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5 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
As the Colorado River slowly dries up, states angle for influence over future water rights
The Colorado River is in trouble: Not as much water flows into the river as people are entitled to take out of it. A new idea might change that, but complicated political and practical negotiations stand in the way. The river and its tributaries provide water for about 5 million acres of cropland and pasture, hydroelectric power for millions of people, recreation in the Grand Canyon, and critical habitat for fish and other wildlife. Thirty federally recognized Native American tribes assert rights to water from the Colorado River system. It is also an important source of drinking water for cities within the Colorado River Basin, including Phoenix, Tucson and Las Vegas, and cities outside the basin, such as Los Angeles, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Denver and Albuquerque. The seven Colorado Basin states have been grappling with how to deal with declining Colorado River supplies for a quarter century, revising usage guidelines and taking additional measures as drought has persisted and reservoir levels have continued to decline. The current guidelines will expire in late 2026, and talks on new guidelines have been stalled because the states can't agree on how to avoid a future crisis. In June 2025, Arizona suggested a new approach that would, for the first time, base the amount of water available on the river's actual flows, rather than on reservoir level projections or historic apportionments. While the proposal has been praised as offering 'a glimmer of hope,' coming to agreement on the details presents daunting challenges for the Colorado Basin. The Colorado River Compact The 1922 Colorado Compact divided the 250,000-square-mile Colorado River Basin into an Upper Basin – which includes parts of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, as well as the northeastern corner of Arizona – and a Lower Basin, encompassing most of Arizona and parts of California and Nevada. The compact apportions each basin 7.5 million acre-feet of water from the river each year. An acre-foot of water is enough to cover 1 acre in water 1 foot deep, which amounts to approximately 326,000 gallons. According to a 2021 estimate from the Arizona Department of Water Resources, 1 acre-foot is sufficient to supply 3.5 single-family households in Arizona for one year. Anticipating a future treaty with Mexico for sharing Colorado River water, the compact specified that Mexico should be supplied first with any surplus available and any additional amount needed 'borne equally' by the two divisions. A 1944 water-sharing treaty between Mexico and the U.S. guarantees Mexico at least 1.5 million acre-feet of Colorado River water annually. The compact also specified that the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming 'will not cause the flow of the river … to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of 10 consecutive years.' The Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada contend that this provision is a 'delivery obligation,' requiring the Upper Basin to ensure that over any 10-year period, a total of at least 75 million acre-feet flows to the Lower Basin. By contrast, the Upper Basin states contend that the language merely creates a 'non-depletion obligation' that caps their collective use at 7.5 million acre-feet per year in times when additional use by the Upper Basin would cause less than 75 million acre-feet to be delivered to the Lower Basin over a 10-year period. This disagreement over the compact's language is at the heart of the differences between the two basins. A small source area Nearly all of the water in the Colorado River system comes from snow that falls in the Rocky Mountains in the Upper Basin. About 85% of the Colorado Basin's flows come from just 15% of the basin's surface area. Most of the rest of the basin's lands are arid or semi-arid, receiving less than 20 inches of precipitation a year and contributing little to the flows of the Colorado River and its tributaries. Rain and snowfall vary dramatically from year to year, so over the course of the 20th century, the Colorado Basin states – with the assistance of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the agency of the Department of the Interior responsible for operating federal water and power projects in the U.S. West – developed a complex system of reservoirs to capture the extra water in wet years so it could be available in drier years. The most notable reservoirs in the system are Lake Mead, impounded by Hoover Dam, which was completed in 1936, and Lake Powell, impounded by Glen Canyon Dam, completed in 1966. Over the past 25 years, the quantity of water stored in Lake Mead and Lake Powell has declined significantly. A primary driver of this decline is a lengthy drought likely amplified by climate change: One study estimated that the region may be suffering its driest spell in 1,200 years. But human errors are also adding up. The Colorado Compact's original negotiators made unrealistically optimistic assumptions about the river's average annual flow – perhaps knowingly. In their book 'Science be Dammed,' Colorado River experts Eric Kuhn and John Fleck document how compact negotiators willfully or wishfully ignored available data about the river's actual flows. Kuhn and Fleck argue the negotiators knew it would be decades before demand would exceed the river's water supply, and they wanted to sell a big vision of Southwestern development that would merit massive federal financing for reservoirs and other infrastructure. In addition, the current Colorado River system accounting does not factor in the roughly 1.3 million acre-feet of water lost annually from Lake Mead due to evaporation into the air or seepage into the ground. This accounting gap means that under normal annual releases to satisfy the apportionments to the Lower Basin and Mexico, Lake Mead's water level is steadily declining. Stabilization efforts The seven Colorado River states and Mexico have taken significant steps to stabilize the reservoirs. In 2007, they agreed to new guidelines to coordinate the operations of Lake Mead and Lake Powell to prevent either reservoir from reaching catastrophically low levels. They also agreed to reduce the amount of water available to Arizona and Nevada depending on how low Lake Mead's levels go. When the 2007 guidelines proved insufficient to keep the reservoir levels from declining, the Colorado Basin states and Mexico agreed in 2019 to additional measures, authorizing releases from Upper Basin reservoirs under certain conditions and additional cuts to water users in the Lower Basin and Mexico. By 2022, projections for the reservoir levels looked so dire that the states started negotiating additional near-term measures to reduce the amount of water users withdrew from the river. The federal government helped out, too: $4 billion of Inflation Reduction Act funding has helped pay the costs of water-conservation measures, primarily by agricultural districts, cities and tribes. These reductions are real. In 2023, Arizona, California and Nevada used only 5.8 million acre-feet of Colorado River water – their lowest combined annual consumption since 1983. The Lower Basin's total consumption in 2024 was slightly higher, at 6.09 million acre-feet. A new opportunity? With the 2007 guidelines and additional measures expiring in 2026, the deadline for a new agreement looms. As the Colorado River states try to work out a new agreement, Arizona's new proposal of a supply-driven approach offers hope, but the devil's in the details. Critical components of that approach have not been ironed out – for instance, the percentage of the river's flows that would be available to Arizona, California and Nevada. If the states can't agree, there is a chance that the secretary of the Interior, acting through the Bureau of Reclamation, may decide on his own how to balance the reservoirs and how much water to deliver out of them. That decision would almost certainly be taken to court by states or water users unhappy with the result. And the Lower Basin states have said they are fully prepared to go to court to enforce what they believe to be the Upper Basin's delivery obligation, which, the Upper Basin has responded, it is prepared to dispute. In the meantime, farmers in Arizona's Yuma County and California's Imperial County cannot be sure that in the next few years they will have enough water to produce winter vegetables and melons for the nation. The Colorado River Basin's municipal water providers are worried about how they will meet demands for tap water for homes and businesses. And tribal nations fear that they will not have the water they need for their farms, communities and economies. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Sarah Porter, Arizona State University Read more: As climate change and overuse shrink Lake Powell, the emergent landscape is coming back to life – and posing new challenges Water is the other US-Mexico border crisis, and the supply crunch is getting worse Western states buy time with a 7-year Colorado River drought plan, but face a hotter, drier future Sarah Porter is the Director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy, part of Arizona State University's Morrison Institute for Public Policy. In 2021, the Kyl Center for Water Policy received a grant from the Walton Family Foundation to develop a data visualization tool showing how Colorado River shortage will impact cities, tribes and agricultural districts in Arizona. Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
