The Colorado River Compact

The annual demand for and “legal” claim to Colorado River water is 1.4 trillion gallons more than actually exists. That amounts to 4,308,000 acre feet, or enough water to supply more than 20 million people annually.

Water that exists in legal documents rather than the real world is known as “paper water,” and that characterizes much of the water claimed in the Colorado River Basin. It has never existed in liquid form, and it never will. Further, the Colorado’s paper water is a ticking time bomb. And when it explodes, it will be more than a crisis. It will be a catastrophe. Millions of urbanites will find themselves without water, and millions of acres of cropland will lie fallow, causing widespread economic dislocation and human misery. The Colorado River water distribution system is based on a fantasy, one that ultimately will have devastating repercussions for the West and the nation.

And the situation is by no means static; it’s getting worse. Urban development is exploding throughout the compact region, driving the already insupportable demand for water even higher. Drought has hammered the Colorado River Basin for the past 20 years. Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the nation and the main storage facility for the Colorado, is 160 feet lower than it was in 2000. Concerns are growing that Lake Mead and its sister reservoirs, including the likewise capacious Lake Powell, could soon reach "dead pool" – that point at which downstream flow stops.

 As supplies from the river have fallen, the pact that has distributed water among the seven stakeholder states is fraying. They've failed to agree on the changes necessary to allocate existing and future supplies in a sustainable fashion, resulting in deadlock. In late January 2023, the states missed a federal deadline for a water consumption reduction plan; this was due largely to California's balking at the proposed cuts.

Of all the compact states, California holds senior water rights due to the "Law of the River:" a group of agreements dating back more than a hundred years. It is thus entitled to one-third the flow of the river, meaning it can continue to draw water from the Colorado even if Lake Mead reaches dead pool. California derives more than 15 percent of its surface water supplies from the Colorado, delivered via two huge aqueducts, the California Aqueduct and the All-American Canal. The former delivers water to the Los Angeles Basin and San Diego, while the latter irrigates the -huge corporate farms of the Imperial Valley.

Much of the tail water from the Imperial Valley’s fields eventually filters into the Salton Sea, the vast, saline lake that was formed in 1905 when irrigation canals that diverted water from the Colorado River proved insufficient to handle run-off from heavy snowmelt and rainfall, and the entire flow of the river poured into the dry Salton Sink for two years. While this agricultural drainage helps recharge the steadily evaporating “sea,” it is laden with nitrates and pesticides, threatening fish, wildlife and human health.

Meanwhile, California continues to rely on the Colorado River as a significant water source, a situation that is not sustainable for either the state or the river. As the past 20 years of drought in the Colorado River Basin has confirmed, the interior western United States is a desert. Indeed, during the early years of its exploration by Euro-Americans, all the territory west of the Mississippi River was known as the Great American Desert; it was only later that the nomenclature was changed to the Midwest and the West.

Ironically, the original terminology was the most accurate. The land west of the Mississippi is a functional desert, and the Colorado River Basin is a particularly sere portion of this vast, desiccated region. Further, all reliable computer models show that the interior West will become increasingly arid as climate change proceeds. In short, the Colorado River can never be relied on to produce enough water to support a booming civilization. For both economic and environmental reasons, then, California must wean itself from the turbid waters of the Colorado. Maintaining our dependence, let alone increasing it, will only lead to disaster.

One thing is clear: the Colorado River cannot sustain current demands, let alone support new ones. Given that 80% of the river's diversions are used by agribusiness, significant adjustments in agricultural allotments are essential; preference must be given to operations that maximize water conservation and support ancillary "ecosystem services" such as wildlife habitat, carbon sequestration, and soil preservation. Western and southwestern cities must also accelerate current trends in conservation, tougher landscaping regulations and the development of alternative sources, such as wastewater recycling and stormwater capture.

All future allotments must also acknowledge an inconvenient truth about the river. The torrid, arid climate of the American Southwest exerts a tremendous levy on the region's reservoirs: about 600,000 acre-feet a year evaporates into thin air from Lake Mead alone. That's enough water to supply 1.2 million households for a year. In the "Upper Basin" states bound by the 1948 compact – Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico – evaporation is calculated against allocations.  But that's not the case with the "Lower Basin" states: California, Arizona and Nevada. Their allotments are based on the amount of water diverted from the river with credit given for water that returns to the river via agricultural tail water flows or other means. This policy is not only inequitable. Given the hydrological realities of the Colorado River Basin, it's unworkable. All the states that are beneficiaries of the Colorado's water must accept reductions that reflect the ineluctable evaporative loss that's integral to reservoir storage.

Finally, all accommodations must confirm the rights of the river's most senior – and long ignored – stakeholders: the indigenous people of the Colorado's watershed. The Ten Tribes Partnership of 1992 provides a framework for both protecting the river and the prerogatives of the upper basin and lower basin tribes, and it must be safeguarded and enhanced.

There is enough water in California to supply our cities, support sustainable agriculture, honor tribal rights, and maintain wild, free-flowing rivers. But there is not enough – there is never enough – to waste. Through conservation, retirement of "impaired" croplands (i.e., lands susceptible to erosion or laden with salt or toxic compounds), water recycling, development of local surface sources and, in limited applications, desalinization, we can both guarantee water security for Californians and maintain a free-flowing Colorado River.