tradition of reporting on this topic, I’ll ask two obvious questions:

• Is the status-quo consensus-based governance changing?

• What comes next?

We’re watching this play out in real time. With the states failing to reach a consensus on a long-term deal for the river’s operational rules, the federal government has said it will announce a shortage plan by July. Few are pleased with any of the options they’ve so far proposed. And one way or another, litigation is on the horizon, as the Colorado Sun’s Shannon Mullane (who is doing essential work on the water beat) reports.

With such low runoff forecast for this year, a near-term question remains, even amid the threats of lawsuits: Who will actually manage the river on a month-to-month and year-to-year basis? As in, structurally, what will be the process for decisions? Will it be intentional, imposed, or come together in a last-ditch attempt to avoid collapse?

In the past, the federal government and other diverse water users have relied on the states to help shape these decisions. If they cannot come to a consensus, what then? Not in the abstract, but in the real-world day-to-day operations of making choices.

A couple of weeks ago, when states were asked to provide comments to the federal government as it develops a shortage plan, Nevada alone put forth a stopgap proposal. I mentioned it in my newsletter a few weeks ago, but I thought it worth highlighting, strictly from a governance perspective, and thinking about how things are changing.

It offers short-term operational recommendations to stabilize storage reservoirs but what I found truly notable was it calls for a more structured path forward. It calls on the federal government to “adopt a decision-making process” and lays out what that could look like, with meetings among the state at least twice a year (in March and August) to review hydrology, water use, conservation, and recommend a consensus recommendation. And it’s gained some traction, prompting the states to talk again, despite continuing disagreements and interpretations of who cuts water in shortage.

The alternative? Uncertainty? Risk? A concentration of decision-making power? The rupture in the river’s governance at a time of hydrologic instability raises immediate concerns, and it will be replaced with something else, one way or another.

This is not to say that the status-quo approach was working perfectly. Deferring to the interstate consensus-based negotiations have historically excluded important parties and perspectives, including Tribal nations, limited the adoption of innovative ideas, and lacked transparency. At UC Davis this year, I’ve been helping to co-facilitate a graduate seminar on the Colorado River, and the questions that have come up have brought this into relief: Why are these meetings closed to the public? Why are there no meeting minutes? Transparency? Why does the fate of this important river rest on the ability of seven negotiators to come to a consensus? Is this a fair process?

Clearly it could be improved. And there have been strong and persuasive proposals, for decades, on creating an entity to make basin governance structurally inclusive, more transparent, and intentionally-centered around common goals, most recently in a report from the Colorado River Research Group in December. It’s worth reading.

One final thought here: It’s easy to lose focus on the bigger picture. I want to take a moment to recognize and emphasize how bleak and scary the snowpack was this year, even when compared to an average of the past 30 years that fully incorporates climate change. What is taking place on the Colorado River is a climate adaptation story as much as anything else. The change is here, and it is happening now. We need to adapt.

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In the weeds: Groundwater science, law, and conjunctive management

In 2024, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled, in a landmark case, that Nevada’s top water regulator had authority to manage groundwater and surface water as connected, and recognized that groundwater flow patterns do not always follow topographic basin boundaries (i.e. interbasin flow). How the decision is implemented remains a major and contentious policy question. And the Nevada experience is not unique. States across the West have struggled (and are struggling) to implement policies to address streamflow depletion caused by groundwater pumping within existing water law.

For my Nevada subscribers (and others might be interested too!), I stumbled upon this podcast earlier in the week from with Justice Patricia Lee, who authored the decision. It’s two years old, but I’m about halfway through and found it clear and illuminating.

Pushing back against a groundwater pipeline in the Great Basin

From the Salt Lake Tribune’s Brooke Larsen:

“A diverse group of rural Utah counties, ranchers, environmental groups and a tribe are raising red flags about a recently approved water pipeline in the West Desert.

The Indian Peaks Band of the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, the Center for Biological Diversity and a coalition that includes Utah and Nevada counties, residents and the Great Basin Water Network filed three separate appeals with the Interior Board of Land Appeals on Wednesday, challenging the Bureau of Land Management’s approval of the Pine Valley Water Supply Project last month.

…

The project proposed by the Cedar Valley Water Conservancy, formerly known as the Central Iron County Water Conservancy District, would pump up to 15,000 acre-feet of groundwater from Pine Valley in Beaver County and pipe it to Iron County.”

Copy of the lawsuit available here.

Low snowpack sets up a difficult summer

From the San Francisco Chronicle’s Kurtis Alexander:

California is ending the winter season with its second-lowest snowpack in modern times, a troubling distinction reflective of the warming climate, which could, in coming months, pose problems for water supplies, wildfires and wildlife.

State measurements on April 1, the closely watched date when snow levels historically reach their peaks, show that snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, southern Cascades and Klamath Mountains is a meager 18% of average.

…

“It didn’t snow where we needed it to snow, and where it did snow, it didn’t stick,” said Jeff Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California’s Water Policy Center. “This is going to be an ugly summer.”

I’ll be back with more soon! Until then, let me know what you think in the comments. And as always, feel free to reach out with tips or suggestions. Be safe and stay well,

Daniel

Hey there everyone!

To mark World Water Day (last Sunday) and Groundwater Awareness Week (earlier in the month), this edition of Invisible Waters starts with a global perspective. Across the Earth, we are depleting groundwater supplies faster than they can be replenished. It’s the focus (and rightly so) of many news stories, reports, and academic literature.

But when you zoom in to better understand groundwater overuse, you can also find many local recovery stories. Developing durable, enforceable, and verifiable solutions to a problem as entrenched as groundwater overuse is not easy. They take time, and buy-in, many, many meetings, and a large amount of baseline science. Yet it’s possible. Many communities are doing it, and we can learn much from their experiences.

Every groundwater aquifer is different, and so is every natural and human community dependent on it. But there are some throughlines in what types of solutions have been published in the past. A new paper published in Science analyzes more than 67 cases of groundwater recovery efforts, and works to tease apart the conditions that can make them successful, finding most solutions break down into three categories:

• Alternative Water Supplies

• Policy/Markets

• Artificial Recharge

These categories do not represent exclusive choices, and many of the case studies pulled on multiple approaches. “This study can help create a menu of options for managers and stakeholders to consider as they develop locally relevant strategies to try to make things better,” the study’s author, UCSB professor Scott Jasechko, said.

In a news release for the paper, he details ten key themes from the case studies:

1. Most success stories involved multiple kinds of interventions.

2. The majority included accessing alternative water sources.

3. Interventions that reduced pumping often helped aquifers recover.

4. Good policies still require sound implementation and enforcement.

5. Sometimes recovery can happen over just a few years.

6. When recovery is slow, gradual policy phase-in can be helpful.

7. Recovery can vary widely within a given area.

8. Improvements aren’t permanent, and can easily reverse.

9. It’s important to manage groundwater quality alongside quantity.

10. Interventions should consider the direct and indirect impacts of climate change.

One of the most compelling findings in the paper was that a vast majority (81%) of the 67 case studies analyzed hinged, at least in part, on applying alternative water supplies (i.e., surface water) to supplement or offset groundwater pumping. Interesting why?

So often, surface water and groundwater are viewed as two separate buckets. But the two often operate as one, linked together physically, socially, and by policy. The paper shows how they are connected not only by overuse but by through solutions to it, too.

When we talk about river management, we often focus only on rivers. When we talk groundwater management, we often focus mostly on aquifers. In many places, water managers are moving (or have moved) away from that paradigm, and there are many good scientific reasons for doing so — streamflow depletion caused by groundwater pumping being a major one. But there are also many important policy and governance reasons for considering the two together. How solutions play out in the long-term can hinge on management that considers both surface and groundwater connections over time. This is not a new idea, but it’s worth highlighting, especially as both sources face pressure, often simultaneously, from overallocation, climate change, and demand.

Consider one of the groundwater recovery stories that feels all too timely.

In central Arizona, the federal authorization and construction of the Central Arizona Project canal to deliver Colorado River water through Arizona decreased demand for groundwater extraction. To build this project, Arizona accepted “junior” water rights that would be cut off first in times of scarcity. That time of scarcity is now here, and the Central Arizona Project is starting down potentially deep cuts that could “flatten” the economy. Those cuts, in turn, are likely to lead to more groundwater pumping.

As the paper notes, what happens to surface water can indirectly impact groundwater:

“In places where groundwater withdrawals are offset by surface-water imports, climate variability can indirectly affect groundwater levels. For example, recent drought conditions in the Colorado River Basin reduced surface-water deliveries to Albuquerque, leading to increased groundwater withdrawals and a concomitant disruption to groundwater recovery trends. Similarly, the diversions of Colorado River water that enabled groundwater recovery in central Arizona are vulnerable to prolonged droughts, highlighting the importance of considering long-term climate variability when managing groundwater.”