24-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
How data centers are deepening the water crisis
The Colorado River runs over 1,450 miles through seven US states, carving dramatic canyons and providing drinking water for 40 million people before it crosses into Mexico. Overuse threatens to dry up this critical American artery, which sustains people from Denver to Los Angeles and feeds the crops of California's Imperial Valley and Arizona's Yuma region — two of the world's most productive agricultural areas. Already, some homebuilders in Arizona have stopped work over fears their developments won't have enough water. Cotton farmers south of Phoenix have left thousands of acres unplanted. Los Angeles residents have stopped watering their lawns. States are renegotiating allocations guided by the 103-year-old Colorado River Compact. Now, in some of the region's driest stretches, tech companies are bringing a massive influx of water-guzzling data centers. Documents reviewed by Business Insider show that some of these large data centers, football-field-size warehouses filled with computer servers that power the artificial intelligence revolution, could each demand millions of gallons of water a day, enough for tens of thousands of Americans. Business Insider found that 40% of the nation's planned and existing data centers are in areas that the nonprofit World Resources Institute, which focuses on sustainability research, has characterized as experiencing "extremely high" or "high" water scarcity. The share is even larger, 43%, for the biggest centers, those that use 40 megawatt-hours or more of electricity each hour. Two companies stood out in BI's analysis as having the most data centers in high or extremely high water-stressed areas: Amazon, with 81, and Microsoft, with 23. As a share of their data centers, Microsoft ranks first with 52% in such arid spots. The companies don't seek out locations that are arid — they go to places like Arizona for reasons including abundant land and stable supplies of electricity. They negotiate access with the local officials in cities and towns across the country, arguing that the investment, tax revenue, and other economic benefits they bring will be worth it. It can be an attractive proposition, even in parched places like Goodyear, Arizona, which has negotiated for years with Microsoft over a complex of data centers. "It's been challenging because they are a big company, and we are a small city," said Bill Stipp, a former Goodyear City Council member who voted to approve various stages of the project despite his concerns about water. Ben Wilsker, a Microsoft spokesman, said the company's agreement with the city of Goodyear "benefits both parties." He declined to comment on the company's industry-leading percentage. Data centers historically have needed copious amounts of water to cool their multitudes of powerful computer chips. Use of less water-reliant cooling techniques is growing but remains much less common. Amazon still prefers water-intensive evaporative cooling technologies, though not all its data centers use that method, said a company spokesperson. Unlike farmers or golf courses that have learned to make do with recycled water, data centers that do use water for cooling overwhelmingly rely on fresh supplies. Even before the AI boom, tech giants were known guzzlers. In 2018, the industry was already one of the 10 largest commercial or industrial water users in the US, according to a 2021 paper in Environmental Research Letters. These companies are now pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into expanding their data center operations. Business Insider used permits that data centers must get for their backup generators to create a comprehensive list of facilities, and mapped the names and addresses onto the World Resources Institute's water scarcity tracker. We found 24 of the largest centers, and 379 smaller ones, in the four states now negotiating over Colorado River allotments. Other water-scarce areas across the US, in places including Texas and the upper Midwest, also host large, water-hungry facilities. It can be difficult to determine exactly how much water any given data center uses. Hundreds of water districts control the taps, and many decline to disclose customer usage data. The companies closely guard the secrecy of their projects, often using limited liability companies and nondisclosure agreements with local officials. Business Insider records requests were often blocked in water districts in Western states experiencing acute water scarcity. In Colorado, for example, Denver Water asked data centers in its service area whether they would give permission to release their records. All but one said no. The utility then initiated legal action to prevent disclosure. In Arizona, Tucson and Scottsdale would release only anonymized data, citing local privacy laws. When Business Insider obtained economic development agreements for data centers, many localities redacted the water use, with at least one citing commercial trade secrets. Still, some data emerged. Water use can vary widely. A pair of Amazon facilities in Hermiston, Oregon, used 66.8 million gallons of water in 2023. In Mesa, Arizona, Meta struck an agreement allowing a facility to use up to 4 million gallons of water a day — enough for nearly 49,000 people, based on an Environmental Protection Agency estimate that Americans use 82 gallons a day. Even those numbers understate the total impact. The 2021 research paper, which was done by scholars at Virginia Tech and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, found that only about a quarter of data centers' water use was direct, through cooling. The other 75% was used indirectly, through the electricity generation data centers depend on. Many tech companies don't incorporate the demands of electricity generation in calculating their water use, said Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of computer engineering at University of California, Riverside. "We know the lifecycle water footprint of almost every agriculture-related product," reads one of his recent presentations. "But we have almost zero information about AI's real water footprint." Melanie Roe, a spokesperson for Meta, described the amount of water the company was permitted for as a "theoretical maximum" and said actual use was expected to be less. Across the West, public officials and utility managers are coming to grips with the increased demands on the region's water resources. "The data centers bring up a little bit of a conundrum," Rebecca Mitchell, a member of the Upper Colorado River Commission who is the state's leader in the Colorado River talks, said in an interview. "If you're creating a larger draw on the system, you have to figure out where that comes from. And it's got to come from your own bank, not somebody else's." In Denver, the data center developer CoreSite withdrew its request for a $9 million tax break in October after the city council questioned the company's plan to use up to 805,000 gallons of water a day, or enough for 16,000 homes, The Denver Post reported. "I am very concerned about a tax incentive for a company that is using some of our most valuable resources," Councilwoman Flor Alvidrez said at an August council committee meeting. In nearby Aurora, water officials have been among the most proactive in the country in limiting water use by data centers and other industrial superusers such as bottling plants and mines. Aurora has been one of the nation's fastest-growing large cities, and sees its water supply as a potential limiter on that growth. "If you're going to come to Aurora," said Marshall Brown, Aurora Water's general manager, "you're going to have to figure out how to be efficient." Several data center companies have gone to Aurora to meet with water officials, only to lose interest once they learned of its stringent water regulations, Greg Baker, then an Aurora Water spokesperson, said in August. QTS, one of the nation's largest data center operators, with 34 US facilities by BI's count, has deployed a more expensive cooling technology that uses refrigerant for cooling. The annual water allocation for its facility in Aurora will be 525,600 gallons, according to Aurora Water records obtained by BI. That's less than what some facilities use in a single day, and equivalent to what a handful of restaurants might use, a QTS spokesperson said, adding that none of it would be used to cool the center's servers. Any more, and it will have to pay a surcharge, though that total doesn't include water for irrigation and other uses outside the QTS facility that are expected to require 1.1 million gallons of water a year, according to an Aurora Water official. As of 2023, roughly half of the company's data centers used this water-conserving technology. A spokesperson for QTS, which is owned by the investment firm Blackstone, said none of the data centers the company had built since 2018 used water for cooling. "A typical data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of water daily," QTS wrote in a 2023 white