As world leaders and some 20,000 delegates gather in Glasgow, Scotland, for the COP26 climate summit, they’ll be working toward the goal of keeping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, through a variety of methods aimed at reducing greenhouse gases. Much of the focus is on renewable energy and decarbonizing the power grid, transportation, and buildings. But Bruce Babbitt, former governor of Arizona and former Interior secretary, says there are two other big sectors that should not be overlooked:  land and water. 
 
“It just isn’t really getting the attention it deserves,” says Babbitt in the most recent episode of the Land Matters podcast, noting that land-clearing and the destruction of forests takes away vast carbon sinks and accounts for 20 percent of emissions worldwide, on a par with what transportation produces globally. 

Global warming is also having such a big impact on water supplies all around the world, he said, more focus needs to be on near-term solutions to avert a catastrophic crisis in both urban development and agriculture. The Colorado River Basin, where the Lake Mead and Lake Powell reservoirs have dropped to historic lows, is a vivid illustration of that challenge. 

“The Colorado River becomes sort of the poster child of this, because the river flow is diminishing as a result of the drought and the decrease in runoff efficiency,” he said. “What rain there is doesn’t reach the reservoirs because it evaporates from the soil [because of] the temperature constantly heating up the landscape.” 

Holders of water rights established long ago are now facing drastic reductions, both in urban areas and in the agricultural sector, the biggest user of Colorado River water. They must now make due with less water—right now and in the future. The current method of irrigating crops simply cannot go on as usual, Babbitt said. “We haven’t really stared that straight in the eye, and begun to plan and to join a big region-wide discussion,” he said. 
  
Babbitt, for whom the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy is named, served for many years on the board of the Lincoln Institute. The Phoenix-based center is promoting the better coordination of land use planning and the management of water resources. The Lincoln Institute’s work in land, water, and climate is getting special recognition in this 75th anniversary year; the organization started as the Lincoln Foundation in 1946, in Phoenix. 
 
You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Further reading 
 

The COP26 Climate Talks Are Opening. Here’s What to Expect  

UK to push plan to ‘halt and reverse global deforestation by 2030’ at Cop26 

In Search of Solutions: Water & Tribes Initiative Encourages Collaborative Approach to Colorado River Management 

Lessons from the Colorado River: Climate, Land, and Drought: A 75th Anniversary Lincoln Institute Dialogue

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines. 

Image: Bruce Babbitt Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

This summer, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) declared the first official water shortage on the Colorado River. The declaration triggers mandatory cuts in withdrawals from the river, which supports more than 40 million people and 4.5 million acres of agriculture across seven U.S. states and two states in Mexico. While the announcement made both history and headlines, it came as no surprise to those in the Colorado River Basin who know the river best—the farmers, water utility managers, tribal leaders, state water management agencies, and others who have witnessed the severe impacts of the region’s decades-long drought and spent years making plans to address it.

“We knew this day would come, and it’s here,” said Brenda Burman, who served as commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, an agency of DOI that manages water in the West, from 2017 to 2021. “We need collective action on the river to address this situation.”

Burman joined former U.S. Secretary of the Interior and Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt for “Lessons from the Colorado River,” a Lincoln Institute Dialogue hosted by Jim Holway, director of the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy, in early September. Their discussion was part of a series of virtual dialogues celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Lincoln Institute. It drew more than 500 registered participants from 43 U.S. states and 19 countries, including Turkey, Bangladesh, Colombia, and Kenya.

“We are at a critical juncture in the Colorado River Basin where we need to rethink our approaches and chart a long-term, sustainable course,” said Holway. “I can think of no one better equipped to help us understand these challenges than Bruce Babbitt and Brenda Burman, who have shaped Colorado River management, as both state and federal leaders, for over 40 years.”

Holway invited Burman to offer an overview of the Colorado River system, current conditions, and the complex 20th and 21st century agreements that govern its usage, including the 1922 Colorado River Compact that allotted water to each of the seven U.S. states in the basin; the 1944 agreement between the United States and Mexico that formalized the latter country’s rights to a share of the water; and the more recent interim guidelines of 2007 and Drought Contingency Plans (DCP) of 2019. The DCP, developed through a series of negotiations among the basin states, NGOs, tribal leaders, and the governments of the United States and Mexico, outlines how stakeholders along the river will share a resource that’s been depleted by a 22-year drought and is vulnerable to long-term climate change.

Both Burman and Babbitt emphasized the importance of a collaborative approach to managing the river. Burman identified the 1990s, and specifically Babbitt’s tenure at DOI (1993–2001), as “the time when we started coming together as a basin to find agreements, to find flexibility, to be able to use this resource.” Babbitt described cooperative management of the river as “a work in progress . . . working together, we’ve managed to come a long way.”

Babbitt was frank about the hard realities of the current situation, outlining serious potential impacts in the Lower Basin (which includes Arizona and parts of California and Nevada). For example, Babbitt said, agricultural operations in central Arizona that no longer have access to river water will pump groundwater instead, which will overtax groundwater reserves and dramatically reduce the amount of agricultural land in production. That shift could also curtail future development in the region because of state requirements that developers demonstrate adequate water supply for their projects. He voiced concern that a political and economic water war could result if speculators accelerate efforts to buy up farmland with senior water rights in other regions, with the goal of selling the associated water rights to others who need water.

Meanwhile, in the Upper Basin (which includes parts of Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Utah), Babbitt said the sheer number of small water districts is making it difficult to coordinate a response to the drought. He noted that in Colorado, urban areas could be the first to feel the impact of cuts due to the structure of various management agreements. “It isn’t easy to turn off the faucet, because there are so many hands on the faucet,” he said. Still, he struck a cautiously optimistic tone: “These changes don’t happen overnight. There is time still to find a pathway toward a more sustainable balance as these changes take place.”