Another interesting finding in the paper is that many of the case studies developed solutions that combined one or two of the three interventions listed above, linking artificial recharge (like managed aquifer recharge) with alternative water supplies, or policy (well drilling restrictions/market signals) with alternative water supplies. This is to say that there are often many layers to these solutions, all working together.

Jeniffer Solis over at the Nevada Current has an excellent piece on the paper and the case study of Las Vegas, which quickly over-developed its groundwater aquifer as the city’s primary water supply in the early 20th-century. Las Vegas continued to overuse its aquifer long after there were clear signs — in drying springs and land subsidence — that doing so was unsustainable. The city took a two-pronged approach, 1) finding and developing an alternative water supply in the Colorado River and 2) artificially recharging the aquifer with conserved Colorado River water. At the same time, Las Vegas created a Groundwater Management Program that, among other things, does water quality monitoring and helps fund well conversions. It’s worth emphasizing, as the paper does, the major role of infrastructure investment here. It all requires funding.

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• A Hot March: Temperatures last week shattered records across the West (see above), only worsening an already dire snowpack and runoff outlook for much of the West. From the San Francisco Chronicle, reporting on the Sierra snowpack:

  • “Nearly every snow-measuring station in the Sierra has lost more than a foot of snow in the 10 days since the heat wave kicked into full gear. An even more important measurement, snow water equivalent, has dropped faster than ever measured in March, said Mike Hittle, a hydrologist at the National Weather Service’s California-Nevada River Forecast Center. It’s a key measure for how much liquid is stored in the snowpack, if melted completely. ‘A melt of this rate is a big deal any time, but in March it’s unheard of,’ Hittle said…”

• The bad snowpack is especially sobering on the Colorado River: A chart shows that the snowpack quickly plummeting with the recent heatwave, only adding to the pressure faced by water users and the federal government, tasked with coming up with shortage-sharing rules to replace the existing ones that expire this year. A bit of good news is that the states appear to be talking about a short-term plan outlined by Nevada. As always, UNM’s John Fleck had a smart and concise post about how “the tragedy of the anti-commons” is prevailing over any compromise.

  

  • If you’re looking to learn more about the Colorado River and find credible information, I I highly recommend the Colorado River Science Wiki, a very valuable resource. They are continually refreshing their pages with newly-published research, data applications, and summaries of law/policies/reports.

• For World Water Day, IGRAC (International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre) released a beautifully-produced five-part “Discover Groundwater” series that highlights the importance of groundwater worldwide. A wonderful example of how storytelling and science communication go hand in hand.

• For Source NM, Laura Paskus writes about a Middle Rio Grande that could run dry as early as May. “Irrigation season will be short, fire danger will be high and Albuquerque’s largest drinking water utility will again switch from diverting river water to relying exclusively on groundwater.”

• Land Desk’s Jonathan Thompson on the water footprint of mining in Arizona, where groundwater is pumped for dewatering and operations like dust control.

Some journal articles I’m reading right now:

• “Breaking the Cycle: New Ideas to Solve Old Problems in Colorado River Tribal Water Access,” Tanana et al., Arizona State Law Journal (2026).

• “Agricultural Water Manager Perspectives on Water Markets in Utah” Schumacher et al., Journal of the American Water Resources Society (2026).

• “Technology is not enough: rethinking policy for informal groundwater markets in a changing climate,” Amar Razzaq, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, (2026).

• “The Mono Basin Project: Remedying Environmental Injustice Through Tribal Beneficial Use Designations,” Molly Greene, UC Law Environmental Journal (2026).

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My apologies here for the radio silence the past few weeks. What happened? Been juggling several things last month and was focused on writing about the Colorado River shortly after the missed Feb. 14 deadline. I started a post on the river + governance but, as I was refining it in free moments, I found myself struggling with it, especially as the situation is still unfolding. There’s a lot to say but I felt like it was hard to say anything too definitive right now. I want to write something, and I also need more time to think, observe, synthesize, and sift through a couple of ideas. In the meantime, I’ll share below some links in the post below.

The pause was not all for nothing. It got me to step back and ask an important question: What is the big picture? Clearly, cutting back has gotten harder as the cuts have become increasingly difficult to share and have become increasingly present. But this is a climate story as much as anything else. What happens, at least this year, could very well be dictated by the hydrology.

And… the snowpack in much of the Western U.S. is abysmal. Meteorological winter ended two weeks ago, and we are two-ish weeks away from hitting what typically is peak snowpack for the season. It’s bad news for water and wildfire across the West, especially in the Colorado River Basin, Northern California, and the Great Basin.

(For more technical details here, climatologist Daniel Swain held office hours on his Weather West YouTube channel Tuesday to dissect what’s going on and the drivers here. I highly recommend checking them out, and supporting his valuable work!)

First, I’ll start with the maps and charts, which tell the story more simply than I could (data as of March 11). Keep in mind, as Swain notes, these products compare this year to 1991-2020, a period that already accounts for snowpack loss due to climate change.

The Westwide Snow Water Equivalent Map

Upper Colorado Region Snow Water Equivalent Chart

Great Basin (Nevada, Utah, Great Salt Lake) Chart

Rio Grande Region Chart

California Basins (Sacramento + San Joaquin + Walker + Truckee)

**Snowpack is still below average across California, but parts of the state are doing better, especially in the eastern Sierra, where the Walker, Carson and Truckee flow into western Nevada/Great Basin. Since there’s some variability, here’s four charts:

Warmest Winter on Record

One last map, which Swain and others have highlighted, comes from NOAA showing that this winter (Dec. 2025 - Feb. 2026) was the warmest in 131 years across the West. Swain, in his office hours, noted that there is natural variability, but climate change is the “anchor” beneath the “noise.” He likened it to “bad luck on top of bad behavior,” with variability adding an exclamation point. And more record heat is on the way.

Breaking it All Down

How the snowpack runs off and what it means for the water supply depends on where you are, taking into consideration other parameters like soil moisture and the overall precipitation. The details and geographic particulars do matter quite a bit here.

But in the Colorado River Basin, the awful snowpack this year will add pressure to an already tense situation. Streamflow into Lake Powell is predicted to be at 36% of the average for April to July, and about 52% for the water year. That, as Brandon Loomis reports in the Arizona Republic, would be “lowest April-July boost for Lake Powell since the disastrous year of 2002 firmly entrenched this age of megadrought.”

The hydrology comes at a time of a management crisis on the river. The states failed to meet a(n extended) federal deadline to develop a consensus plan to share cuts on the river, a planning process with a scope that got slowly whittled down the past few years as attention turned toward avoiding short-term crises. Now there’s another one.

In the absence of a state-led consensus, the federal government has finally pledged to step in and impose its own cuts in a serious way, laying out earlier this year a menu of options (without saying which course may be the preferred option), all sort of cobbled-together amalgams of existing plans and none universally loved, or liked, by anyone.

I guess the states don’t agree on much but can at least agree that they don’t want the federal government to tell them what to do. In a (perverse?) way, that actually could be read as a signal of hope that maybe a real federal threat will incentivize the states to come to some kind of short-term deal to preserve some of the architecture in current operational rules for shortage, upon which many other agreements to cut back exist — how water is conserved and stored in Lake Mead, and Mexico’s shortage agreements.

A looming and real federal threat has moved the state negotiators to a deal in the past, as the Pacific Institute’s Michael Cohen wrote earlier this year.

There are still some rumblings about a short-term deal. The L.A. Times Ian James reported in a piece last month that negotiators are still talking about it. And two experienced river negotiators make an argument there is still time for consensus. Writing in the Grand Junction Sentinel, the former heads of Denver Water and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California say that “if the basin states cannot act together, the river’s future will be decided by courts, crisis, and collapse. That is a legacy no state should accept — and a future the Colorado River cannot afford.”

Given the snowpack and recent hydrology, “crisis and collapse” may come before any kind of final court ruling. Understanding this, Nevada showcased what a short-term deal might look like, as the Review-Journal’s Alan Halaly reported. “The Colorado has become a very unpredictable river. I would still hold out hope for a longer-term, multi-decadal deal, “ Nevada water chief John Entsminger explained. “But if we don’t have that, then establishing what the process will be to agree to operations and keep us out of court seems to be a prudent, adult conversation to be had.”

More than the Colorado River

The Colorado River story is important for many reasons; 40 million people in the West depend on it. But in some ways, it is representative of what a lot of watersheds face in the West. Overallocation of water rights, made worse by ignoring important science, all made worse by climate change. Finding the balance between the interests of many differently-motivated individual actors — with different risk profiles, incentives, and values — and the collective in managing a common natural resource.