paper. "There is rising concern over how these facilities will impact water supplies, especially in areas that are already water-stressed. To be good neighbors, data centers need to adopt water conservation strategies." In August, Yadi Wang stood in the dried-out riverbed of a Colorado tributary about 100 miles southwest of Phoenix. The temperature was rapidly approaching triple digits, and it wasn't yet 10 a.m. Wang, the manager of Oatman Flats Ranch, explained how water once flowed through this stretch of the Gila River, populated by beavers and cottonwood trees. Now, he said, sporting a brimmed leather hat and Carhartt jeans, it's among the most barren places in the state. "This is no different than the Sahara desert," Wang said, picking up a handful of the sandy soil. The bone-dry grains easily slipped through his fingers. Since the 1990s, Arizona has been in an extended drought. Rising temperatures have only increased water needs. Phoenix set a record last year with 113 straight days of high temperatures at or above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Water access determines everything. In 1980, the state passed the Groundwater Management Act requiring cities and developers in some of the most populous areas to prove they had enough water for the next 100 years before they could break ground on a new project. Since then, the battle for water has only grown more intense. Gov. Katie Hobbs recently limited residential housing growth in an area outside Phoenix that failed to prove it had enough groundwater. Agricultural producers have set out to conserve water. Yet, Arizona has become one of the country's largest data center markets. If all permitted Arizona data centers Business Insider identified go online, it will be the country's second-largest market after Virginia in terms of energy consumption and the sixth in terms of number of facilities, with 52. Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, features one of the nation's largest data center clusters, with 48 campuses. Robust tax incentives, passed by state lawmakers in 2013, have propelled that growth. Companies flocked to the desert to take advantage of the free money, cheap and plentiful electricity, and affordable land. In 2021, lawmakers extended the breaks through 2033. The state's fragmented system of water management hasn't kept pace. Water from the Colorado River is tightly regulated, and the 1980 law governs groundwater extraction near population centers, but wells outside those areas can operate largely without limit. Big Tech firms can shop for municipalities willing to allocate the water that data centers require. They have found many takers, often in Phoenix's less prosperous outskirts, where officials in cities such as Goodyear and El Mirage have approved massive data center developments in recent years. "The appetite of the council has been to welcome economic development into our city," Mayor Alexis Hermosillo of El Mirage said in an interview. Approving data centers, she added, was "in alignment with that thought process and those priorities." Ron Rayner has been watching as data centers go up to Phoenix's west. He and his family have farmed in Goodyear for decades, growing cotton, alfalfa, and other crops on land they own or lease. Their largely agricultural community has been transformed by development, including new Amazon warehouses, residential housing, and data centers. Several years ago, Rayner pinned an aerial photograph to his office wall showing the land he and his brothers at the A Tumbling-T Ranches had under cultivation. Any time an owner of land they leased sold one of the plots to developers, they put a big X on the parcel. Rayner estimates they've lost about 2,000 acres, roughly a third of the land they once farmed. "This map has just got all these big X's all over it," Rayner said. "They're gone, they're done, you know. They'll never be back." One of those leases, for 260 acres in Goodyear, was terminated in 2018. The new owner was Microsoft, which bought that land and another 19 acres for $48 million to build a data center campus. Initial water plans for the campus didn't survive. Microsoft went to the city council seeking fast-track authority to start constructing the first two centers on the campus, which it proposed would be cooled through direct evaporative cooling, one of the more water-intensive cooling technologies. According to Goodyear city documents, Microsoft planned for each of the five buildings on its Goodyear campus to use 1 million gallons of water a day, for a total of 1.83 billion gallons a year. On average, that's enough water for roughly 61,000 Americans, or a bit more than half the city's population. Microsoft's purchase of the land gave it ownership rights to underground supplies, but the thought of sucking up that much water for data centers in such an arid climate was daunting. "The water situation was a little scary in the beginning," Stipp, the former Goodyear City Council member, told Business Insider, saying early projections suggested the company would have needed more water than its supplies could have provided. "You look at it and say, 'Holy smokes, that's a lot of water.'" Microsoft won fast-track approval. Stipp said that he thought the anticipated tax revenue from Microsoft was too good for Goodyear to pass up and that the city's water supplies could handle the demand. But the company and the city still needed to figure out how to handle the enormous flow of wastewater that would result. Microsoft planned to treat its water discharge and send it by pipeline to a Goodyear drinking-water treatment plant, city documents said. As long as the treated wastewater complied with pollution rules, it could be fed into Goodyear's drinking water supply. Microsoft soon changed course: The discharge from its data centers would overwhelm Goodyear's infrastructure. "Microsoft," reads a March 2023 city council report, "has effectively abandoned its original plan." Microsoft's new proposal would instead send discharge to the city's wastewater treatment plant, making it more difficult for it to later be used as the city's drinking water. Then, another amendment: Microsoft's wasted water was so voluminous, 1.2 million gallons a day, that it would overwhelm the wastewater treatment plant, too. Finally, Microsoft agreed that any buildings it constructed after the first three would employ mechanical air cooling, which uses more energy but less water. Goodyear agreed to expand its wastewater plant to process 3 million more gallons a day, enough to handle Microsoft's flow, at a cost of $90 million. Microsoft covered $36 million of that, and Goodyear the rest. Wilsker, the Microsoft spokesperson, said the company altered course after conducting a feasibility study and also paid $9 million for other water infrastructure. Its three facilities use direct evaporative cooling only at certain temperatures, reducing water's use in cooling to less than 40% of the year, he said. Goodyear officials told Business Insider that data centers bring jobs and other economic benefits, and that Microsoft's current water plan let it rely on its state-designated water rights, so it wouldn't draw from the city's official supplies. Tech companies have set bold commitments to offset their water consumption. Microsoft, with 44 US data centers already built or underway, according to BI's tally, has pledged to be water positive by 2030 despite consuming a net 2.1 billion gallons of water in 2023, its sustainability report said. Meta has said it will "return more water to the environment than we consumed for our global operations" by 2030. It has 32 data centers built or permitted, 28% of them in high or extremely high water-stressed areas, by BI's count. Google — with 47 permitted US data centers, 19% in those acutely arid locations, Business Insider found — pledged to "replenish 120% of the freshwater" it consumes by 2030. In 2023, Amazon pledged to be "water positive" by 2030. The company said it was 53% of the way there by the end of last year. QTS set a goal of reducing its "water usage effectiveness" by 5% each year. Like QTS, other companies are developing water-saving technologies. Google uses nonpotable water sources for some cooling, and Devon Smiley, a spokesperson, said the company had switched a Mesa facility to air cooling and wouldn't use water to cool future data centers in areas seriously short on water. Microsoft is moving toward a design at its newest data centers in the Phoenix area that uses minimal water thanks to a closed-loop liquid cooling system, said Alistair Speirs, a senior director for cloud infrastructure at the company. At older data centers, Microsoft relies on adiabatic cooling, which uses water to wet a mesh-like material and forces air through the material with big fans to cool it down. When the ambient outside air temperature is below 85 degrees, that air is brought inside to cool the servers. In August, Microsoft said all new data centers would be designed to cool the servers at the computer chip level, eliminating the need for water other than to fill the system during construction. Industry experts say much data center technology still relies on millions of gallons of drinking water. Steve Solomon, a Microsoft vice president in data center engineering, said in an interview that data centers require drinking water if their cooling technology involves wetting the air that circulates