https://www.propublica.org/article/colorado-river-water-shortage-jay-
famiglietti

The megadrought gripping the western states is only part of the problem.
Alternative sources of water are also imperiled, and the nation�s food
along with it.

The western United States is, famously, in the grips of its worst
megadrought in a millennium. The Colorado River, which supplies water to
more than 40 million Americans and supports food production for the rest
of the country, is in imminent peril. The levels in the nation�s largest
freshwater reservoir, Lake Mead, behind the Hoover Dam and a fulcrum of
the Colorado River basin, have dropped to around 25% of capacity. The
Bureau of Reclamation, which governs lakes Mead and Powell and water
distribution for the southern end of the river, has issued an ultimatum:
The seven states that draw from the Colorado must find ways to cut their
consumption � by as much as 40% � or the federal government will do it for
them. Last week those states failed to agree on new conservation measures
by deadline. Meanwhile, next door, California, which draws from the
Colorado, faces its own additional crises, with snowpack and water levels
in both its reservoirs and aquifers all experiencing a steady, historic
and climate-driven decline. It�s a national emergency, but not a surprise,
as scientists and leaders have been warning for a generation that warming
plus overuse of water in a fast-growing West would lead those states to
run out.

I recently sat down with Jay Famiglietti, the executive director of the
Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, to
talk about what comes next and what the public still doesn�t understand
about water scarcity in the United States. Before moving to Canada,
Famiglietti was a lead researcher at NASA�s water science program at the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and a member of the
faculty at the University of California, Irvine. He pioneered the use of
the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites to peer into the
earth�s mass and measure changes in its underground water supplies. The
Colorado River crisis is urgent, Famiglietti said, but the hidden,
underground water crisis is even worse. We talked about what U.S. leaders
either won�t acknowledge or don�t understand and about how bad things are
about to get.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Let�s start with the Colorado River because it�s in the news. The federal
government has put some extraordinary numbers out there, suggesting water
users cut between 2 and 4 million acre-feet of water usage starting this
year � roughly 40% of the entire river�s recent flow. How could that
possibly happen?
It�s going to be really hard. We�re looking at drastically reduced food
production and the migration of agriculture to other parts of the country
and real limits on growth, especially in desert cities like Phoenix. My
fear is that groundwater will, as usual, be left out of the discussion �
groundwater is mostly unprotected, and it�s going to be a real shit show.

Remind us how that happens. States and farmers cut back on the Colorado
River, and California and Arizona just start pumping all the water out of
their aquifers?
Yeah. This started with the drought contingency plan [the 2018 legal
agreement among the states on the Colorado River]. Arizona had to cut
nearly 20% of its Colorado River water. To placate the farmers, the deal
was that they would have free access to the groundwater. In fact,
something like $20 million was allocated to help them dig more wells. So,
it was just a direct transfer from surface water to groundwater. Right
away, you could see that the groundwater depletion was accelerating. With
this latest round, I�m afraid we�re just going to see more of that.

Some of that groundwater actually gets used to grow feed for cattle in the
Middle East or China, right? There�s Saudi-owned agriculture firms
planting alfalfa, which uses more water than just about anything, and it�s
not for American food supply. Do I have that right?
There�s been other buyers from other countries coming in, buying up that
land, land grabbing and grabbing the water rights. That�s happening in
Arizona.

What about in California? Groundwater depletion has caused the earth to
sink in on itself. Parts of the Central Valley are 28 feet lower today
than they were a century ago.
California passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in 2014,
which mandated an extraordinarily long time horizon: two years to form the
Groundwater Sustainability Agencies and then five years for each GSA to
come up with its sustainability plan. So that�s now: 2022. And then 20
years to come into sustainability. My fear is that the slow implementation
will allow for too much groundwater depletion to happen. It�s sort of the
same old, same old.

But could it work?
I don�t think we�re talking about sustainability. I think we�re talking
about managed depletion. Because it�s impossible to keep growing the food
that we grow in California. It�s agriculture that uses most of the
groundwater. The math just isn�t there to have sustainable groundwater
management. If you think of sustainability as input equals output � don�t
withdraw more than is being replenished on an annual basis � that�s
impossible in most of California.