This is to say that although a lot of news outlets are focused on the Colorado River, it’s important to sit with all the charts above. There is low snowpack across the West, with major social-political-ecological implications for far smaller watersheds too — for surface water and groundwater, natural and built ecosystems. In many of those, users are faced with similar problems of how to equitably divide water in a system built for a different century, with the threat of litigation looming over everyone.

And the hydrology is not going to wait out a long court battle.

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Closing out my tabs, cleaning out my inbox

Lots more to write about, coming soon, but for now:

• New study on the cost of data centers on water systems over the next few years —> “Small Bottle, Big Pipe: Quantifying and Addressing the Impact of Data Centers on Public Water Systems” (Han et al.)

  • From press release: “A study by a UC Riverside research team in collaboration with Caltech found that community waterworks across the United States will need billions of dollars in new infrastructure to meet spikes in data center water demands during peak usage. Without new water efficiencies, data center cooling systems four years from now could require 697 million to 1.45 billion gallons of additional peak water capacity per day — roughly equal to the typical daily water supply of New York City.” (emphasis mine).

• Drinking water from Stanislaus County’s domestic wells can be dangerous. (Modesto Bee) “Domestic wells are a blind spot for water quality data since the state does not regulate private wells. It’s only through voluntary programs like the Valley Water Collaborative that data on these wells are gathered.”

• Navajo Nation President Press Release, March 11, 2026 “WASHINGTON D.C. — Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren today called on Congress to pass S. 953, the Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Act, emphasizing the urgent need to secure safe, reliable water for thousands of tribal families.”

  • “Roughly a third of Navajo households still lack running water,” President Nygren said. “I grew up hauling five-gallon buckets with my mom and grandma. Today, thousands of our people still travel over 30 miles round trip to meet basic water needs. It costs on average $600 a month per family—crippling for those living below the poverty line.”

  • “President Nygren stressed that S. 953 represents a historic and cost-effective federal investment, benefiting both tribal communities and the American taxpayer. Under the settlement, tribes are waiving claims to Colorado River Basin water in exchange for funding to improve infrastructure and enhance Lake Powell’s reserves, achieving these goals at roughly 25 percent lower cost per tribal member than previous Indian water settlements.”

• Heavily contested pumped hydro-storage project gets federal go-ahead (High Country News) “The project in the Columbia Gorge would involve tunneling through a Ḱamíłpa sacred mountain.”

• How a California desalination plant could ease water shortages on the Colorado River (L.A. Times) + The Alfalfa Fallacy (Land Desk)

• CA Gov. Press release (Feb. 24) “SACRAMENTO – Governor Gavin Newsom today announced the formal launch of the California Water Plan 2028, marking the start of a multi-year effort to modernize statewide water planning in response to climate-driven extremes and long-term water reliability challenges…”

  • “California has a statewide water supply target: 9 million acre-feet by 2040. The California Water Plan 2028 is an action-oriented blueprint that will be built by voices from across the state and designed to close the water gaps that climate change, including extreme swings between drought and floods, is widening every year.”

• Warming winters are reshaping Canada’s snowpack (The Conversation)

And yet it’s so often “out of sight, out of mind.”

Those numbers come from a recent UN report declaring that we are living in an era of Global Water Bankruptcy and must move beyond temporary “crisis” responses to longer-term management that seeks “to prevent further irreversible damage, rebalance rights and claims within degraded carrying capacities, transform water-intensive sectors and development models, and support just transitions for those most affected.”

At the center of these challenges often lies a groundwater story. And sometimes it helps to see it to believe it. Exhibit A: The photo below is used in the UN report and captioned “The Visible Face of Water Bankruptcy.” It shows a sinkhole in Turkey, a “direct result of extracting groundwater much faster than nature can replenish it.”

It’s an important visual to take in.

Reports like this can, should and do, make groundwater more visible. But making groundwater more visible, and less hidden, is easier said than done. What language is there for us to use? What visuals should we use to illustrate its full spatial extent?

Where does the groundwater flow and where does the water go?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past couple of months.

Zooming In and Out

Groundwater is difficult to describe or visualize, despite being such a key part of the water cycle, a node that supports rivers, wetlands, springs, and ecologies that, in turn, supports communities who rely on it for drinking water and growing food. Part of the descriptive challenge is that aquifers can be geologically specific, highly-complex, and localized, requiring you to Zoom In to many different places to understand the whole. They are also dynamic systems, influenced by human actions and natural variability.

Zooming In is important, but it often leaves us with so many technical details we get lost in the weeds. Like calibrating a microscope at its highest magnification, we can forget the ways in which the parts are integrated with the whole. After all, individual groundwater aquifers connect to rivers and ecosystems in varied and changing ways.

So we Zoom Out.

Zooming Out matters because groundwater can flow over time and over long spatial extents (consider Nevada’s Lower White River Flow System, a “superbasin” of seven distinct hydrographic basins connected by groundwater). It’s important to visualize groundwater as more than a point (a well or a spring) on a map, but in its full extent.

Still, when we (I) Zoom Out too far, we (I) often lose the groundwater piece altogether as we (I) tend to revert to the surface features we can see. Here, I’m thinking about some recent newsletter-ing on the Colorado River. We go back to the watershed-scale, in which groundwater is a major component, but so often not centered in discussions.

Where do we calibrate then? Do we have language for something in between?

A ‘springshed?’ A ‘groundwatershed?’

A couple months ago, a colleague texted me about a project mapping the sources of springs in the northern part of the Great Basin. The text included a word I’d rarely seen before. A “springshed.” Something clicked. A play on a “watershed,” it was an intuitive term to describe the spatial extent of groundwater’s contribution to springs.

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But the water supply story had another, less positive layer. As I’d watch rain fall, I’d check the weather in the Sierra to see if storms in the valley were translating to snow in the mountains. They rarely did, a major warning sign for the snow drought to come.

By mid-January, NASA satellite imagery recorded snow cover in the Western U.S. as the lowest recorded since 2001, and about one-third of the median. It’s been wet, but it’s also been warm, resulting in more precipitation falling as rain at higher elevations.

That’s concerning because snowpack acts as a natural reservoir for many western watersheds, providing a steady spring runoff. There is still time for more snow (we have all of February and March) but the situation is serious enough that Utah Gov. Spencer Cox again called on his constituents of all faiths to pray for precipitation.

In Utah, Great Salt Lake Basin snowpack is now at the lowest recorded since 1989, a fact that has, as one headline put it, “triggered alarm” in the Utah statehouse.

In California, a snow survey at the end of January registered the state’s snowpack at 59% of average for this time of the year. Not the worst on record, but not abundant.

Yet snow drought is especially severe in the Colorado River Basin, where negotiators for the seven U.S. states that rely on the river struggle to come up with an agreement over how to share a shrinking pie of water after a set of operating rules expire. “It’s just completely grim,” Brad Udall, a Colorado State University climate scientist told Politico last week for a story about Washington’s involvement in the negotiations.

“He said that snowpack above Lake Powell in Utah and Arizona is currently at 65 percent of median level — a situation that could be expected to produce just 50 percent of the typical runoff in the spring and summer.”

When I checked the chart for the Upper Colorado this morning, it showed snowpack at its lowest recorded in a period of record going back to 1986. Zero percentile.

As for the Colorado River…

On Friday, the U.S. government summoned the governors of states in the Colorado River Basin to Washington D.C. as negotiating teams have clashed for more than a year in closed-door meetings over compromising on how to share the river. It’s hard to know exactly how much progress was made as states aim to have a conceptual deal by a Feb. 14 deadline. The Colorado Sun’s Shannon Mullane has a good story on details.

The conflict over water follows the geography of the river. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming are deadlocked with Arizona, California, and Nevada of the Lower Basin, where most of the water is used. But the Lower Basin has cut significantly over the past decade; Now they want the Upper Basin to chip in with reductions in use. The Upper Basin, which has long had ambitions to grow into its full Colorado River allocation, is saying no, and everyone has their legal arguments prepared for why they are right. Are the Upper Basin states in denial? Sammy Roth, former L.A. Times columnist and author of Climate-Colored Goggles makes a strong argument that they are in a recent piece for the New York Times opinion pages. More on the story and perspectives from some of the key players involved on his Substack.

The Arizona perspective: On Tuesday, the Arizona House unanimously passed a bill to set aside $1 million for potential Colorado River litigation. The move came one day after the state’s water leaders met to discuss potential pathways forward. This slide deck offers a look at the varying magnitude of the federal government’s options for cutting use (pulled out one of the most notable charts below). As the state with lower-priority rights, Arizona could see a large amount of its water cut in some scenarios.

But, as Axios reported, the state’s top water water leader that the Washington D.C. meeting was a “breath of fresh air.” The Axios piece contemplated discussion of a short-term deal, potentially with incentives to the Upper Basin under a 1922 compact.

