Arizona, Nevada and Mexico get less Colorado River water for a third year
The Colorado River is a critical lifeline to seven U.S. states, 30 Native American tribes, and two Mexican states. The cuts are based on projections for levels at federal reservoirs — chief among them Lake Powell and Lake Mead — released every August by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
Arizona will again go without 18% of its total Colorado River allocation, while Mexico loses 5%. The reduction for Nevada — which receives far less water than Arizona, California or Mexico — will stay at 7%. California won't face any cuts because it has senior water rights and is the last to lose in times of shortage.
Decades of overuse and the effects of long-term drought worsened by climate change means there's far more demand for water than what actually flows through the river. Low reservoir levels at Lake Mead have triggered mandatory cutbacks every year since 2022, with the deepest cuts in 2023, which hit farmers in Arizona the hardest.
Meanwhile, the states are working to reach agreement by next year on new long-term rules to govern the river in dry years. The Trump administration gave a mid-November deadline for states to reach a preliminary agreement, or risk federal intervention. Negotiations have faced delays as states push back against how much water they should each give up.
The original 1922 Colorado River Compact was calculated based on an amount of water that doesn't exist in today's climate. That leaves the Upper Basin states of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah to share far less water after the required amount is sent to the to the 'Lower Basin' states of Nevada, Arizona and California. Lots of water is also lost to evaporation and leaky infrastructure.
Fairly splitting the river's water in the era of climate change has been vexing for years, with all of the major users hesitant to give anything up as they anticipate a drier future. There has to be enough water in the reservoirs to reach the tunnels that usher water downstream, and key infrastructure like the Hoover Dam rely on certain water levels in Lake Mead to generate electricity.
Mandatory cuts and emergency water releases are 'reactive," said John Berggren, a regional policy manager at Western Resource Advocates, a nonprofit focused on climate change.
'If we are going to be able to have a sustainable Colorado River and not just be responding to crisis after crisis, we need large amounts of flexibility built into this new set of guidelines," he said.
States are considering a so-called natural flow approach to managing the river — where the Lower Basin would receive a certain percentage of the average natural flow from the prior few years.
The Lower Basin states have helped stave off deeper cuts by coming up with voluntary conservation plans.
'Absent all of those measures, the river would be in a very bad place,' said J.B. Hamby, chairman of the Colorado River Board of California and a board member for the Imperial Irrigation District, the largest user of the river's water. Still, he knows California, like others, will have to give up more in the ongoing negotiations.
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Toothless and frail, Gloria Palacios, 84, stooped as she set up her rickety sidewalk shop in Mexico City's roughshod Doctores neighborhood. On sale: peanuts, cigarettes, chewing gum, chocolates and chips. When asked how much she made in a day, Palacios's disabled son Gustavo, who helps run the tiny store, simply laughed. 'If we make 100 pesos ($5) it's a lot,' he said. Happily, said Palacios, the family has a different lifeline. With their house crumbling and bills piling up, the only thing keeping them afloat is a bimonthly transfer of 6,200 pesos ($330) implemented by the government of previous president Andrés Manuel López Obrador for adults over 65. 'God bless López Obrador,' said Palacios. 'Without him what would we do? I think we wouldn't even have enough to eat.' Palacios is one of millions of people across Mexico who have benefited from the welfare policies of López Obrador, or Amlo as he's commonly known. 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Some independent Mexican analysts have been equally enthusiastic about the poverty reductions achieved under Amlo. 'There has never been a single six-year term in which poverty has been reduced or decreased so significantly,' said Viri Ríos, a public policy expert and director of Mexico Decoded. 'This is a watershed moment for the Mexican economy.' Amlo was elected in a 2018 landslide with a promise to eradicate corruption and tackle inequality. Among the legacies of his administration were the tripling of the minimum wage from 88.40 pesos ($4.75) per day when he took office to the current rate of 278.80 pesos ($15) a day. This had a knock-on effect on other sectors of the economy, according to Valeria Moy, a Mexican economist and director general of IMCO, a public policy thinktank. 'When the minimum wage increases, other wages and incomes in the economy begin to rise – even in the informal economy – because there is a greater availability of resources,' she said. 'I don't know if the [poverty reduction] was purely because of López Obrador's policies, but I do think the push in the minimum wage moved the rest.' Ríos was more emphatic. 'We're talking about a labor market that had a minimum wage well below the standard of living,' she said. 'And now it's reached a level that allows 13.4 million families to escape poverty. It's a historic achievement.' Amlo also transformed the social welfare system, implementing a system of cash transfers for elderly people, like Palacios, for young people doing apprenticeships and for farmers planting fruit trees, among others. He then doubled the amount spent on these transfers. The universal cash transfer system, which replaced a well-regarded conditional system for the poorest fifth of households requiring children to go to school and families to attend health check-ups, has received some criticism as it meant that, in the case of the pension system for example, anyone, even well-off Mexicans over 65, were entitled to a transfer. 'We lost focus and lost the ability to give to the poorest,' said Gonzalo Hernández Licona, the former head of the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL), a now defunct agency which used to measure poverty before the task was transferred to the statistics institute. 'While the amount has grown, the way the amount is distributed has worsened.' This might help explain why the 19% reduction in extreme poverty was much lower than the nearly 26% reduction in overall poverty. Many of the poorest Mexicans live in remote rural places, where accessing social welfare is hard if not impossible. 'The big problem [with the cash transfers] is not that they're universal,' said Ríos. 'The big problem is that the Mexican government has not made an effort to make it truly universal – that is, to make it reach everyone.' Meanwhile, the report from the statistics agency also revealed other glaring issues under Amlo's government: while access to food security, social security and dignified living conditions all increased, the number of people without access to health services more than doubled, from 20.1 million people in 2018 to more than 44 million in 2024. 'I think the great debt that the Mexican state still owes its people is improving access to healthcare,' said Ríos. 'As a percentage of GDP, our spending on health is similar to countries in sub-Saharan Africa.' Palacios, who has considerable medical expenses but no access to medical insurance said she felt 'horrible'. 'Medicines are so expensive,' she said. 'And I don't have anything.' Sheinbaum admitted there was still more work to do. 'Do we still have progress to make? Yes,' she said. 'With 30% of Mexico's population living in poverty, we obviously have to keep moving forward.'
