How to Save the Colorado River from Climate Change and Chronic Overuse

Paul Kehmeier is a fourth-generation farmer from western Colorado. One hundred and twenty years ago, his great grandfather Wilhelm Kehmeier bought land in Delta County, dug an irrigation ditch to bring water from a nearby stream, and got to work planting. The Kehmeier family has been farming on the same land ever since, growing alfalfa, hay and oats. But a few years ago, Paul Kehmeier did something unusual: he decided not to water about 60% of his fields. He was one of a few dozen farmers and landowners in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico—the four states comprising the upper basin of the Colorado River— who volunteered for a pilot program meant to test out a new water-conservation strategy: paying farmers to temporarily leave their fields dry, to save the Colorado River. “I participated in the pilot program because we ought to live in the reality over here in Western Colorado,” says Kehmeier. “Demand for water is increasing, and supply surely isn’t increasing.” Every single drop of Colorado River water is currently spoken for, used by cities, farms and industry across the western U.S. and Mexico. In most years, the river goes dry before it reaches the Gulf of California, and demand for its water is only expected to increase as populations grow in cities across the Southwest. Compounding the problem, climate change is leading to hotter and drier weather, projected to diminish the Colorado’s annual flow by as much as 30% by 2050. But scarcity is the mother of invention, and western states are coming up with innovative ways to save water. One was a pilot program which ran from 2015 to 2018 and paid farmers—including Kehmeier—about $200 for every acre-foot of water that they had the right to but did not use. An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, the amount of water needed by two average American households for a year. Over the course of four years, the pilot program sponsored 64 projects, conserving an estimated 46,000 acre-feet of water. There was so much interest in some districts that participants had to be selected via a lottery system. Participating farmers closed off some of their irrigation canals, allowing water that would normally go to their fields to flow downstream; at the same time, water administrative agencies and environmental groups like The Nature Conservancy and Trout Unlimited helped monitor flow rates. The pilot cost about $8.5 million, with funding coming almost entirely from the major municipalities that rely on the Colorado River, including Denver, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Now the states in the upper Colorado River basin are exploring how to scale it up. Colorado has formed a series of working groups, set to meet for the first time in September, which will tackle questions like who will foot the bill for a large-scale program (which could run in the hundreds of millions of dollars), how to ensure participating farmers are legally allowed to lease out their water rights, and what sort of mechanisms can safeguard conserved water as it makes its way to reservoirs...MORE