In the background though, the “snow drought” hydrology looms, putting even more pressure on states to negotiate, or at least continue down a collaborative pathway.

What I’m reading right now:

“Considerations for Assigned Water after Expiration of the 2007 Guidelines” by Sorensen et al. (Link) → In the Lower Basin, users of the Colorado River Basin are allowed to store, or bank, water in Lake Mead for future use. “But,” as the authors write, “nearly two decades of operational experience also have exposed unintended consequences.” These include “inequitable access” and crowding out” other programs.

“Entrusting Groundwater” by Sean Lyness (Link). Many states in the United States have recognized the Public Trust Doctrine, the notion that governments hold certain natural resource — land and water — in trust for the public’s benefit. To what extent does it apply to groundwater? While doing some research, I came across this 2024 Wisconsin Law Review article on the topic, and looking forward to learning more.

“The great government brain drain” by Monica Hersher and Jeffrey Mervis. (Link) An eye-opening analysis from Science shows how many PhDs the federal government lost last year at agencies ranging from the USDA to Department of Interior. It finds that about 11 times more PhDs were lost than gained last year.

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• Western U.S. Cities Open Wallets in Quest for Water (Circle of Blue)

• 2025 in Review: The Saline Lakes Ecosystems Integrated Water Availability Assessment (USGS)

• Mexico agrees to make more predictable water deliveries to the US (AP)

• “Reno, Nev. (Jan. 26, 2026) The Nature Conservancy in Nevada (TNC in Nevada), DRI, and the University of Wisconsin – Madison (UW-Madison) have developed the Nevada GDE Water Needs Explorer Tool. This new online resource helps land and water managers understand how groundwater supports groundwater-dependent ecosystems (GDEs) and how changes in water levels can affect them.”

• Geothermal industry’s groundwater ‘loophole’ scrutinized (Nevada Current)

Thank you to all my existing subscribers. If you are new here, you can support this newsletter and my work by pitching in with a paid subscription or sharing with friends. Liking these posts also helps with the Substack algorithm. And as always, please let me know what you think.

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Where the groundwater goes

Arizona officials announced this month they would limit groundwater pumping from a declining aquifer system that made headlines after a Saudi-owned farm had been allowed to extract billions of gallons to grow and export alfalfa for dairy cows.

The L.A. Times’ Ian James, who has closely been following the story, reported on the state’s action last week. The move comes after Attorney General Kris Mayes sued the company, Fondomente, at the end of 2024. That litigation is ongoing and alleges that the company violated public nuisance laws, arguing that dewatering of the aquifer in question, the Ranegras Basin, has “accelerated at an extraordinary rate.”

As with many groundwater basins, withdrawals from the basin had long exceeded the annual replenishment rate, causing declines in the water table and land subsidence. In the state’s order regulating the groundwater basin, officials noted that some wells had declined more than 90 feet over 20 years, with one registering a 141.9 foot decline.

According to the order, the Arizona Department of Water Resources received more than 300 comments supporting management of the basin, touting the benefits of such action as including “safeguards for private property, local jobs, future investment, and future economic growth.” Others, the order said, “stated that it is unacceptable that vast amounts of Arizona’s finite groundwater are being pumped without oversight to grow water-intensive crops for export.” Hint, hint. One element of this story I found interesting was how much Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) has leaned into talking about it.

Water can make for bad politics, a lose-lose proposition in which you are almost certain to leave someone frustrated. And that’s especially true when you are limiting its use. But here is what Hobbs had to say about the action in her State of the State:

“Unlike politicians of the past, I refuse to bury my head in the sand. I refuse to ignore the problems we face. I will tackle them head on to deliver for our state.

… I will continue to stand up for communities across our state to ensure they are protected from corporations who care only about today’s profits, not Arizona’s future… That’s why today I am announcing a new Active Management Area for La Paz County, to crack down on the out-of-state special interests that are pumping our state dry while Arizona families and farmers suffer.”

Agree or disagree with the decision, the messaging lays out the stakes in real terms, doing something for constituents who see water supply as a major concern across the West. It also gets at the tradeoffs at the heart of so many water issues, but especially groundwater issues: The rights of an individual water user versus community needs.

“Today’s profits” vs. “Arizona’s future.”

After years of overallocation, groundwater regulation, on its face, may look limiting, but in cases when it aims to reduce overuse, it can serve to protect communities who rely on it. This is what Hobbs emphasizes — that acknowledging water constraints and developing management structures can actually enhance security, not diminish it.

How much water are we talking about?

Annual outflows from the groundwater basin, according to the order, are about 42,000 acre-feet. To put that in perspective, Arizona uses about 7.0 million acre-feet of water every year. What matters, though, is not the volume but the magnitude by which those 42,000 acre-feet in outflows exceed inflows, or how much water recharges the aquifer on an annual basis. In the case of the Ranegras Basin, the gap is significant. The state estimates inflows of about 4,500 acre-feet. That means roughly 9.5 times more water leaves the groundwater basin than replenishes it. Even if higher recharge estimates are used (6,000 acre-feet), the issue is largely the same. The math speaks for itself.

I wanted to flag this story first because while the total volume of water might seem small in the context of a watershed or a given state’s total water use, what matters is the local context. Over-pumping to such a degree, and for so long, has resulted in real consequences for the community. As a Republican county official, who has long raised the issue, told the Times: “You’re starting to see more and more wells get depleted. If we don’t try to slow this thing down, where are we going to be in 20 years?”

Even what seems like a small volume of water, if over-pumped, can lead to severe long-term consequences. Debt can accumulate any time you exceed a budget, and budgets come in different scales. This seems intuitive but it’s something that is missed out of so many conversations. One example is in some of the data center discourse: Many stories look at data centers in the aggregate, and water supply in aggregate and then conclude, surely we have the capacity for them. This may be true in sum. But as many experts have noted, it’s the local supply-demand paradigm that matters. Can the local supply sustainably support a large new demand without sacrificing community needs?

One last thing on this: Hobbs is right to note that many politicians in the past have hid from this issues. It’s always shocking how well-documented overallocation was as groundwater boomed in the mid-20th Century. On that note, I wanted to share this snippet from a 1955 USGS report I was looking at on groundwater rights. From 1955:

Overdraft can be eliminated if water is available from another source to replace some of the water taken from the affected aquifer. In areas where no alternate source of supply is available at reasonable cost, public opinion so far appears to favor treating ground water as a nonrenewable resource comparable to petroleum and metals, and mining it until the supply is exhausted, rather than curbing the withdrawals at an earlier date. (emphasis mine)

See also, “Arizona comes to agreement with major dairy farm to cut groundwater pumping that is draining wells,” Wyatt Myskow, Inside Climate News

“Nonfunctional turf” faces a court challenge

As the current shortage on the Colorado River began to take hold in 2021, Las Vegas water officials lobbied Nevada lawmakers to pass a first-of-its-kind law to phase out and eventually ban the use of Colorado River water for ornamental turf.

The landmark law built on decades of work by the Southern Nevada Water Authority to conserve water by a) incentivizing customers to convert grass to drought-tolerant landscaping, and b) limiting grass in new developments. Because Las Vegas recycles most of its indoor water, outdoor irrigation is the major driver of water consumption.

The 2021 legislation went a step further. Relying on cash incentives and rules to limit future turf had been wildly successful, but those tools were starting to hit a saturation point. To meet aggressive conservation goals and deal with a smaller Colorado River supply, the water authority went further. Under the 2021 law, the state required the removal of existing turf that serves a decorative and nonfunctional purpose by 2026.

Some of what that includes is obvious. Think, the oblong patches of turf you at the center of a median or business park. The kind no one touches. But defining what is and is not nonfunctional turf also required many judgment calls. In 2021, a committee released a report recommending nonfunctional turf include frontage and adjacent turf at properties not zoned single-family residences, as well as HOA areas where the turf is not serving a recreational or community benefit, defined further in the report.

Some had a different idea, viewing that turf as “functional” in their daily lives, even if it didn’t fit the committee’s definition. And so, last week, several Las Vegas residents sued before the 2026 deadline, alleging that the agency acted outside of its authority and challenged the constitutionality of the 2021 law (and a supplementary 2023 law).

Here’s a link to the lawsuit.

It begins with a quote from the Lorax “[we] speak for the trees” and focuses largely on the removal of grass that provides cover for trees. The lawsuit alleges that more than 100,000 trees have died in the Las Vegas Valley, resulting in a loss of $300 million.

