Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
July 15, 2024
A team out of Wyoming, including my Colorado River Research Group colleague Kristiana Hansen, has a new paper that reminds us that we need to be careful about how we thinking about conserving water that is being “wasted.”
Their case study is an area on the New Fork in Wyoming, a tributary of the Green, which is a tributary of the Colorado, where producers use flood irrigation on timothy grass to grow livestock forage.
Flood irrigation is often seen as “wasteful.” One approach is to install “more efficient” irrigation technology. But – and this is one of my repetitive talking points with students in the graduate water policy course I teach every fall – you need to flag the word “waste” when you see it in a water policy discussion and think carefully about how you’re using it.
That water is going somewhere, and doing something. You have to include this in your analysis. Maybe it’s really being “wasted”. But you may find that the place the water is going, and the thing that it’s doing, is valuable!
That’s what the Wyoming team found. Flood irrigation recharges the shallow aquifer – reducing the spring peak in the area’s streams, and slowly releasing that water back into those same streams in late summer. Which is crucial, in this case, for economically valuable fisheries – recreational brown trout fishing, to cite their analysis.
This is at the heart Bruce Lankford’s oddly named work on the “paracommons,” which has provided an enormously helpful analytical framework for my thinking about this stuff.
Cleaning up our urban sewage for reuse is super popular right now, and can in some cases be an enormously powerful water policy response to scarcity. But we’ve got to be mindful about where that “wasted” water is going and what positive benefits it is providing. Lots of inland urban cities in the southwestern United States treat their wastewater and return it to rivers, where it feeds ecosystems and downstream users.
We always have to consider the tradeoffs.