Will we run out of water? Are we talking about 10 years or 100 years?
Yes. We are on target to. Parts of the Central Valley have already run out
of water. Before SGMA, there were places in the southern part of the
valley where I would say within 40 to 50 years we would run out or the
water is so saline or so deep that it�s just too expensive to extract.
SGMA may slow that down � or it may not. I don�t think the outlook is
really good. Our own research is showing that groundwater depletion there
has accelerated in the last three years.

Then what happens? What does California or Arizona look like after that?
It looks pretty dry. Even among water users, there�s an element that
doesn�t understand that this is going to be the end for a lot of farming.
Farmers are trying to be really efficient but also magically want the
supply of water to be sustained.

We focus on the big cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas, but it�s farms that
use 80% of water. They grow crops that provide huge amounts of the winter
fruits and vegetables and nuts for the entire country. Is there any way
that farming in California and Arizona can continue even remotely close to
how it is today?
I don�t think so. It has to drastically change. We�ll need wholesale
conversion to efficient irrigation and different pricing structures so
that water is better valued. We�ll need different crops that are bred to
be more drought tolerant and more saline-water tolerant. And we�ll
probably have a lot less production.

What does that mean for the country�s food supply?
This is the big question. I don�t want to be flippant, but people don�t
understand the food-water nexus. Do we try to bring more water to the
southern high plains, to Arizona, to California, because if the food
system�s optimized, maybe that�s the cheapest thing to do? Or does
agriculture move to where the water is? Does it migrate north and east?
It�s not just food production. What about the workers? Transportation? If
we were to move all of our agriculture to northern California, into Idaho,
into North Dakota over the next decade, that�s a major upheaval for
millions and millions of people who work in the ag industry.

It�s really interconnected, isn�t it? The nation essentially expanded West
beginning in the 19th century in order to build a food system that could
support East Coast growth. The Homestead Act, the expansion of the
railroads, was partially to put a system in place to bring stock back to
the meat houses in Chicago and to expand farming to supply the urban
growth in the East.
I don�t think a lot of people really realize that, right? When I go to the
grocery store in Saskatoon, my berries are coming from Watsonville,
California. The lettuce is coming from Salinas, California.

Farmers in the West are fiercely independent. So, in California, Arizona,
do they lose the ability to choose what to plant?
Right now, there�s freedom to plant whatever you want. But when we look
out a few decades, if the water cannot be managed sustainably, I don�t
actually know. At some point we will need discussions and interventions
about what are the needs of the country? What kind of food? What do we
need for our food security?

Let�s discuss California. Its governor, Gavin Newsom, has advanced a lot
of progressive climate policies, but he replaced the water board leader,
who pushed for groundwater management across the state, and last month the
agency�s long-serving climate change manager resigned in protest of the
state�s lax water conservation efforts. What does it mean if a liberal,
climate-active governor can�t make the hard decisions? What does that say
about the bigger picture?
There has been a drop off from the Jerry Brown administration to the
Newsom administration. Water has taken a step lower in priority.

Is that a sign that these problems are intractable?
No. It�s a sign that it�s just not as high a priority. There are tough
decisions to be made in California, and some of them won�t be popular. You
can see the difference between someone like Brown, who was sort of end-of-
career and just like, �Screw it, man, I�m just going to do this because it
needs to be done,� and someone like Newsom, who clearly has aspirations
for higher office and is making more of a political play. We�re not going
to solve California�s water problem, but we could make it a lot more
manageable for decades and decades and decades. (Newsom�s office has
rejected the criticism and has said the governor is doing more than any
other state to adapt to climate change. On Aug. 11 his administration
announced new water recycling, storage and conservation measures.)

Water wars. It�s an idea that gets batted around a whole bunch. Once,
negotiating water use more than a century ago, California and Arizona
amassed armed state guard troops on opposite banks of the Colorado River.
Is this hyperbole or reality for the future?
Well, it�s already happening. Florida and Georgia were in court as was
Tennessee. There�s the dispute between Texas and New Mexico. Even within
California they�re still arguing environment versus agriculture, farmers
versus fish, north versus south. Sadly, we�re at a point in our history
where people are not afraid to express their extreme points of view in
ways that are violent. That�s the trajectory that we�re on. When you put
those things together, especially in the southern half or the southwestern
United States, I think it�s more of a tinderbox than it ever has been.