It includes lines claiming the water authority, through the law, “anointed themselves the water legislature, jury, and executioners.” It includes rhetoric like the “abusive wielding of this unconstitutional law must be stopped immediately before more trees die and the Las Vegas Valley becomes a desert wasteland,” and claims that “Las Vegas has been naturally green due to an undefined amount of groundwater independent of the Colorado River.” Which of course is not totally how it unfolded. Yes, Las Vegas did once depend on groundwater, but that supply was actually quite bounded and limited, so much so that its overuse and depletion led to the disappearance of springs. And its overuse ultimately required Las Vegas to depend on its full Colorado River allocation.

But I digress.

Underneath the strident posture are real, important issues. Conservation requires using less, and using less is always harder in reality than it is on paper. When it has to be implemented on an individual level, everyone wants an exception. This was one thing the head of the water authority made clear when I interviewed him for a story in Smithsonian Magazine about Las Vegas conservation in 2023 and asked what the hardest part was: “I know it sounds simplistic to say, ‘Making people change their behavior is the hardest part,” he said. “But that’s always the hardest part. Every group we talk to says, ‘We fully support your conservation programs, but how do we get a carve-out for our little piece?’”

This is important as deep conservation increasingly becomes part of municipal water strategies in the West. Since the 2021 law passed in Nevada, other jurisdictions have adopted rules around nonfunctional turf, or considered doing so. Seemingly tedious things like how terms are defined, or where they are defined, can have implications for not only the total water savings but also the ultimate impact and cost to end users.

It also speaks to questions about how limited water supplies are equitably distributed in communities, how to share water when the math dictates someone has to use less.

Even more broadly, the story got me thinking about institutional processes, systems, and governance when it comes to using less. It may seem like designing water systems in an Era of Limits requires less infrastructure than the era of big dams, pipelines and canals. But it requires lots of hard and soft infrastructure, if more distributed in nature.

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Clearing my inbox, closing out my tabs, etc…

• Western U.S. faces worsening snow drought, with California being the rare exception (AccuWeather)

• In a warming world, freshwater production is moving deep beneath the sea (Associated Press)

• “Published on the occasion of UNU-INWEH’s 30th anniversary, and ahead of the 2026 UN Water Conference, this flagship report, Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, argues that the world has entered a new stage: more and more river basins and aquifers are losing the ability to return to their historical “normal.” Droughts, shortages, and pollution episodes that once looked like temporary shocks are becoming chronic in many places, signalling a post-crisis condition the report calls water bankruptcy.”

• Newsom steps into labor fight over Sites Reservoir (E&E News/POLITICO)

• Colorado River governors called to Washington (L.A. Times)

• Report says New Mexico faces ‘looming groundwater crisis’ from climate change, overuse (Source NM)

• How New Mexico learned to love its ephemeral waters (Border Chronicle)

For all of its significance, Colorado River governance operates within a high degree of legal complexity. Many fundamental questions about what happens when there is not enough water to go around have never been fully litigated and completely settled.

But that legal framework — what is known as the “Law of the River” — is set against much clearer hydrologic realities. There is less water to go around, on average, than was assumed when rights were allocated about a century ago. Climate change, over two decades, has only worsened the structural “wet water” vs. “paper water” divide.

Cuts are coming. As has been the case for years, it is only a matter of how they are structured and distributed, and whether these cuts are negotiated or imposed. The first consideration (the structure and distribution of cuts) is connected to the latter.

This week, negotiators for the seven states in the Colorado River Basin are reportedly being sequestered in Salt Lake City to see if they can reach a negotiated, consensus-based agreement to manage shortages on the river after missing a deadline last year. They now have until Feb. 14, or else the federal government has threatened to step in.1

On Friday, the federal government offered a glimpse into what that may look like with the release of a draft 1,600-page report, modeling a wide spectrum of potential ways to mandate and distribute cuts on the Colorado River Basin. The report describes four options for moving forward (without endorsing any one alternative as preferred).

With negotiation leading to little progress over the past year, the idea that one might be selected seems to be increasingly likely as the Basin, to borrow a term for a recent expert paper, is “Dancing with Deadpool.” It would mark a major departure from the norm. The Colorado River saw its first shortage declaration in 2021, triggering cuts that were based on a set of negotiated rules, agreed upon in 2007 and updated in 2019.

Imposing cuts that lack such agreement, as Reclamation concedes, would be a major departure from the collaborative dealmaking that has guided past shortage criteria:

Management of the Colorado River has to date been informed by negotiated stakeholder agreements. In the absence of such agreements, efficient and sustainable management of the reservoirs and system resources under an increasingly broad range of potential future hydrologic conditions would be more challenging than under historical operations and would result in a number of highly undesirable consequences for many users. (emphasis mine)

Why is that? How the cuts are divided matters significantly, and negotiations offer more flexibility, a potential path to finding compromises that a) reconciles hydrologic realities with overallocation and unsettled issues in the law and b) balances risk in a way that may be more equitable. The other alternative, government-imposed cuts, are likely to satisfy few, may lack critical buy-in, and would likely lead to litigation that results in justices picking winners and losers, injecting new risk into the basin.

To me, this is the clear subtext in the report release. The federal government is saying it can and will act, but please come up with your own solution because our acting unilaterally would come with mounting risk no matter how we slice it up.

Will that be enough to motivate the states to reach a compromise?

The threat of federal cuts

The draft report offers a glimpse into the different ways cuts could be imposed. The alternatives offer varying ways to implement/fuse two distinct methods for cutting:

• Priority-based cuts: These cuts are based on the priority system, first in time, first in right, as defined through past litigation and Colorado River Basin Project Act.

• Pro rata cuts: The pro rata cuts contemplate shortages on a proportional basis, cutting a percentage off of each entitlement across all Lower Basin water users.

These produce noticeably different results. Table 2-2, from the federal report, results from priority-based cuts up to 1.48 million acre-feet. Table 2-3 is the result of a pro-rata based strategy. And it puts in context a headline from the L.A. Times: “Trump administration proposes Colorado River options that could hit California hard.”

* The report focuses on cuts in Arizona, California and Nevada (or the Lower Colorado River Basin), where the Secretary of Interior serves as “water master.” But it’s worth noting that the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming share risk through other constraints, including a Colorado River Compact obligation to send water to the Lower Basin.

The first scenario, Reclamation states, could be achieved under existing authority. Basing cuts on priority in this scenario means Arizona would have to shoulder painful cuts since the Central Arizona Project and other users in the state hold junior rights.

The charts included in Appendix C illuminate just how complicated priority is in the Lower Basin and how many players are involved. While technical, the charts provide a transparent public accounting for how cuts could be staged, and it offers additional context for the intrastate dynamics that constrain the politics of negotiated cuts.

Senior “present perfected rights” (those existing before 1929) exist in all Lower Basin states and would be satisfied first under the priority system. They include federally reserved water rights for Tribal nations and senior rights for irrigation districts and water projects established before the the Boulder Canyon Project Act went into effect.

The second scenario is a pro-rata method. Here, Reclamation looks at what would happen if the federal government were to distribute shortages proportionally across water users in the Lower Basin. Although this spreads pain more equally, it would represent a major departure from the priority system for cuts under existing law.

With all that said, what a final federal plan looks like is anyone’s guess, making the task of writing about it a little challenging. The document makes clear that all of the scenarios could be updated, changed, or combined together in a final report.

The subtext is a threat of litigation

No matter what option is chosen, a federal action could lead to litigation.

See a statement from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California Friday:

None of the five alternatives analyzed by the Bureau of Reclamation are endorsed by any of the Basin States. The various alternatives highlight the significant risks we could face if we don’t reach an agreement. And implementation of any alternatives would likely lead to lengthy litigation (emphasis mine).

This seems to be clear in parts of the Reclamation report. Even in enforcing Method #1, cutting by priority in accordance with existing law, the federal agency says that the “full extent of Reclamation’s operational authority has not been tested to date — either operationally or through legislative or judicial review.”

As for Method #2, Reclamation offers a qualifying note with the word pro rata: “…additional agreements and other legal authorities would be needed to implement any pro rata operations that are inconsistent with the Decree.”

So federally imposed cuts turn into cuts decided by the U.S. Supreme Court? That adds a high degree of uncertainty to how the waters are divided up in a basin that supports 40 million people in the West. Such litigation could drag on for years and increase risk, with hydrology potentially dictating the real physical constraints and distribution of water much faster than any court ruling could.

Or there is negotiation

The Lower Basin states had pitched a plan in 2024 that combines a proportional and a priority approach. Beyond 1.5 million acre-feet, the Lower Basin’s ask was that the Upper Basin states pitch in with conservation. Sharing the burden of a smaller river, they argued, should fall on all states. The Upper Basin states argue that they already feel the pain of climate change, as creeks in headwater states run dry and cut users off.

And the two sides have been deadlocked for more than a year.

