When Don Cox was looking for a reliable place to build a family farm in the 1950s, he settled on California’s Imperial Valley.
The desert region had high priority water rights, meaning its access to water was hard for anyone to take away.
“He had it on his mind that water rights were very, very important,” said his grandson, Thomas Cox, who now farms in the Valley.
The intensifying crisis facing the Colorado River amounts to what is fundamentally a math problem.
The 40 million people who depend on the river to fill up a glass of water at the dinner table or wash their clothes or grow food across millions of acres use significantly more each year than actually flows through the banks of the Colorado.
In fact, first sliced up 100 years ago in a document known as the Colorado River Compact, the calculation of who gets what amount of that water may never have been balanced.
Utilities and states are preparing for a world with less available water and turning more to wind and solar, demand response, energy storage and improved grid connections. That planning has helped Western states keep the lights on this summer even in severe drought conditions.
Record high temperatures in urban Europe as heat waves bake the planet more often. Devastating floods, some in poorer unprepared areas. Increasing destruction from hurricanes. Drought and famine in poorer parts of Africa as dry spells worsen across the globe. Wild weather worldwide getting stronger and more frequent, resulting “in unprecedented extremes.”
Dry, cracked rice fields can be seen driving along Interstate 5 in Glenn and Colusa counties. This year has been more than challenging for farmers as California continues its third consecutive year of extreme drought conditions.
KRCR spoke to fourth-generation farmer Chris Johnson on Monday about not being able to plant crop due to lower water allocation from the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District (GCID).
When Gilbert Quintana, a farmer in the Mexicali Valley, learned he would soon lose 15% of his water supply, he did what he’s done before in a pinch: buy water from other growers in northern Mexico.
But Quintana worries that such workarounds won’t always be possible. The water used to irrigate his 2,000 acres of (800 hectares) of Brussel sprouts, green onions, and lettuce comes from the over-tapped Colorado River, which a megadrought in the American West due in part to climate change is rapidly depleting.
(AP EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part of a collaborative series on the Colorado River as the 100th anniversary of the historic Colorado River Compact approaches. The Associated Press, The Colorado Sun, The Albuquerque Journal, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Arizona Daily Star and The Nevada Independent are working together to explore the pressures on the river in 2022.)
Mount Shasta, the widely recognizable face of California’s far north, has lost almost all its defining snow cover for a second straight year.
Another summer of scorching temperatures, punctuated by the recent heat wave, has melted most of the mountain’s lofty white crown, typically a year-round symbol of the north state’s enduring wilds.
California is at a transformational moment when it comes to managing water. As aridification of the western United States intensifies, we have an opportunity to advance a better approach to flow management in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and our rivers through a process of voluntary agreements to update the Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan.
The agreements, signed by parties from Red Bluff to San Diego, propose a new structure for managing water resources in the Delta and beyond in a way that is collaborative, innovative and foundational for adapting to climate realities while benefiting communities, farms, fish and wildlife.
As soon as the U.S. Department of the Interior last month announced that Nevada would lose 8% of its water allotment from the Colorado River next year amid the continuing drought, officials with the Southern Nevada Water Authority started fielding questions from concerned residents.
Southwest of Sacramento, the branching arms of waterways reach into a patchwork of farm fields and pastures. Canals and wetlands fringed with reeds meet a sunbaked expanse of dry meadows.
These lands on the northwestern edge of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta have now been targeted for restoration following the widespread destruction of estuary marsh habitats that began over a century ago.
