Bringing water to the table

Eli Rabett has a collection of links to John Fleck’s blogs on the incredible project to send an artificial spring flood down the Colorado River’s delta. Go, read. But the really fascinating thing is the political and diplomatic process that brought it about.

I’ve occasionally said that people don’t fight wars over water anywhere near as much as you might think. It’s an International Relations class cliché that water wars are just around the corner and will be worse than the oil ones. But it’s hard to find real cases. Perhaps it’s like nuclear weapons; the thought of fighting over water is so horrific that it scares people into being reasonable.

So the story of Minute 319, as told in a really superb article by Matt Jenkins of High Country News, is an illuminating story about people managing to co-operate and work out their conflicts without anyone getting killed. Yeah, I know. Dullburn.

Under the treaty between the US and Mexico, you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mexicans aren’t included in the process by which the US water districts manage the supply, and aren’t covered by US environmental legislation. On the other hand, though, their status has some advantages. Although they didn’t have any involvement, they also didn’t have any responsibility. The treaty guaranteed them x amount of water, and if there wasn’t enough to go around, this made them the first call on the supply. The Americans had to accept reducing their usage of water, but the Mexicans didn’t. As one of the Mexican water experts said, it was like having a big tap sticking out of the wall along the border.

They also got run-off water that leaked across the border, and this caused trouble when the Americans fixed a canal to stop it leaking. Eventually, a major drought pushed the whole thing up the agenda, and they pulled it off; the US side would pay for the Mexicans to do a whole lot of work to save water in Mexico, creating a surplus. The extra water for environmental restoration would come out of this surplus, but the Americans were sceptical about letting it come out of their allocation, for fear it would just be aggrandised by Mexican landowners once it crossed the line. The Mexicans, for their part, were just sceptical of the whole concept and suspected they were being offered “paper water”. The parties needed a mechanism to permit them to trust one another.

The solution was that, for the first few years, the US got the saved water, and immediately returned part of it as its contribution to the artificial flood. Then, as the lifetime of the agreement went on, more and more of the surplus would be transferred to Mexico, eventually 100%. As a further side-payment, Mexico would get to use part of the storage capacity in the dams on the US side to hold reserves of water, in exchange for agreeing to save water when a shortage was declared and US users had to cut their demand.

The various academics, NGOs, and such who were deeply involved in the whole thing got to monitor the implementation. To do so, though, they had to become parties to it, which meant providing some of the water for the flood, which they bought from US users.

And the point of the one-off flood? Well, the trees and other vegetation that make the delta important are adapted to intermittent floods, not a steady flow. When they get soaked, they germinate and start driving roots down to the groundwater. So even a one-off is worthwhile, and they’re now discussing making it a regular event.

The whole story is intriguing, inspiring, and deeply cool. Go, read.