It’s notable, as Kyle Roerink of the Great Basin Water Network said, that the report focuses largely on the Lower Basin while almost appearing to “limit the pain” for the Upper Basin. He said that would result in “unprecedented pain” for the Lower Basin.

But there is still room for a negotiated deal.

The Pacific Institute’s Michael Cohen has argued that rather than positioning itself as a mediator and facilitator, the federal government should come forward with a clear and detailed federal threat for both the Upper and Lower Basin. Doing so could give the states cover to actually reach a brokered deal. Here’s what he told KJZZ yesterday:

COHEN: Part of my reasoning is that there needs to be a credible threat so that the seven basin states have the room to operate. Because we’re in a situation now where the amount of water flowing down the Colorado River continues to decline pretty markedly as the climate gets hotter and drier, there’s simply less water available for everyone. But it’s very difficult for any negotiator, for any of the basin states to step up and basically say, “we’re going to sacrifice ourselves for the good of the whole.” … Whereas if they’re responding to a federal threat, then they have some political cover. And then it gives each of these basin states the ability to step up and say that if we don’t do something now, it’s going to be worse otherwise.

It’s a persuasive argument.

Remainders, closing out tabs, etc…

“The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday proposed limiting states’ and Native American tribes’ power to wield the Clean Water Act to block major projects like natural gas pipelines, advancing the Trump administration’s goal of accelerating the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure and data center.” (Associated Press)

Arizona takes action on groundwater pumping, from the L.A. Times: “…Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs said Monday that her administration is acting to ‘crack down on the out-of-state special interests that are pumping our state dry while Arizona families and farmers suffer.’”

From RE:PUBLIC: “Last year was a consequential one for America’s public lands. What does 2026 have in store? Presenting 29 bold predictions from the experts.”

“The United States Supreme Court officially declined to hear a case alleging the federal government illegally stiffed water contractors, including the City of Fresno, when it gave them zero water during the crushing 2014-2015 drought.” (SJV Water)

A powerful piece on the past, present and future of Tulare Lake (Tangled Nature)

Trump vetoes bipartisan bill to prove clean water to rural Colorado (KRCC)

I can hardly believe it’s Dec. 30, and the year is quickly coming to a close. I’m deeply grateful for everyone who subscribed this year, and a special note of gratitude to my paid subscribers. This is a reader-supported venture for me, and your subscriptions help make this work possible. Thank you for supporting my work.

Taking a brief break from writing today to end the year with one last post for 2025.

All the best, and wishing everyone a Happy New Year,

Daniel

1. Hydrology and physical constraints

The water year across the Southwest, at least in terms of snowpack accumulation, is off to an unpromising start in many places. Yes, recent storms last week brought some relief to basins in the Sierra and Western Nevada, with hopefully on the way. While I was writing, California released its snow survey showing snowpack at 71% of average.

It’s still far too early to tell what will happen. The 2024 Water Year in the Upper Colorado River Basin (the orange line below), for instance, started below average and ended slightly above average. For comparison, the 2026 Water Year is shaded in black.

Again, none of this is static. My point in showing these charts is that they highlight important trends to watch into 2026. The hydrology, perhaps more than anything else, could dictate much of what happens next year, especially on the Colorado River Basin.

Hydrology can impose immediate physical constraints, and when those limits collide with existing legal and political constraints — like the inability to reach a deal on new operating guidelines for the river — one crisis can give way to another.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s projections show that Lake Powell, under a worst-case hydrologic forecast, could fall so low by September 2026 that the Glen Canyon Dam would no longer be able to generate power, as Tony Davis from the Arizona Daily Star reports. This would also mean water would have to flow through the dam’s outlet works, which were not designed for large volumes of water.

2. Is it Prior Appropriation, or is it something else?

Building on that point, I’ve been thinking through the mechanisms and circumstances that actually influence policy, whether that policy is a result of legal enforcement or voluntary collaboration. Hydrology certainly is one. And of course, priority is certainly another.

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As always, please reach out if you have any questions. You can support my work by sharing with colleagues or subscribing. All best and happy holiday season. Stay safe and well, Daniel

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Last Friday, Nevada officials confirmed to the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the state’s top water regulator, Adam Sullivan, was no longer in his role, but offered no clues as to his sudden departure, except to “[wish] him well on his future endeavors.”

The end to his tenure as State Engineer has raised many questions. I’m sure more will trickle out in the coming days, as reporters ask quesitons. The Nevada Independent’s Tabitha Mueller talked to Sullivan who said he faced pressure from the governor’s office and his dismissal “didn’t come as a complete surprise, but it was a shock.”

“There was pressure to rescind decisions or accelerate decisions, or withhold decisions, or to not attend public meetings.”

Here’s a little more of what I know:

Already, one of Sullivan’s major initiatives has been put on hold. On Thursday last week, the acting State Engineer emailed members of a Humboldt River working group that the Nevada Division of Water Resources would postpone its next meeting. Later in the email, he confirmed that the state would postpone a draft regulatory order to offset the effects of groundwater pumping on streamflow depletion.

The process to get a draft order has been a significant undertaking. At about 330 miles long, the Humboldt drains entirely within Nevada and spans multiple counties and 34 groundwater basins. It supports massive gold mines and agricultural economies along I-80, but with more rights to use water than there is water to go around sustainably.

The draft order was expected to come out this month. Now it is on an indefinite hold.

In recent weeks, Nevada Gold Mines — a joint-venture between multinational gold miners Barrick and Newmont — sent letters criticizing the modeling used to inform the decision-making, and urged the State Engineer to hold off on issuing a draft order.

According to an outline of the order, the draft document would have detailed how the state could approach groundwater curtailment in the Humboldt, where pumping water from connected aquifers has reduced streamflow for priority downstream irrigators.

The draft order contemplated the creation of Capture Management Zones in which groundwater users would need to mitigate impacts on streamflow through offsets or market-based mechanisms — or face curtailment after a five year window. According to an outline of the draft, the document release was meant to further discussions.

The draft curtailment order is a framework that shows how curtailment could work: when it would be triggered, how and where it would be applied, and what the parameters and options are for water users to avoid curtailment. Distributing a draft for public review provides a basis for clarity, dialogue and collaboration. This is about ensuring that the process moves along with open eyes and an open mind, shaped with stakeholder input. It is not about imposing immediate cuts.

But it signaled that cuts could come.

Following Sullivan’s dismissal last week, the director of the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, James Settelmeyer, made a few brief remarks at a Humboldt River Basin Water Authority meeting. At the start of his comments, he acknowledged that “Adam Sullivan is no longer the State Engineer,” describing it as a decision “to go in another direction,” according to a recording of the meeting.

As for the Humboldt, he said he wanted to slow down the process, citing a need to validate three numerical groundwater models in various stages of development. The modeling work by the U.S. Geological Survey, Desert Research Institute and Division of Water Resources started in 2016 after a curtailment call from surface water users, whose priority water rights were being impacted by upstream groundwater pumping.

Since then, the state has published Upper and Lower Humboldt River groundwater models to help inform decision-making. The final Middle Humboldt River model from the USGS has not been published, but provisional model files were recently released and hydrogeologists have presented on Middle Humboldt modeling for years at many professional workshops and in public meetings. Like most groundwater modeling and decision-support tools, these releases have described uncertainties and limitations.

Cognizant of this, the outline of the draft order flagged three areas, in particular, as needing special attention about whether there was sufficient confidence to impose offset requirements and curtailment. The outline also noted numerical groundwater models could be supplemented by consideration of improved data and information.

At the meeting Friday, Settelmeyer said he did not support “proceeding with a draft order at the end of this year on science that has flaws within it and is problematic,” saying a pause would give the USGS more time to release its final Middle Humboldt model and review/refine existing models. He also said he hoped the state could avoid curtailment and seemed to suggest a draft order release could lead to litigation.

But delaying is likely to frustrate downstream senior surface water users in Pershing County who’ve pushed the state for years to curtail upstream groundwater pumping where it reduces surface deliveries, including through a contentious 2015 lawsuit.

In two recent letters to the state, Nevada Gold Mines raised concerns — similar to those mentioned by Settelmeyer — about the draft order. The company criticized the Middle Humboldt model for ignoring data, being outdated, and showing curtailment may not produce results. The company, which pumps large volumes of groundwater to dewater gold mines in the Middle Humboldt River Basin, wields significant economic and political power in the region and across the state. In addition to operating mines, the company manages water rights through its extensive holdings of ranch land.

Nevada Gold Mines said that it had “serious concerns” about the state’s “course of action and its timing, and we urge you to reconsider basing any such decisions on the Model before it has been appropriately released and vetted in its final form.”