inside the data center. If humans are to inhale it, the water must be free of bacteria or other pollutants, he said. Google's data centers consumed 6.1 billion gallons of water in 2023, a 17% increase over the previous year, of which the vast majority was potable. In a 2024 report, Google said its data centers used the same amount of water needed for 41 golf courses in the Southwest. Ren, the UC Riverside researcher, calls the comparison "unfair at best," as many golf courses use wastewater, not drinking water, for irrigation. Increasingly, municipalities in the arid West are deciding that data centers and other large water users require careful watching, and in some cases are pushing back on companies' asks. In Mesa, where city officials limit water supplies to large users, Meta found a partner in the Gila River Indian Community, one of 30 tribes that live in the Colorado River Basin and the victor in a 2004 legal challenge that gave the community access to some of the river's contested water. The water the community won would not only supply the needs of the 15,000 residents of its reservation just south of Phoenix, but also promised to power its economy. The community partnered with a local utility to create Gila River Water Storage, which took the community's unused Colorado River allotment and created an underground reserve of 1.62 trillion gallons. The community was standing by in 2021 when Mesa's officials told Meta it would need to find additional supplies for the water its proposed data center required. The city at the time limited large water users to about 500,000 gallons a day from city supplies (a cap it lowered last year), and Meta needed 2.5 times as much. So Meta turned to Gila River Water Storage. Under a 25-year agreement with the city, the company purchased storage credits and transferred them to the city. Mesa then gave the company allowances that, provided Meta meets certain conditions, will let it pull up to 4 million gallons a day. Jenn Duff, a Mesa City Council member and self-proclaimed "desert rat" who has lived in the Southwest her entire life, was the only council member to vote against the deal. She said she was startled by a report from the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University that suggested Arizona might have less water than officials thought. "We were in a severe drought, and we had a large water user coming in, and I started reading the publications, and I became alarmed," Duff said in an interview. She still carries around that report, its cover now torn, in her bag. "I just don't think water-cooled data centers should be in the desert." According to the minutes of the vote, Mayor John Giles, who left office this year, voiced his support for the project and noted that the company had been informed about the need to purchase storage credits and advised about the need to be sensitive to water issues. There's no guarantee that the water will be available through all of Meta's contract, as every claim on the Colorado's waters — including Indigenous allotments — is up for negotiation. The Meta spokesperson told Business Insider that the company meets periodically with Mesa officials to ensure it stays in compliance with its water commitments to the city. Jason Hauter, a lawyer representing the Gila River Indian Community, said that while the future of available water supplies from the Colorado River was uncertain, "we do not foresee a future where this water supply is eliminated for central Arizona or for the Community in particular." With less water-intensive cooling technologies still rare, companies have turned to a strategy known as "corporate water stewardship" to meet their goals. This involves paying other people to conserve water and then using a standard calculation to earn credits to offset the company's use. Meta, for example, has helped fund drinking water access for the sprawling Navajo Nation and irrigation piping designed to prevent evaporation. In total, Meta has 12 projects in Arizona expected to restore 883 million gallons of water once they are built out, according to Roe, the spokesperson. Microsoft, which also has purchased storage credits from Gila River Water Storage as part of its stewardship efforts, has also engaged in more controversial offset efforts as well. As part of a state conservation program, it helped fund compensation for the Colorado River Indian Tribes to leave 10,000 acres of farmland unplanted, a company report said, even though the practice of fallowing has fallen out of favor in the desert. "When you fallow farmland in Arizona, you sterilize the land" by allowing nutrient-dense topsoil to blow away, said Dax Hansen, the owner of Oatman Flats Ranch. "It's just bad all the way around. The farmers make a little bit of money, but their land gets destroyed. You end up with more dust, more dust bowls, worse pollution, and all the rest." "There is a healthy conversation about corporate water stewardship and how we manage it, and we are fortunate that the business community and corporations have been willing to do that," Kimberly Schonek, a project manager for The Nature Conservancy in Arizona, said in an interview. "We also want to be careful that we are not giving them cover." Hannah Beckler and Rosemarie Ho contributed reporting. About the data: Business Insider used air permits issued to data center backup generators to identify facility location and ownership, and estimate facility power use. We received permits from all but four states, plus Washington, DC. To identify locations in high or extremely high water stress, Business Insider used data from the Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas built by the World Resources Institute, a Washington, DC, group that advocates for sustainability. Read more about how we investigated the impact of data center growth here. Reporting: Hannah Beckler, Dakin Campbell, Daniel Geiger, Rosemarie Ho, Narimes Parakul, Adam Rogers, Ellen Thomas Editing: Jeffrey Cane, Rosalie Chan, Jason Dean, Esther Kaplan, Jake Swearingen Research: Darren Ankrom, Schuyler Mitchell, Trey Strange, Yuheng Zhan Design and visuals: Dan DeLorenzo, Isabel Fernandez-Pujol, Jinpeng Li, Kim Nguyen, Randy Yeip, Rebecca Zisser Photography: Kendrick Brinson, John David-Richardson, Greg Kahn, Brian Palmer, Jesse Rieser Video: Robert Leslie, Gary Moon, Marco Secci Copy editing: Mark Abadi, Kevin Kaplan Read the original article on Business Insider
Business Insider
24-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Tech Jesse Rieser for BI Tech How data centers are deepening the water crisis
The Colorado River runs over 1,450 miles through seven US states, carving dramatic canyons and providing drinking water for 40 million people before it crosses into Mexico. Overuse threatens to dry up this critical American artery, which sustains people from Denver to Los Angeles and feeds the crops of California's Imperial Valley and Arizona's Yuma region — two of the world's most productive agricultural areas. Already, some homebuilders in Arizona have stopped work over fears their developments won't have enough water. Cotton farmers south of Phoenix have left thousands of acres unplanted. Los Angeles residents have stopped watering their lawns. States are renegotiating allocations guided by the 103-year-old Colorado River Compact. Now, in some of the region's driest stretches, tech companies are bringing a massive influx of water-guzzling data centers. Documents reviewed by Business Insider show that some of these large data centers, football-field-size warehouses filled with computer servers that power the artificial intelligence revolution, could each demand millions of gallons of water a day, enough for tens of thousands of Americans. Business Insider found that 40% of the nation's planned and existing data centers are in areas that the nonprofit World Resources Institute, which focuses on sustainability research, has characterized as experiencing "extremely high" or "high" water scarcity. The share is even larger, 43%, for the biggest centers, those that use 40 megawatt-hours or more of electricity each hour. Two companies stood out in BI's analysis as having the most data centers in high or extremely high water-stressed areas: Amazon, with 81, and Microsoft, with 23. As a share of their data centers, Microsoft ranks first with 52% in such arid spots. The companies don't seek out locations that are arid — they go to places like Arizona for reasons including abundant land and stable supplies of electricity. They negotiate access with the local officials in cities and towns across the country, arguing that the investment, tax revenue, and other economic benefits they bring will be worth it. It can be an attractive proposition, even in parched places like Goodyear, Arizona, which has negotiated for years with Microsoft over a complex of data centers. "It's been challenging because they are a big company, and we are a small city," said Bill Stipp, a former Goodyear City Council member who voted to approve various stages of the project despite his concerns about water. Ben Wilsker, a Microsoft spokesman, said the company's agreement with the city of Goodyear "benefits both parties." He declined to comment on the company's industry-leading percentage. Data centers historically have needed copious amounts of water to cool their multitudes of powerful computer chips. Use of less water-reliant cooling