After long and difficult negotiations, a "historic" agreement was announced Monday by the Biden administration between seven states in the US West to protect the Colorado River, which supplies water to tens of millions of people, but is dwindling in the context of global warming.
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Representatives from the seven states of the Colorado River basin have agreed to submit a proposal for a lower basin protection system," the Department of the Interior, which is in charge of land management in the United States, said in a statement.
Risk of severe restrictions
The winning proposal comes from the three lower basin states — California, Nevada and Arizona — that have agreed to voluntarily take action to save 3.7 billion cubic meters of water by 2026. Some of these savings will be "offset by funds from the Inflation Reduction Act," a major climate law passed last year in Washington, the statement said.
The Biden administration had threatened to impose sweeping restrictions if negotiations between the states remained deadlocked. The announcement is "proof" of the government's "commitment" to "finding consensus solutions to climate change and persistent drought," Interior Minister Deb Haaland said Monday.
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The deal is the result of "months of tireless work," Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs said in a separate statement. "We now have a path to raise the level of our reservoirs in the short term. From there, our work must continue to take action and tackle the long-term problem of climate change.
»Hydroelectric reservoirs and dams under threat
The Colorado River supplies some 40 million people with water from the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of California, Mexico, and irrigates millions of hectares of arable land to feed America.
Many years of drought, compounded by climate change and an increase in water needs, have reduced the once rushing river to an alarming level. So much so that hydroelectric reservoirs and dams along its course are now threatened. Lake Mead, in particular, reached its lowest level since 1937 last summer.
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Last year, federal authorities urged the seven western states (along with Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico) to agree to reduce their consumption to a maximum of 40% of the river's flow. Six states had proposed that the majority of these restrictions be imposed on California, which did not agree to the plan and later issued a counter-proposal, suggesting that the cuts came mainly from upstream.
The system that has regulated the distribution of river water for more than a century, based on a criterion of seniority, favors farmers in California, the most populous US state. "California has taken matters into its own hands" by committing to "significant cuts in water use," its governor, Gavin Newsom, said Monday. "The entire western United States is on the front lines of climate change -- we need to work together to confront this crisis.
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