During the conversation, Babbitt, Burman, and Holway identified several elements of successful watershed management—collaboration, diversity, public engagement, and nonpartisan approaches—and suggested that the Colorado River can serve as a model for other places facing complex resource management problems in an era of climate change. “The lessons we are learning here, and the binational collaborative approaches, serve as examples for other arid and semi-arid river basins throughout the world,” Holway said.

Some of the necessary next steps in the Colorado River Basin include agreeing to additional shortage reductions in individual state water allocations; improving water efficiency; settling outstanding tribal water claims; addressing tribal water infrastructure needs; and establishing fair and equitable water sharing arrangements between agricultural, urban, and tribal water users. The speakers agreed there are promising signs that these steps are achievable, including the ability to agree on previous rounds of Colorado River water cuts; an uptick in wastewater reuse and in local efforts to increase water efficiency and conservation; and growing recognition of the connection between local land use and water management policy. Holway cites Colorado’s Land and Water Planning Alliance as an excellent example of collaboration around actions local government and local water users can take.

As drought and climate change continue to put immense pressure on the Colorado River and other regional water supplies, stakeholders throughout the basin will have to confront not only the current shortage, but also the prospect of more to come. “We are facing a warmer, drier present and a warmer, drier future,” Burman said. “We have a history of coming together, but the time to do more is now . . . . I have a lot of faith that we can do it.”

A recording of the Colorado River webinar is available online, along with related links including the recently updated Colorado River StoryMap created by the Babbitt Center team. The special 75th anniversary Lincoln Institute Dialogue series continues on October 27 with a discussion about land-based financing. Learn more about the Lincoln Institute’s 75th anniversary and related events. 

Katharine Wroth is the editor of Land Lines. 

Photo Credit: Sean Pavone/iStock via Getty Images.

The Babbitt Center’s new Colorado River Basin map is available at no cost as a downloadable pdf and as a hard copy.

Where is the Colorado River Basin? A novice attempting a cursory Google search will be surprised—and perhaps frustrated, confused, or a little of both—to find that there is no simple answer to that question. Winding through seven U.S. states and two states in Mexico—and supporting over 40 million people and 4.5 million acres of agriculture along the way—the Colorado River is one of our most geographically, historically, politically, and culturally complex waterways. As a result, creating an accurate map of the basin—the vast area of land drained by the river and its tributaries—is not a simple undertaking.

Commonly used maps of the region vary widely, even on basic details like the boundaries of the basin, and most haven’t kept up with changing realities—like the fact that the overtapped waterway no longer reaches its outlet at the sea. At the Babbitt Center, we began to hear a common refrain as we worked on water and planning integration efforts with stakeholders throughout the West: people frequently pointed out the flaws in available maps and suggested that addressing them could contribute to more effective water management decisions, but no one seemed to have the capacity to fix them. So, with the help of the Lincoln Institute’s newly established Center for Geospatial Solutions, we embarked on a mapping project of our own.

Our newly published peer-reviewed Colorado River Basin map seeks to correct several common errors in popular maps while providing an updated resource for water managers, tribal leaders, and others confronting critical issues related to growth, resource management, climate change, and sustainability. It is a physical and political map of the entire Colorado River Basin, including the location of the 30 federally recognized tribal nations; dams, reservoirs, transbasin diversions, and canals; federal protected areas; and natural waterways with indications of year-round or intermittent streamflow. We are making the map freely available with the hope that it will become a widely used resource, both within the basin and beyond.

Challenges, Choices, and Rationale

Even though they have few words, maps still speak. All maps are somewhat subjective, and they influence how people perceive and think about places and phenomena. During the peer review process for our new map, one reviewer asked whether our purpose was to show the “natural” basin or the modern, aka engineered and legally defined, basin. This seemingly simple question raised several fundamental questions about what a “natural” basin actually is or would be. This struck us as akin to a perennial question facing ecological restoration advocates: to what past condition should one try to restore a landscape?

In the case of the Colorado, this question becomes: when was the basin “natural”? Before the construction of Hoover Dam in the 1930s? Before Laguna Dam, the first dam built by the U.S. government, went up in 1905? The 18th century? 500 years ago? A million years ago? In an era when the human–natural binary has evolved into a more enlightened understanding of socioecological systems, these questions are difficult to answer.

We struggled with this quandary for some time. On the one hand, representing a prehuman “natural” basin is practically impossible. On the other hand, we felt an impulse to represent more of the pre-dam aspects of the basin than we typically see in conventional maps, which often privilege the boundary based on governmental contrivances of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Ultimately, after multiple internal and external review sessions, we agreed on a representation that does not attempt to resolve the “natural” versus “human” tension. We included infrastructure, clearly showing the highly engineered nature of the modern basin. We also included the Salton Basin and Laguna Salada Basin, two topographical depressions that were formed by the Colorado. Both are separate from the river’s modern engineered course, and often excluded from maps of the basin. We didn’t choose to show them because we expect the Colorado River to jump its channel any time soon, nor because we presume to accurately represent how the delta looked prior to the 20th century. But from our research, we learned that the 1980s El Niño was of such magnitude that river water from the flooded lower delta reached back up into the dry bed of the Laguna Salada, making commercial fishing possible there. Environmental management of the heavily polluted Salton Sea, meanwhile, is a contested issue that has figured in recent discussions about future management of the Colorado. These areas are not hydrologically or politically irrelevant.

Our map doesn’t attempt to answer every question about the basin. In many ways, our contribution to Colorado River cartography highlights the unresolved tensions that define this river system and will continue to drive the discourse around water management and conservation in the Colorado Basin.

There is no simple definition of the Colorado River Basin. That might be the most important underlying message of this new map.

Zachary Sugg is a senior program manager at the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy.

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