techniques is growing but remains much less common. Amazon still prefers water-intensive evaporative cooling technologies, though not all its data centers use that method, said a company spokesperson. Unlike farmers or golf courses that have learned to make do with recycled water, data centers that do use water for cooling overwhelmingly rely on fresh supplies. Even before the AI boom, tech giants were known guzzlers. In 2018, the industry was already one of the 10 largest commercial or industrial water users in the US, according to a 2021 paper in Environmental Research Letters. These companies are now pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into expanding their data center operations. Business Insider used permits that data centers must get for their backup generators to create a comprehensive list of facilities, and mapped the names and addresses onto the World Resources Institute's water scarcity tracker. We found 24 of the largest centers, and 379 smaller ones, in the four states now negotiating over Colorado River allotments. Other water-scarce areas across the US, in places including Texas and the upper Midwest, also host large, water-hungry facilities. Fragmented oversight It can be difficult to determine exactly how much water any given data center uses. Hundreds of water districts control the taps, and many decline to disclose customer usage data. The companies closely guard the secrecy of their projects, often using limited liability companies and nondisclosure agreements with local officials. Business Insider records requests were often blocked in water districts in Western states experiencing acute water scarcity. In Colorado, for example, Denver Water asked data centers in its service area whether they would give permission to release their records. All but one said no. The utility then initiated legal action to prevent disclosure. In Arizona, Tucson and Scottsdale would release only anonymized data, citing local privacy laws. When Business Insider obtained economic development agreements for data centers, many localities redacted the water use, with at least one citing commercial trade secrets. Still, some data emerged. Water use can vary widely. A pair of Amazon facilities in Hermiston, Oregon, used 66.8 million gallons of water in 2023. In Mesa, Arizona, Meta struck an agreement allowing a facility to use up to 4 million gallons of water a day — enough for nearly 49,000 people, based on an Environmental Protection Agency estimate that Americans use 82 gallons a day. Even those numbers understate the total impact. The 2021 research paper, which was done by scholars at Virginia Tech and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, found that only about a quarter of data centers' water use was direct, through cooling. The other 75% was used indirectly, through the electricity generation data centers depend on. Many tech companies don't incorporate the demands of electricity generation in calculating their water use, said Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of computer engineering at University of California, Riverside. "We know the lifecycle water footprint of almost every agriculture-related product," reads one of his recent presentations. "But we have almost zero information about AI's real water footprint." Melanie Roe, a spokesperson for Meta, described the amount of water the company was permitted for as a "theoretical maximum" and said actual use was expected to be less. Across the West, public officials and utility managers are coming to grips with the increased demands on the region's water resources. "The data centers bring up a little bit of a conundrum," Rebecca Mitchell, a member of the Upper Colorado River Commission who is the state's leader in the Colorado River talks, said in an interview. "If you're creating a larger draw on the system, you have to figure out where that comes from. And it's got to come from your own bank, not somebody else's." Conserving water in Colorado In Denver, the data center developer CoreSite withdrew its request for a $9 million tax break in October after the city council questioned the company's plan to use up to 805,000 gallons of water a day, or enough for 16,000 homes, The Denver Post reported. "I am very concerned about a tax incentive for a company that is using some of our most valuable resources," Councilwoman Flor Alvidrez said at an August council committee meeting. In nearby Aurora, water officials have been among the most proactive in the country in limiting water use by data centers and other industrial superusers such as bottling plants and mines. Aurora has been one of the nation's fastest-growing large cities, and sees its water supply as a potential limiter on that growth. "If you're going to come to Aurora," said Marshall Brown, Aurora Water's general manager, "you're going to have to figure out how to be efficient." Several data center companies have gone to Aurora to meet with water officials, only to lose interest once they learned of its stringent water regulations, Greg Baker, then an Aurora Water spokesperson, said in August. QTS, one of the nation's largest data center operators, with 34 US facilities by BI's count, has deployed a more expensive cooling technology that uses refrigerant for cooling. The annual water allocation for its facility in Aurora will be 525,600 gallons, according to Aurora Water records obtained by BI. That's less than what some facilities use in a single day, and equivalent to what a handful of restaurants might use, a QTS spokesperson said, adding that none of it would be used to cool the center's servers. Any more, and it will have to pay a surcharge, though that total doesn't include water for irrigation and other uses outside the QTS facility that are expected to require 1.1 million gallons of water a year, according to an Aurora Water official. As of 2023, roughly half of the company's data centers used this water-conserving technology. A spokesperson for QTS, which is owned by the investment firm Blackstone, said none of the data centers the company had built since 2018 used water for cooling. "A typical data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of water daily," QTS wrote in a 2023 white paper. "There is rising concern over how these facilities will impact water supplies, especially in areas that are already water-stressed. To be good neighbors, data centers need to adopt water conservation strategies." Data centers in the desert In August, Yadi Wang stood in the dried-out riverbed of a Colorado tributary about 100 miles southwest of Phoenix. The temperature was rapidly approaching triple digits, and it wasn't yet 10 a.m. Wang, the manager of Oatman Flats Ranch, explained how water once flowed through this stretch of the Gila River, populated by beavers and cottonwood trees. Now, he said, sporting a brimmed leather hat and Carhartt jeans, it's among the most barren places in the state. "This is no different than the Sahara desert," Wang said, picking up a handful of the sandy soil. The bone-dry grains easily slipped through his fingers. Since the 1990s, Arizona has been in an extended drought. Rising temperatures have only increased water needs. Phoenix set a record last year with 113 straight days of high temperatures at or above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Water access determines everything. In 1980, the state passed the Groundwater Management Act requiring cities and developers in some of the most populous areas to prove they had enough water for the next 100 years before they could break ground on a new project. Since then, the battle for water has only grown more intense. Gov. Katie Hobbs recently limited residential housing growth in an area outside Phoenix that failed to prove it had enough groundwater. Agricultural producers have set out to conserve water. Yet, Arizona has become one of the country's largest data center markets. If all permitted Arizona data centers Business Insider identified go online, it will be the country's second-largest market after Virginia in terms of energy consumption and the sixth in terms of number of facilities, with 52. Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, features one of the nation's largest data center clusters, with 48 campuses. Robust tax incentives, passed by state lawmakers in 2013, have propelled that growth. Companies flocked to the desert to take advantage of the free money, cheap and plentiful electricity, and affordable land. In 2021, lawmakers extended the breaks through 2033. The state's fragmented system of water management hasn't kept pace. Water from the Colorado River is tightly regulated, and the 1980 law governs groundwater extraction near population centers, but wells outside those areas can operate largely without limit. Big Tech firms can shop for municipalities willing to allocate the water that data centers require. They have found many takers, often in Phoenix's less prosperous outskirts, where officials in cities such as Goodyear and El Mirage have approved massive data center developments in recent years. "The appetite of the council has been to welcome economic development into our city," Mayor Alexis Hermosillo of El Mirage said in an interview. Approving data centers, she added, was "in alignment with that thought process and those priorities." 