Sullivan, in a Dec. 3 reply, said “the model, while provisionally released, represents a significant step forward in understanding the complex hydrologic dynamics of the Humboldt River Basin. It is one of several tools the Division is using to inform its decisions and that we expect will continue to be refined as new data and insights emerge.” He emphasized the “draft curtailment order does not impose curtailment. Rather, it is a planning and engagement tool intended to illustrate how curtailment could be structured under existing [water] permit terms and Nevada water law.”

The State Engineer’s office prides itself on science-based decision-making that is independent of politics and interference. Especially in recent years, facing pressures for new growth combined with drought, the office has been forced to make tough calls on appropriations that has made their decisions unpopular (and challenged in court).

The sudden departure of a State Engineer is very rare, though not unprecedented.

In 1962, Gov. Grant Sawyer pushed for the removal of State Engineer Ed Muth, who had previously frustrated Sawyer by not issuing a permit for the Dunes golf course in an over-tapped Las Vegas aquifer (the state eventually issued a permit), and later, not allowing new wells for North Las Vegas. As a newspaper put it, Muth resigned after facing “strong criticism from Southern Nevada officials on his water policies.”

The state still has given no public explanation for why Sullivan was dismissed, and I focus on the Humboldt since that is where there’ve been immediate consequences.

But it’s worth noting that the State Engineer’s decisions affect the entire state. The person in the position has always faced tension over how to balance the long-term public interest with existing demand to appropriate and use water, which belongs to the public. That is to say the State Engineer is involved in many controversial issues at any given time, often involving high-profile projects. The State Engineer is charged not only with approving new water permits but also evaluating applications to change water uses and decisions to forfeit water rights, all of which have economic impacts.

It’s also worth noting that the change in leadership comes at a critical juncture as the state works to implement conjunctive management on the Humboldt and elsewhere.

Historically, groundwater and surface water has been managed separately in Nevada and in many Western states, despite knowledge of hydrologic connections between the two. Pump in certain locations for too long, and you risk wells capturing water that would naturally flow as surface water (rivers, streams, etc…). This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as a type of groundwater capture. It has created conflict across the state (and West), with varied economic interests on different sides as water users seek to reconcile the capture with priority “first in time, first in right” rules for water rights. Other states have also had to deal with how to integrate the management of surface water and groundwater after decades of policy treating them as separate.

For more than a decade, the State Engineer has been working on how to resolve these conflicts — and the challenges in regulating interconnected sources did not begin with Sullivan. In 2024, the Nevada Supreme Court issued a key ruling upholding the state’s authority to manage surface water and groundwater as a connected resource. That court case centered on the state’s ability to manage a regional groundwater flow system that discharges to a tributary to the Colorado River and where major players like Southern Nevada Water Authority, Coyote Springs and others hold water rights.

With that court ruling making the state’s authority clear, there now remain critical questions about how to implement conjunctive management, particularly for existing water rights permits, such as those at issue in the Humboldt River.

Make-or-break moment for Colorado River governance?

Water managers and government officials from across the Southwest met this week for the Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas. For the last two decades, negotiators for the seven U.S. states in the Basin — navigating drought and declining reservoir conditions — have prided themselves on finding the collaborative consensus-based path forward in cutting back use.

But the talks among the states have been at an impasse much of this year. Little progress has been made since last year’s annual water users conference — where everyone was sharpening their litigation stances. This year’s conference went about exactly as you might imagine. As Cynthia Campbell, a water expert with ASU, told Inside Climate News, “I came with very low expectations, and they were met,”

It all raises important questions about whether the federal government’s deference to a state-driven approach is working in a basin that supports 40 million people.

Some important words on that from Pacific Institute’s Michael Cohen:

The basin state negotiators have met for years behind closed doors, without success. It’s time for a new approach. Aggressive federal intervention and the credible threat of a federally-imposed Colorado River management plan would offer political cover – or a political imperative – for the negotiators. The credible threat of a federal plan would give the negotiators the space to compromise without having to do so unilaterally and then being accused of not protecting their state’s interests.

…

To date, the development of the post-2026 guidelines has prioritized routine operations of Glen Canyon and Hoover dams over the system as a whole, a focus inconsistent with the magnitude and urgency of the problem. Prioritizing routine dam operations and hydropower generation over water delivery and environmental protection elevates the tool over the task. Seeking to preserve routine operations of the dams while imposing draconian cuts on water users is not a path to resilience and precludes alternatives that would help stabilize the system.

+ Jonathan Thompson at the Land Desk also has a good (if not extremely sobering) post on the aptly-named “Dancing with Dead Pool” report released by the Colorado River Research Group. The report chronicles the continued crisis facing the Colorado River — with increasingly less storage to pull from. Interestingly, the report (which I plan to dig into more next year) calls for some kind of entity to improve the status quo.

…the basinwide entity we envision would be inclusive, transparent, integrate multiple objectives, and address the framing issues explained above. The entity would be guided by the best available knowledge, including science and indigenous knowledge, emphasize collaborative learning and adaptive management, and provide explicit mechanisms for consensus building and dispute resolution.

+ Interesting UCLA/Natural Resources Defense Council study looking at the price of water across the Lower Colorado River Basin. More from CalMatters’ Rachel Becker:

The research team spent a year scouring state and federal contracts, financial reports and agency records to assemble a dataset of water purchases, transfers and contracts to acquire water from rivers and reservoirs. They compared vastly different water suppliers with different needs and geographies, purchasing water from delivery systems built at different times and paid for under different contracts.

Their overarching conclusion: One of the West’s most valuable resources has no consistent valuation – and sometimes costs nothing at all.

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One last thing: A slow start to building up the West’s snowpack

From NOAA and the National Integrated Drought Information System:

• Water Year 2026 (October 1, 2025–September 30, 2026) precipitation to date is near or above median for many parts of the West. However, much warmer-than-normal temperatures caused precipitation to fall as rain instead of snow across many basins, leading to snow drought despite wetter-than-normal conditions across most of the West.

  • Nearly every major river basin in the West experienced a November among the top 5 warmest on record.

• Snow drought is most severe across much of the Sierra Nevada in California, the Cascade Range in Washington and Oregon, the Blue Mountains of Oregon, and the Great Basin in Nevada, with snow water equivalent (SWE) in most of these basins at less than 50% of median.

As always, send me feedback, ideas or drop a comment in the comment section at the bottom of this post. You can support this newsletter by sharing with colleagues, and if you’re able to, consider subscribing below! Hope everyone has a good holiday spent with friends and family.

Last week I talked with Caroline Tracey, a writer and geographer whose forthcoming book, Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History (March 2026), weaves together beautiful personal essays about the strange, surreal, and spectacular social-ecological systems that exist within the world’s salt lakes — and their ability to change our ideas and perspectives.

Seemingly out of nowhere, salt lakes emerge at the terminus of rivers with no outlet to the sea. These endorheic lakes are prominent features of the Great Basin — Mono Lake, Owens Lake, Walker Lake, the Great Salt Lake — but saline lakes exist and have existed all over the world, from the Aral Sea in Central Asia to Lake Urmia in Iran. In fact, they represent roughly half (44%) of the volume of global lakes (Messager et al.)

But almost everywhere they exist, saline lakes have shrunk during the past century as a result of upstream human diversions from rivers that flow into them (Wurtsbaugh et al.). In her essays, Tracey grapples with what these losses mean for communities and ecologies that depend on these lakes. The essays are personal and poetic, with quiet gestures to the beauty and meaning we can find in the places so many often overlook.

“People often refer to salt lakes as “dead,” inferring that they are absent of life,” she writes in one essay. “But the lakes overflow with life — just in specific, small forms.”

Salt lakes force us to pay attention, an especially valuable skill in an economy that both deflects and demands so much of it. When salt lakes decline and run dry, the impacts are evident. As Tracey and I discuss, it seems no accident that it is salt lakes that have continuously been at the center of lawsuits over the role of the government, under the Public Trust Doctrine, to balance public interests with the private use of water. At Mono Lake with National Audubon Society v. Superior Court (1983), then at Walker Lake with Mineral County v. Lyon County (2020), now with the Great Salt Lake.

As an endorheic basin enthusiast, I am of course biased. But Salt Lakes resonated with me in so many ways, and I highly recommend checking it out and pre-ordering!

Hope you enjoy the interview.

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A few other things:

My friend Laura Paskus is working on a neat new project raising awareness about environmental flows in New Mexico and the policies around them. New Mexico Rivers Rising “is dedicated to covering New Mexico’s rivers, streams, wetlands, and springs; the challenges they face in a warming world; and the policies and practices that create or protect environmental flows or instream water rights.”

A new paper by Richter et al. looks at overconsumption in the Rio Grande-Bravo Basin, finding that about half of the water consumed for human use comes from an unsustainable supply — most of which is through groundwater depletion (see chart above). Hope to write more about this in a future newsletter. Check out Jonathan Thompson’s reporting on the paper in the Land Desk newsletter.

