WATER POLITICS

In recent years I’ve had the great fortune to be able to work with some amazing teams of researchers to explore the causes of water scarcity across many geographies, including the Colorado River, the Rio Grande, the Western US, and around the globe. Importantly, we’ve gone beyond just documenting the problems or threats caused by water shortages and have offered effective, proven solutions for sustainably rebalancing over-drafted water budgets. Our studies have looked at ways of conserving water in irrigated agriculture through crop shifting and other on-farm strategies as well as ways to conserve water in cities and industries.

Our just-published study of the Great Salt Lake in Utah (USA) was one of the most fascinating and enjoyable projects I’ve been involved with. I learned a great deal from our research!

I came to appreciate the hydrologic hyper-sensitivity of endorheic (lacking outflow) lakes. The Great Salt Lake is the largest saline lake in North America and the eighth largest in the world. Other big ones include the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and Lake Urmia in Iran. All of these lakes teeter on a delicate balance between river inflows and evaporative losses from the lakes. The Great Salt Lake began to slip into long-term deficit way back in the mid-1800s when Mormon settlers from the eastern US began to capture the inflowing water from tributary rivers to expand their irrigated farms. The ensuing slow shrinkage of the lake was briefly interrupted by huge snowfalls in the 1980s and 1990s, but climate warming began to accelerate the lake’s demise since 2000. The lake dropped 14 feet (4.2 meters) and lost two-thirds of its volume during the past three decades.

The primary cause of the lake’s decline is the diversion of nearly two-thirds of the inflowing water for use in cities, industries, and irrigated farming. Farms are by far the biggest anthropogenic water consumer, accounting for 71% of water consumption, and 80% of this farm water goes to irrigated cattle-feed crops (alfalfa and grass hay).

The outsized contribution of irrigated cattle-feed crops to water shortages is repeated in most other river basins in the western US, and in many other water-scarce regions of our planet. As I’ve said in previous blogs, farmers and ranchers grow these crops for a simple business reason: our beef and dairy demands create a price for these crops that is quite attractive to farmers. In the past two decades, dairy consumption in the US has risen by 12%, driven mostly by increased demand for yogurt (+220%) and cheese (+28%).

In our paper, we took a close look at a variety of ways to rebalance the Great Salt Lake’s water budget by reducing production of these cattle-feed crops, along with urban and industrial water conservation. We concluded that saving the Great Salt Lake will require an overall reduction of consumptive water use by 35%; a reduction of 15% is needed to stabilize the lake to keep it from declining further, and another 20% will be needed to replenish the lake to an ecologically safe level.

Saving the Great Salt Lake will come with an eye-popping price tag: it will take at least $100 million per year for a decade to get the lake back to a safe level. However, when you put that cost in perspective, it translates to about $29 per Utah resident per year, or far less than 1% of the state’s annual budgets.

The challenges of water scarcity are growing rapidly with climate warming in many regions of the globe. Given that nearly 90% of all “blue” water (from rivers, lakes, aquifers) consumed in the world goes to irrigated agriculture, resolving water scarcity and keeping pace with climate change is going to necessarily require not just unprecedented levels of urban water conservation but also a massive transformation of what we grow on farms, and how we grow it. Because these agricultural changes commonly elicit fierce political resistance and high costs, political leaders are loathe to touch it. However, illustrative success stories are emerging around the world, demonstrating that with proper consideration of farmer needs, values, and cultures, and with financial compensation and technical support to ease difficult transitions, we can meet these challenges.

It begins by acknowledging the nature and size of the challenge, and demanding bold leadership from our decision makers. We can only run from water shortages and climate change for so long before truly disastrous consequences befall us.