5 million gallons a day Ron Rayner has been watching as data centers go up to Phoenix's west. He and his family have farmed in Goodyear for decades, growing cotton, alfalfa, and other crops on land they own or lease. Their largely agricultural community has been transformed by development, including new Amazon warehouses, residential housing, and data centers. Several years ago, Rayner pinned an aerial photograph to his office wall showing the land he and his brothers at the A Tumbling-T Ranches had under cultivation. Any time an owner of land they leased sold one of the plots to developers, they put a big X on the parcel. Rayner estimates they've lost about 2,000 acres, roughly a third of the land they once farmed. "This map has just got all these big X's all over it," Rayner said. "They're gone, they're done, you know. They'll never be back." One of those leases, for 260 acres in Goodyear, was terminated in 2018. The new owner was Microsoft, which bought that land and another 19 acres for $48 million to build a data center campus. Initial water plans for the campus didn't survive. Microsoft went to the city council seeking fast-track authority to start constructing the first two centers on the campus, which it proposed would be cooled through direct evaporative cooling, one of the more water-intensive cooling technologies. According to Goodyear city documents, Microsoft planned for each of the five buildings on its Goodyear campus to use 1 million gallons of water a day, for a total of 1.83 billion gallons a year. On average, that's enough water for roughly 61,000 Americans, or a bit more than half the city's population. Microsoft's purchase of the land gave it ownership rights to underground supplies, but the thought of sucking up that much water for data centers in such an arid climate was daunting. "The water situation was a little scary in the beginning," Stipp, the former Goodyear City Council member, told Business Insider, saying early projections suggested the company would have needed more water than its supplies could have provided. "You look at it and say, 'Holy smokes, that's a lot of water.'" Microsoft won fast-track approval. Stipp said that he thought the anticipated tax revenue from Microsoft was too good for Goodyear to pass up and that the city's water supplies could handle the demand. But the company and the city still needed to figure out how to handle the enormous flow of wastewater that would result. Microsoft planned to treat its water discharge and send it by pipeline to a Goodyear drinking-water treatment plant, city documents said. As long as the treated wastewater complied with pollution rules, it could be fed into Goodyear's drinking water supply. Microsoft soon changed course: The discharge from its data centers would overwhelm Goodyear's infrastructure. "Microsoft," reads a March 2023 city council report, "has effectively abandoned its original plan." Microsoft's new proposal would instead send discharge to the city's wastewater treatment plant, making it more difficult for it to later be used as the city's drinking water. Then, another amendment: Microsoft's wasted water was so voluminous, 1.2 million gallons a day, that it would overwhelm the wastewater treatment plant, too. Finally, Microsoft agreed that any buildings it constructed after the first three would employ mechanical air cooling, which uses more energy but less water. Goodyear agreed to expand its wastewater plant to process 3 million more gallons a day, enough to handle Microsoft's flow, at a cost of $90 million. Microsoft covered $36 million of that, and Goodyear the rest. Wilsker, the Microsoft spokesperson, said the company altered course after conducting a feasibility study and also paid $9 million for other water infrastructure. Its three facilities use direct evaporative cooling only at certain temperatures, reducing water's use in cooling to less than 40% of the year, he said. Goodyear officials told Business Insider that data centers bring jobs and other economic benefits, and that Microsoft's current water plan let it rely on its state-designated water rights, so it wouldn't draw from the city's official supplies. The offsets game Microsoft, with 44 US data centers already built or underway, according to BI's tally, has pledged to be water positive by 2030 despite consuming a net 2.1 billion gallons of water in 2023, its sustainability report said. Meta has said it will "return more water to the environment than we consumed for our global operations" by 2030. It has 32 data centers built or permitted, 28% of them in high or extremely high water-stressed areas, by BI's count. Google — with 47 permitted US data centers, 19% in those acutely arid locations, Business Insider found — pledged to "replenish 120% of the freshwater" it consumes by 2030. In 2023, Amazon pledged to be "water positive" by 2030. The company said it was 53% of the way there by the end of last year. QTS set a goal of reducing its "water usage effectiveness" by 5% each year. Like QTS, other companies are developing water-saving technologies. Google uses nonpotable water sources for some cooling, and Devon Smiley, a spokesperson, said the company had switched a Mesa facility to air cooling and wouldn't use water to cool future data centers in areas seriously short on water. Microsoft is moving toward a design at its newest data centers in the Phoenix area that uses minimal water thanks to a closed-loop liquid cooling system, said Alistair Speirs, a senior director for cloud infrastructure at the company. At older data centers, Microsoft relies on adiabatic cooling, which uses water to wet a mesh-like material and forces air through the material with big fans to cool it down. When the ambient outside air temperature is below 85 degrees, that air is brought inside to cool the servers. In August, Microsoft said all new data centers would be designed to cool the servers at the computer chip level, eliminating the need for water other than to fill the system during construction. Industry experts say much data center technology still relies on millions of gallons of drinking water. Steve Solomon, a Microsoft vice president in data center engineering, said in an interview that data centers require drinking water if their cooling technology involves wetting the air that circulates inside the data center. If humans are to inhale it, the water must be free of bacteria or other pollutants, he said. Google's data centers consumed 6.1 billion gallons of water in 2023, a 17% increase over the previous year, of which the vast majority was potable. In a 2024 report, Google said its data centers used the same amount of water needed for 41 golf courses in the Southwest. Ren, the UC Riverside researcher, calls the comparison "unfair at best," as many golf courses use wastewater, not drinking water, for irrigation. Increasingly, municipalities in the arid West are deciding that data centers and other large water users require careful watching, and in some cases are pushing back on companies' asks. In Mesa, where city officials limit water supplies to large users, Meta found a partner in the Gila River Indian Community, one of 30 tribes that live in the Colorado River Basin and the victor in a 2004 legal challenge that gave the community access to some of the river's contested water. The water the community won would not only supply the needs of the 15,000 residents of its reservation just south of Phoenix, but also promised to power its economy. The community partnered with a local utility to create Gila River Water Storage, which took the community's unused Colorado River allotment and created an underground reserve of 1.62 trillion gallons. The community was standing by in 2021 when Mesa's officials told Meta it would need to find additional supplies for the water its proposed data center required. The city at the time limited large water users to about 500,000 gallons a day from city supplies (a cap it lowered last year), and Meta needed 2.5 times as much. So Meta turned to Gila River Water Storage. Under a 25-year agreement with the city, the company purchased storage credits and transferred them to the city. Mesa then gave the company allowances that, provided Meta meets certain conditions, will let it pull up to 4 million gallons a day. Jenn Duff, a Mesa City Council member and self-proclaimed "desert rat" who has lived in the Southwest her entire life, was the only council member to vote against the deal. She said she was startled by a report from the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University that suggested Arizona might have less water than officials thought. "We were in a severe drought, and we had a large water user coming in, and I started reading the publications, and I became alarmed," Duff said in an interview. She still carries around that report, its cover now torn, in her bag. "I just don't think water-cooled data centers should be in the desert." According to the minutes of the vote, Mayor John Giles, who left office this year, voiced his support for the project and noted that the company had been informed about the need to purchase storage credits and advised about the need to be sensitive to water issues. There's no guarantee that the water will be available through all of Meta's contract, as every claim on the Colorado's waters — including Indigenous allotments — is up for negotiation. The Meta spokesperson told Business Insider that the company meets periodically with Mesa officials to ensure it stays in