A River of Resilience: Navigating Water Governance in the Colorado River Basin

This paper explores how climate change, the Southwestern North American megadrought, rapid population growth, the overallocation of water entitlements, and excessive consumption impact the Colorado River Basin’s water supply. The Colorado River basin will not be able to sustain its water supply for the forty million people depending on it across the seven basin states– Arizona, Colorado, California, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, and Wyoming– in addition to the two Mexican states, Sonora and Baja California unless consumption is reduced to regulate the basin’s decreasing supply. Despite its critical role in supplying water to millions of people and the challenges posed by the Southwestern North American megadrought, civil society largely overlooks the Colorado River basin's overconsumption. Chapter 1 provides quantitative data on the degradation of neighboring ecosystems and their services, alongside the basin’s decline in water supply due to overconsumption and miscalculated governmental allocations, increasing evaporation, and reduced precipitation and snowmelt inflow, underscoring the need for improved infrastructure and enforceable federal regulations. Chapter 2 outlines the percentage of the basin’s water supply used commercially within agricultural, livestock, and commercial industries and examines its economic, environmental, and social costs. Chapter 3 delves into the rural, suburban, and urban planning related to the basin’s existing water infrastructure and management, assessing infrastructure inefficiencies. Chapter 4 surveys the contemporary state of the Colorado River basin’s federal politics and laws, highlighting the political exploitation of Indigenous tribes, Mexico, and ecosystems from historical allocations and how these exclusions have disproportionately made marginalized groups more vulnerable to climate change and limited water accessibility. Chapter 5 proposes policy recommendations aimed at: restoring and preserving nearby ecosystems degraded by current water infrastructure, consumption rates, the megadrought, or climate change, reliably allocating water supplies for industries, Indigenous Peoples, Mexico, and every basin state, and advancing existing water infrastructure to prevent losses within storage and distribution systems to establish a sustainable and equitable water source for Southwest people of the United States.