In Nature Sustainability, a paper on AI, energy, and water from researchers at Cornell:

The team found that, by 2030, the current rate of AI growth would annually put 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the emissions equivalent of adding 5 to 10 million cars to U.S. roadways. It would also drain 731 to 1,125 million cubic meters of water per year – equal to the annual household water usage of 6 to 10 million Americans. The cumulative effect would put the AI industry’s net-zero emissions targets out of reach…. On the upside, the study also outlines an actionable roadmap that would use smart siting, faster grid decarbonization and operational efficiency to cut these impacts by approximately 73% (carbon dioxide) and 86% (water) compared with worst-case scenarios.”

• On that note, I highly recommend this reporting by Rolling Stone/The Food & Environment Reporting Network, a story about nitrate contamination in an eastern Oregon aquifer, local politics in the data center rush — “How Oregon’s data center boom is supercharging a water crisis.” // The story says so much about how contextual the data center build out is and how increased pumping for water can result in consequences for water quality infrastructure, not only water quantity.

The Trump administration issued a new definition of what counts as a “Water of the United States” (WOTUS) and can be regulated under the Clean Water Act of 1972. The proposal significantly constrains the government’s ability to regulate pollution and could get rid of protections for ~85% of wetlands, the Natural Resources Defense Council told the New York Times. Redefining the scope of WOTUS comes after a 2023 Supreme Court ruling, Sackett v. EPA, limited the scope of the Clean Water Act.

• Exactly what counts as a regulated water has been a disputed question for years, raising questions about whether the act can be used to regulate ephemeral and intermittent streams, which do not run year-round but make up a majority of the mapped streams in many arid watersheds and play critical hydrological roles.

A new Groundwater paper, Owen et al., looks at the policy challenges and benefits of Managed Aquifer Recharge. From the abstract:

… “Some of the problems arise from the challenges of finding physically suitable locations for managed aquifer recharge; many derive from economics, public policy, and law; and some derive from ways in which managed aquifer recharge could exacerbate traditional equity challenges of water management. But as we explain, there also are potential solutions to these challenges, and the future success of managed aquifer recharge will likely depend on the extent to which these solutions are adopted.”

And finally, the latest drought monitor map after some snow and rain last week:

Shortly afterward, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation held a scoping period and received hundreds of comments from tribal nations, the seven U.S. states in the Colorado River Basin, agencies, NGOs and the general public. With the news that the seven states at the heart of the negotiations missed a key deadline yesterday, I have been revisiting a summary report of those comments. I recommend checking them out.

They say a lot about the hope many had for the post-2026 operating guidelines — that this set of negotiations would be more inclusive, proactive and collaborative than the 2007 Interim Guidelines that are scheduled to lapse a year(ish) from now. The public comments also reflect the conflicting and overlapping interests that inform the river’s management. While these varied interests can, at times, promote collaboration, they can also make agreements difficult. This is true in watersheds across the U.S. West.

The major news, as the L.A. Times’ Ian James reports, is the seven-state Colorado River negotiators failed to meet a benchmark yesterday to present a consensus plan over how to share cuts on a river that is shrinking from climate change:

Negotiators for seven Western states said they are making progress in ongoing talks over how to share the diminishing waters of the Colorado River, but they provided no specifics. A deadline set by the Trump administration came and went Tuesday without any region-wide agreement on water cutbacks.

…

Negotiators for the states and the federal Interior Department said in a joint statement that they “recognize the serious and ongoing challenges facing the Colorado River,” and that “prolonged drought and low reservoir conditions have placed extraordinary pressure on this critical water resource.” “While more work needs to be done, collective progress has been made that warrants continued efforts to define and approve details for a finalized agreement,” they said.

According to the story, the negotiators are still talking, and that’s a good thing.

But why have the negotiations been so hard?

The path to a consensus was already fraying when the scoping comments came in. In 2022, Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton issued an ultimatum to the states, asking all sectors and users to cut 2-4 million acre-feet in use to stabilize Lakes Mead and Powell, the two largest reservoirs on the Colorado River system.

The next year, the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada reached a historic deal to save 3 million acre-feet through 2026, an effort aided by considerable funding from the Inflation Reduction Act. [It’s worth noting here that California’s water use is the lowest since 1949]. A good water year in 2022-2023 provided some more breathing room, but by 2024, there was stark disagreement between the Upper Basin and Lower Basin, with two alternatives for a post-2026 operating regime.

Colorado River managers have talked about the post-2026 guidelines for a decade. And from the perspective of the public, they seem only a little closer than they were years ago on fundamental issues. Much of the negotiations have taken place outside of the public’s view, and its hard to assess them, in part, because there is little record.

Over the summer, there was a glimmer of hope when news broke of the seven states modeling management scenarios based on actual supply, moving to a system more responsive and closely aligned with actual reservoir inflows and streamflow. The idea would be to link shortage declarations to the natural flows at the Lee’s Ferry gauge downstream of the Grand Canyon versus on elevation levels at Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which guides the current formula for releases and shortage declarations/cuts.

But despite the excitement around the plan, the reality was that familiar, foundational governance questions remained about how water is allocated on the Colorado River, in accordance with a complex, overlapping, and layered legal framework that, in sum, dedicates more rights to use water on paper than there is wet water to go around. And these fundamental, controversial questions have often been deferred in past deals.

As California negotiator J.B. Hamby told High Country News:

“Previous negotiations did not address core issues. They either delayed them or worked around them, making do based on the circumstances of the time.”

The less water there is to go around, the harder these issues get. And there is less water to go around, with 21st Century flows far lower than those of the proceeding century, with warmer temperatures contributing to the decline. The more acute the hydrologic situation is, the more it has stressed out an uncertain legal regime.

Uncertain how?

The negotiations have revealed what has been known and well-documented by many scholars. The 1922 Colorado River Compact — central to subsequent laws that govern the river — can be vague in its implementation, operations, and accounting system.

Does the Upper Basin have a non-depletion or delivery obligation to the Lower Basin? How would a Compact Call work? How would the states curtail? How do you account for where all of the water goes. Whose allocations does it count against? The list goes on and on; Shannon Mullane from the Colorado Sun has an excellent piece on it.

In practice, this vagueness can provide a lot of room for negotiation. And many saw (or at least once did) the benefits of negotiating, versus kicking the issue to the courts. Better to come to a consensus than gamble with a judicial process that could open the door to all sorts of unpredictable consequences. Or as John Entsminger, Nevada’s river negotiator, put it in 2023: “Anyone telling you we should pursue the litigation path, all they’re saying is they’re willing to roll the dice on your future, because they’re going to change out seasoned water professionals for nine people with black robes.”

But it’s hard to come to consensus when the scale of the cuts are large. When the cuts are actually staring you down, perhaps litigation does not look as bad as it once did?

In practice, the Law of the River has operated similarly to how Prior Appropriation has in many situations. The rules seem ironclad on paper, but in practice, they leave open many real social, political, and legal questions about what feasible curtailment were to look like. To reduce collective (and specific) risks, water users have come to prefer negotiating around the most controversial issues as an alternative to litigation.

For some unrelated research, I recently came across a paper written by legal scholar Dan Tarlock in 2000 about enforcing priority appropriation. This quote felt relevant:

Priority’s modern significance lies in the threat of enforcement rather than the actual enforcement because it encourages water users to cooperate either to reduce the risk of enforcement to as close to zero as possible or to share more equitably the burdens of shortages. This said, cooperation and ad hoc sharing do not come easily to water users. Alternative allocation systems usually emerge only when a significant group of water users thinks that cooperation will produce a superior result to the likely legal resolution allocation of the resource.

Sound familiar? If the states seem to be heading toward a future of litigation, I hope (and part of me doubts) it would end there. My reasoning is what we’ve seen over the last two decades: The reality is the impacts of climate change on hydrology are forcing change faster than the century-old legal framework for the river can respond to them.

Litigation could take years, if not decades, to resolve.

The effects of aridification are unfolding at a faster rate.

The recent past is prologue: Because of climate change, the states have had to swing from crisis to crisis over the past decade, resulting in patchwork agreements to make it to 2026, especially in the Lower Basin. The Drought Contingency Plan (2019). 500+ Plan (2021). Lower Basin Cuts (2023). Drought Response Operations Agreement (2023). The very fact that these stopgap measures have been necessary seems, in and of itself, an indication of the need to develop a holistic long-term post-2026 operations plan.

There is still time for that to happen, but the window is narrowing.

That’s it for today. Thanks, as always, for reading. If you have any colleagues or friends who might be interested, you can support this newsletter by passing it along! My work is reader-supported, and if you are able to subscribe, please consider one of the options here.💧

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