compliance with its water commitments to the city. Jason Hauter, a lawyer representing the Gila River Indian Community, said that while the future of available water supplies from the Colorado River was uncertain, "we do not foresee a future where this water supply is eliminated for central Arizona or for the Community in particular." With less water-intensive cooling technologies still rare, companies have turned to a strategy known as "corporate water stewardship" to meet their goals. This involves paying other people to conserve water and then using a standard calculation to earn credits to offset the company's use. Meta, for example, has helped fund drinking water access for the sprawling Navajo Nation and irrigation piping designed to prevent evaporation. In total, Meta has 12 projects in Arizona expected to restore 883 million gallons of water once they are built out, according to Roe, the spokesperson. Microsoft, which also has purchased storage credits from Gila River Water Storage as part of its stewardship efforts, has also engaged in more controversial offset efforts as well. As part of a state conservation program, it helped fund compensation for the Colorado River Indian Tribes to leave 10,000 acres of farmland unplanted, a company report said, even though the practice of fallowing has fallen out of favor in the desert. "When you fallow farmland in Arizona, you sterilize the land" by allowing nutrient-dense topsoil to blow away, said Dax Hansen, the owner of Oatman Flats Ranch. "It's just bad all the way around. The farmers make a little bit of money, but their land gets destroyed. You end up with more dust, more dust bowls, worse pollution, and all the rest." "There is a healthy conversation about corporate water stewardship and how we manage it, and we are fortunate that the business community and corporations have been willing to do that," Kimberly Schonek, a project manager for The Nature Conservancy in Arizona, said in an interview. "We also want to be careful that we are not giving them cover." Hannah Beckler and Rosemarie Ho contributed reporting. Big Tech promised jobs. Cities gave millions. Where are the workers? The True Cost of Data Centers AI runs on dirty power — and the public pays the price Tallying the true costs of AI The 'AI boom' pits neighbor against neighbor How Business Insider investigated the true cost of data centers Series credits About the data: Business Insider used air permits issued to data center backup generators to identify facility location and ownership, and estimate facility power use. We received permits from all but four states, plus Washington, DC. To identify locations in high or extremely high water stress, Business Insider used data from the Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas built by the World Resources Institute, a Washington, DC, group that advocates for sustainability. Read more about how we investigated the impact of data center growth here. Reporting: Hannah Beckler, Dakin Campbell, Daniel Geiger, Rosemarie Ho, Narimes Parakul, Adam Rogers, Ellen Thomas Editing: Jeffrey Cane, Rosalie Chan, Jason Dean, Esther Kaplan, Jake Swearingen Research: Darren Ankrom, Schuyler Mitchell, Trey Strange, Yuheng Zhan Design and visuals: Dan DeLorenzo, Isabel Fernandez-Pujol, Jinpeng Li, Kim Nguyen, Randy Yeip, Rebecca Zisser Photography: Kendrick Brinson, John David-Richardson, Greg Kahn, Brian Palmer, Jesse Rieser Video: Robert Leslie, Gary Moon, Marco Secci Copy editing: Mark Abadi, Kevin Kaplan
The Hill
20-06-2025
- Science
- The Hill
Colorado River ‘water market' could bring security to farmers, fish and families: Study
Applying a market-based approach to Colorado River management could ensure more robust and reliable supplies for farmers, communities and the environment, a new study has found. Without considerable cutbacks in basin-wide water consumption, fish populations could face dire consequences for at least one month of the irrigation season, scientists warned in the study, published on Friday in Nature Sustainability. But if action were taken to deploy strategic water transactions among the basin's stakeholders, resultant reductions in usage could improve the situation of more than 380 miles of restorable segments, per the research. 'By strategically directing river water to the right places, even under drought conditions, fish can be saved with targeted restoration at nominal additional cost,' senior author Steven Gorelick, a hydrologist at Stanford University, said in a statement. The 1,450-mile Colorado River provides drinking water and agricultural irrigation to about 40 million people across seven U.S. states, 30 tribal nations and two states in Mexico. On the domestic side, the region is divided into the Upper and Lower basins: Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico; and California, Nevada and Arizona. As the West becomes increasingly arid and a growing population consumes more water, this critical transboundary artery is dwindling. Meanwhile, the U.S. basin states are currently negotiating an update to the river's operational guidelines, which expire at the end of 2026. Stakeholders across the region adhere to a century-old Colorado River Compact that allocated 7.5 million acre-feet annually to each of the two basins. The average suburban household consumes about half an acre-foot of water per year. Also at play is a historic U.S. West 'water rights' system, a 'first in time, first in right' approach to water that stems from the mid-19th century homesteading and gold rush era. At the time, farmers and miners secured and diverted water according to their arrival, rather than their geographical position along the river — creating a prioritization structure that is still in effect today. But the authors of Friday's study stressed that climate change has since exacerbated the Colorado River's shortages, noting that recent research has indicated that the artery's flows are at their lowest in at least 2,000 years. 'Given the overallocation of the river water, we explored how the needs of people and the environment can both be served,' Gorelick said. With the goal of compensating for potential cutbacks, water users in the Lower Basin states have created systems for voluntary water market transactions, the authors explained. The Upper Basin states — which are responsible for fulfilling the Lower Basin's allocations — have also explored the idea of designing a water market. Such a market, the researchers continued, would involve proactive reductions that ensure downstream deliveries. Nonetheless, they stressed that existing programs generally do not prioritize water necessary to maintain critical fish habitats. To quantify the cost of improving these environments, the researchers simulated potential transactions and ecological effects at the river's headwaters in Colorado — the source of about a quarter of the artery's natural annual flow into the Lake Powell reservoir. Farmers, irrigation organizations, cities and other water sellers would lease senior water rights to both governments and nongovernmental organizations interested in protecting fish habitats, per the model. Those senior water rights, the authors contended, are critical to environmental protection because they are always fulfilled prior to any junior water rights claims. 'One key characteristic of water law across the western U.S. is our 'use it or lose it' principle,' lead author Philip Womble, who conducted the research as a Stanford graduate student, said in a statement. 'That can be a disincentive to water conservation,' added Womble, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Washington. Womble, Gorelick and their colleagues assessed six scenarios to understand possible outcomes amid future drought conditions. They compared the effects of a 'protected' market — in which newer uses would be legally barred from diverting restored flows — to an unprotected market with no such limits. Ultimately, they found that without decreases in water consumption, the consequences to fish would be devastating. But when strategic water transactions were in place, 380 miles of river segments stood to benefit, while hundreds more could enjoy at least partial improvements. 'Strategic environmental water transactions would simultaneously reduce water consumption and preserve fish habitat at the lowest cost to the buyer,' the authors wrote. Moderate reductions in water usage could be achieved with an investment of about $29 million in a protected market, while aggressive cuts could occur at a cost of about $120 million, according to the study. In an unprotected market, similar such decreases would require about 12 percent more money, per the research. The researchers suggested that one source of the necessary funds could be the increasing number of corporations seeking to offset water use from their operations. Even the lowest cost water-use reductions, as modeled in the study, would yield improvement over about a third of restorable river habitat, the authors found. But an investment that was just 8 percent more than the least-cost plan could triple the amount of restored habitat in a protected water market with aggressive usage reductions, according to the study. 'Rivers worldwide have been overallocated by society,' the authors concluded. 'While strategic approaches may cost marginally more, we show modest additional funding can have outsized ecological impacts.'
