John Locher/AP Photo
A buoy sits high and dry on cracked earth previously under the waters of Lake Mead at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area near Boulder City, Nevada, June 28, 2022.
Signed with a flourish this week by President Biden, the Inflation Reduction Act’s drought provisions bring some fiscal relief to the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin. Democratic Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Michael Bennet of Colorado, and other Western senators pushed hard for the deal, but it comes with the realization that the affected states have not been able to join forces to come up with long-term solutions.
The $4 billion bounty in mitigation assistance to help confront climate crisis–driven drought and aridification is a start. It could end up, however, sparking new tensions over how to handle one of the most devastating water scarcity crises in American history.
On Tuesday, the Bureau of Reclamation mandated reduced water flows to Arizona and Nevada, the latest reaction to a decades-long calamity already reshaping many aspects of human life in the West, ranging from agricultural practices to residential water consumption and power generation. For years, the seven squabbling Western states have tussled over how to better allocate water flows for watersheds that are grossly overburdened by basin users. Faced with an August 15 deadline for submitting a plan, they came up empty and forced the federal government’s hand.
The IRA’s drought provisions may look like a kind of salvation. The billions would flow primarily to seven states in the Colorado River Basin: Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming (as well as “other basins, experiencing comparable levels of long-term drought.” Sections of the Pacific Northwest and Missouri River Basin also face severe conditions.) Grants, contracts, or other financial-assistance agreements will be directed to states as compensation for temporary or voluntary water consumption reduction projects and water diversion plans. Monies would also go to states for system conservation projects that reduce water demand and for river basin and inland waterway habitat restoration plans.
But the IRA hasn’t disposed of decades of disputes over how best to ease pressures on the Colorado River and Lake Mead near Las Vegas and Lake Powell on the Arizona-Utah border, the two largest reservoirs in the country. The Southwest drought is no short-term fluke that humans can ignore. The catastrophically dry conditions looming over the West today have been 23 years in the making. The reservoirs have ebbed to historic lows, a situation that is much worse than projected as little as three years ago. As Western Resource Advocates, a regional environmental group, has noted, “the Colorado River will never have enough water to meet the current over-allocations to the Colorado River Basin states.”
Both Washington, D.C., and the states have accelerated their response to this crisis in recent years. In 2021, the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees water and power generation in the West, implemented reservoir water conservation measures. Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton pronounced some of those measures, such as drought contingency plans implemented in 2019, “successful” in a June Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing. Arizona stepped up with $1 billion in water conservation and other measures, and other states have enacted similar policies.
Although the Bureau of Reclamation oversees both basins, the states are left to manage their own water usage and consult with one another on strategies.
But the Bureau of Reclamation head also announced that the region needs to conserve two to four million more acre-feet of water (one acre-foot equals 326,000 gallons, or enough to cover an acre with one foot of water). When states failed to come up with solutions, the bureau swooped in with this week’s reductions and other mandates, cutting Arizona’s allocation by about 20 percent, Nevada’s by 8 percent, and Mexico’s by 7 percent. (Under the 1944 Mexican Water Treaty, monitored by the International Boundary and Water Commission, the United States provides Mexico with an annual water allotment from the basin and additional water when there is a surplus.)
The complex allocation dispute pits the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada, as well as Mexico, against the Upper Basin states, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. A 1922 compact spelled out specific water allocation for the two basins and Mexico, which set in motion the disputes over water flows that persist today.
The Upper Basin states argue that they operate at a disadvantage: They are not as populous nor developing as fast as their Lower Basin counterparts, and are not using as much water as they are entitled to under the compact. Moreover, they are more dependent on natural water flows, unlike the Lower Basin states that rely on the large reservoirs.
As the Upper Colorado River Commission pointed out in a July 18 letter to the Bureau of Reclamation, “Reclamation data shows that Lower Basin and Mexico depletions are more than double the depletions in the Upper Basin.”
Although the Bureau of Reclamation oversees both basins, the states are left to manage their own water usage and consult with one another on strategies, a herding-cats framework that has stymied regionwide progress and led to the current situation with the bureau imposing reductions on some states (Arizona and Nevada) and not others (California), based on a system that prioritizes water allocation users, with fast-developing California having more high-priority users than Arizona. (By 2040, California will lose 10 percent of its water supply. To replace those lost supplies, state officials plan to investigate desalinization and other options.)
The agriculture sector consumes 80 percent of the basin’s water, far eclipsing municipal, tribal nation, power generation, and recreational uses. Farmers have responded by switching to more drought-resistant crops. There are also conversations about growing crops that can no longer be grown in the West in other sections of the country, such as the Mississippi Delta.
Amid the titanic conservation pressures, IRA funding will compensate municipalities, tribal nations, and other interests that pursue additional water restrictions and specific water conservation projects, as well as compensating farmers who voluntarily reduce consumption through irrigation technology upgrades, letting their lands lie fallow, or switching to drought-resistant crops.
In the West, much of the water destined for human consumption goes to outdoor uses, such as garden and lawn maintenance, according to Cynthia Koehler, executive director of WaterNow Alliance, a national advocacy group of municipal water officials. One problem is that the average Westerner is only partially aware of the scope of the drought, whose impacts may range from megadrought conditions in one city or town that require severe water restrictions to less draconian rules in other regions.
Many communities have already exhausted toilet, gray-water, and cash-for-grass rebate programs. What the IRA drought provisions do, Koehler says, is open up more robust opportunities for more permanent demand management programs. They may also begin to “galvanize cultural change” to Westerners’ water consumption habits.
Kevin Wheeler, a senior research fellow at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, notes that Colorado River Basin residents will most likely have to learn to live with certain adaptations. “Whatever solutions we come up with now, we have to assume that some of these solutions may need to stay in place for a long time or at least until this drought ends,” he says. “We may also realize those solutions are insufficient because conditions have become even more extreme: It’s very important to stop thinking only in terms of when the drought ends—because we have no clear indication if and when the drought will end.”
The IRA provisions also contain funds to restore inland habitats like the Salton Sea, a lake 120 miles east of San Diego formed when the Colorado River breached an irrigation canal and flowed into a dry river bed in the early 20th century. Aridification has dried out the lake and has destroyed bird and fish habitats while industrial and agricultural activity pollute the water. The resulting poor air quality continues to threaten the health of the region’s disproportionately impoverished Latino residents.
The lake holds significant lithium deposits, which could help satisfy domestic demand for the mineral used in electric-vehicle batteries. Although lithium is extracted by surface mining, which would seem to be incompatible with environmental justice and habitat restoration, a CNBC report found that several companies are investigating geothermal mining techniques that could extract lithium from the lake’s brine.
But most mining operations are holding back on projects until technology advances and potential risks and uncertainties have been addressed and the state has established the Lithium Valley Commission “to review, investigate, and analyze opportunities and benefits for lithium recovery and use.” Despite the possibility that federal funds could indirectly help promote such mining, the IRA funding for the ecosystem has encouraged California environmentalists.
The IRA’s drought funding is available through the end of fiscal 2026.
This story has been updated.