That�s hopeful.
You�re not going to get any hope out of me. The best you�re going to get
out of me is we can manage our way through. I don�t think we�re going to
really slow global change. We have to do what we�re doing because we�re
talking about the future. But a certain number of degrees warming and a
certain amount of sea level rise is already locked in, and all that�s
happening in our lifetimes. The best you�re going to hear from me is that
we need to do the best we can now to slow down the rates of warming that
directly impacts the availability of water. We�re talking about the future
of humanity. I think people don�t realize that we�re making those
decisions now by our water policies and by our climate change policy.

When people think about water, they think of it as a Western problem, but
there�s water shortages across the High Plains and into the South, too.
I don�t think most people understand that scarcity in many places is
getting more pronounced. Nationally, let�s look at the positives: It�s a
big country, and within its boundaries, we have enough water to be water
secure and to be food secure and to do it in an environmentally
sustainable way. A lot of countries don�t have that. That�s a positive,
though we still have the same problems that everyone else has with
increasing flooding and drought. What I really think we need is more
attention to a national water policy and more attention to the food, water
and energy nexus. Because those are things that are going to define how
well we do as a country.

What would a national water policy look like?
It recognizes where people live, and it recognizes where we have water,
and then it decides how we want to deal with that. Maybe it�s more like a
national water/food policy. Moving water over long distances is not really
feasible right now � it�s incredibly expensive. Does the government want
to subsidize that? These are the kind of things that need to be discussed,
because we�re on a collision course with reality � and the reality is
those places where we grow food, where a lot of people live, are running
out of water, and there are other parts of the country that have a lot of
water. So that�s a national-level discussion that has to happen, because
when you think about it, the food problem is a national problem. It�s not
a California problem. It�s not a Southern, High Plains, Ogallala, Texas
Panhandle problem. It�s a national problem. It needs a national solution.

Is this a climate czar? A new agency?
Something like that. We�re failing right now. We�re failing to have any
vision for how that would happen. In Canada, we�re talking about a
Canadian water agency and a national water policy. That could be something
that we need in the United States � a national water agency to deal with
these problems.

In the Inflation Reduction Act we finally have some legislation that will
help cut emissions. There�s plenty of other talk about infrastructure and
adaptation � seawalls and strengthening housing and building codes and all
of those sorts of things. Where would you rank the priority of a national
water policy?
It�s an absolute top priority. I like to say that water�s next, right
after carbon. Water is the messenger that�s delivering the bad news about
climate change to your city, to your front door.

We don�t usually mix concern over drought with concern over contamination,
but there was a recent study about the presence of �forever� chemicals in
rainfall and salt washing off the roads in Washington, D.C., and
contaminating drinking water. Can these remain separate challenges in a
hotter future?
It doesn�t get discussed much, but we�re seeing more and more the links
between water quality and climate change. We�ve got water treatment
facilities and sewers close to coasts. During drought, discharge of
contaminants is less diluted. The water quality community and the water
climate communities don�t really overlap. We�ve done a terrible job as
stewards where water is concerned.

Globally, what do you want Americans to think about when they read this?
The United States is kind of a snapshot of what�s happening in the rest of
the world. There�s no place we can run to. Things are happening really,
really fast and in a very large scale. We as a society, as a country or as
a global society are not responding with the urgency, with the pace and
the scale that�s required. I am specifically talking about rapid changes
that are happening with freshwater availability that most people don�t
know about. The problems are often larger than one country. A lot of it is
transboundary. And we�re just not moving fast enough.

News flash.
Around the world the water levels have just continued to drop. In the
Middle East or India. In fact, they�re getting faster. It�s actually a
steeper slope.

So, the Colorado River is the least of our worries.
Globally? It�s not even as bad as the others. Arizona doesn�t really show
up as much compared to some of these places.

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