Yahoo
06-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Worsening climate outlooks raise the stakes for an agreement on the Colorado River
BOULDER, CO — Everyone who's haggling or agonizing over how to split up the drying Colorado River in coming decades is painfully aware that the river's flow has dipped below what previous generations thought would water an ever-growing West. That's now the good news. A leading Colorado River Basin climate scientist told hundreds gathered for a conference about how to stretch, share and save the river that the current warming trajectory will seriously strain their efforts at balancing supply and demand. The world is on track to exceed 3 degrees Celsius of global warming by 2100 — 5 degrees Celsius (or 9 Fahrenheit) over land — according to Colorado State University water and climate researcher Brad Udall. 'That's a world unlike anything we currently know,' Udall said June 5 at a University of Colorado Law School conference examining the river's woes, 'and it's going to challenge us on every front.' On the Colorado River front, warming equals reduced flows as the atmosphere, desiccated soils, thirsty forests and human irrigation demands all take their share to deplete water that could otherwise be stored in the nation's two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell. This year's snowmelt runoff outlook, projected to reach just over half of the 30-year average by the time it effectively ends in July, is complicating efforts to reach consensus on interstate cutbacks. Any future reductions in flow will only add to the pain. Climate change is speeding faster than expected, with the likely effect of further tanking the river's bounty until it provides just two-thirds of the water that the negotiators of a century ago thought would support the growing region, according to Udall's worst-case scenario for the end of the century. And that doesn't account for water that the United States must provide to Mexico by treaty. In the language of water managers, it means a river that the interstate negotiators of a century ago asserted could provide 15 million acre-feet to the seven states that use it could instead average just 10 million acre-feet a year. Already, the megadrought that started in 2000 has dropped the average below 13 million. Mexico's share is 1.5 million. (An acre-foot is roughly 321,000 gallons, enough to support several households for a year, though more river water is consumed on farms.) Measuring flows: How much water flows down the Colorado River? The right answer is more important than ever Against today's startling water losses and tomorrow's even more frightening projections, the states are struggling to reach consensus on how to spread the pain among themselves after guidelines for navigating shortages expire next year. The Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada fully developed their half of the 15 million acre-feet that the 1922 Colorado River Compact granted them and have had to cut back. The four states upstream of them now face the prospect of never getting their full half even as the southwestern states ask them to consider cutting back from their existing uses in the driest of years. The Trump administration's Interior Department will likely need to step up as a moderator in a debate that to date has been left largely to the states, said Mike Connor, who led the department's Bureau of Reclamation in the Obama administration. The new administration is showing signs that it may begin to work on bringing the states together, Connor said, and it should help that it still has more than $1 billion in funds from the last administration's infrastructure allocation to help tackle drought. 'The federal government is the key mediator and facilitator,' he said. So far, though, the states at least publicly are far apart. The Upper Basin States of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming have said their cuts come in the form of dry winters that limit what farms and ranches can divert, and that it's up to the Lower Basin to cut more from what it takes out of the big desert reservoirs before they drain below useful levels. The Lower Basin states say they are willing to give up more in future years, but that trying to fill the gap all on their own could lead to unacceptable results such as a dry Central Arizona Project Canal cutting off Phoenix and Tucson. The rift has proved deep enough that most of the lead negotiators who normally appear together for panel discussions at this and similar annual conferences did not even show up. Preparing for a fight: Hobbs says Arizona will defend its Colorado River water, wants other states to accept cuts Conference attendees — the experts and advocates who work to protect the river and its various uses — must help give political cover to those negotiators who are responsible for protecting their own states' interests, said Anne Castle, a former Interior Department official and Upper Basin Commission chair who is now a fellow at the University of Colorado Law School. Their jobs are difficult, she said, and experts could help by making clear to their constituents that there's not enough water to go around, and all must use less of it. 'Some of what we thought were our legal entitlements and what we had expectations about using in the future … have to be moderated,' Castle said. Other speakers detailed how cities have adapted by growing while using less water, and how some, such as Phoenix, are able to essentially save water by growing because homes will use less water than the farms that they displace. But others pointed to a challenging future in which farms will likely have to cut back further to keep supplies flowing to cities. In all, according to water researcher Brian Richter of the global scarcity solutions organization Sustainable Waters, current rates of reservoir and groundwater drawdowns suggest that 15% of current use within the Colorado River Basin is unsustainable and will have to go. And that's at today's average rate of flow. If warming and drought continue to shrink the river, more cutbacks will be needed just to balance the annual supply, let alone the roughly two-thirds of storage capacity now unfilled in Lake Mead and Lake Powell. Want more stories about water? Sign up for AZ Climate, The Republic's free weekly environment newsletter To Udall, the water and climate researcher, the new 'anti-knowledge' Trump administration seems bent on worsening the problem by eliminating the science that the states and federal dam managers rely on to make informed decisions. The administration is crippling agencies that are critical to climate adaptation by 'going after anything and everything that has the word climate in it,' he said. 'It's insanity, what they're doing,' Udall said, especially given that warming is accelerating. 'There is no way this makes for a better world in which we live, a better world in which the Colorado River flows.' A Trump administration official, Acting Assistant Interior Secretary for Water and Science Scott Cameron, was scheduled to appear on the conference's second day, June 6. Brandon Loomis covers environmental and climate issues for The Arizona Republic and Reach him at Environmental coverage on and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at and @azcenvironment on Facebook and Instagram. This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: A warming, drying Colorado River increasingly vexes water negotiators
