Robert Marcos | Photojournalist | Grand Junction, Colorado
I’ve never been a strategic thinker so I’m grateful that I can utilize an AI that provides factual answers plus direct links to its sources, and while having coffee this morning Perplexity provided a response that I’d like to share. Note: while each of the first four responses deserves to be elaborated upon, in this post I’m just going to focus just on number 5.
Query: “Please provide 5 examples of under-reported factors influencing the aridification of the American West.”
Responses:
- Temperature‑driven evaporative demand (not just lack of precipitation).
- Groundwater depletion as a hidden component of aridification.
- Progressive salinization and water‑quality‑driven “functional” scarcity.
- Degradation of groundwater–surface water connectivity in headwaters.
- Institutional and legacy‑infrastructure lock‑in. Definition: Institutional lock-in refers to the way established rules, organizations, and physical infrastructure create powerful inertia that resists change, even when better options exist for addressing challenges like aridification in the American West.1
This “institutional lock-in” amplifies drying Western water law, infrastructure, and allocation rules that were created around 20th‑century hydroclimate and tend to favor maintaining large, evaporative surface reservoirs and extensive canal networks rather than flexible, low‑loss storage and delivery. These institutional and physical path dependencies increase evaporation losses, slow adaptation, and channel scarce flows into rigid prior‑appropriation commitments and uses that may be economically or ecologically inefficient under a hotter, drier regime. 2
For instance, efforts to manage Colorado River salinity and shortages must operate within existing compacts and project mandates, which can prioritize delivery targets over system‑wide efficiency, effectively deepening aridification by making it harder to reallocate or conserve water in response to temperature‑driven drying. 3
Here are four specific examples of institutional and legacy‑infrastructure lock‑in in the Colorado River system…
1. Law of the River and the 7.5+7.5 maf Structure
The 1922 Colorado River Compact and subsequent “Law of the River” documents hard‑wire an overestimate of available flow (7.5 maf to each basin, plus an extra 1 maf to the Lower Basin) into the management framework, even as mean flows decline under aridification. This basin split at Lee Ferry, plus the Upper Basin’s delivery obligations to the Lower Basin and Mexico, makes it institutionally difficult to reallocate water to match a smaller, more variable river without reopening a century of compacts, court decrees, and federal statutes.4
2. Glen Canyon Dam / CRSP as a “Must‑Operate” System
Glen Canyon Dam and the broader Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP) were built to regulate flows and guarantee Lower Basin deliveries, embedding the assumption of large, stable storage and hydropower revenues into basin operations. Today, even with shrinking inflows and dead pool risk, operating rules, repayment contracts, and power‐marketing arrangements keep agencies oriented toward maintaining Lake Powell as a central regulating reservoir, rather than rapidly re‑optimizing for a different storage configuration or prioritizing ecological flow restoration.5
3. Transbasin Diversions and the Colorado‑Big Thompson Pattern
Projects such as the Colorado‑Big Thompson (C‑BT) move Upper Colorado River water across the Divide into the South Platte via large, fixed works—Adams Tunnel, canals, reservoirs like Horsetooth, Carter Lake, and Boulder Reservoir—which were sized for a wetter historical regime. Municipal and agricultural systems on the Front Range have grown around this imported supply, creating political and economic resistance to curtailing diversions or repurposing infrastructure, even as those exports reduce flexibility for in‑basin adaptation, instream flows, and tribal water development.6
4. Wellton–Mohawk Return Flows and the Yuma Desalting Plant
The Colorado River Basin Salinity Control Act led to construction of the Yuma Desalting Plant to treat saline Wellton–Mohawk return flows so the U.S. could meet water‑quality obligations to Mexico while preserving higher‑quality water in Lake Mead. A “temporary” 1977 operational workaround—bypassing those return flows to the Ciénega de Santa Clara—became the de facto long‑term solution, locking in a fragile arrangement where restarting the plant would damage a large accidental wetland and disrupt established ecological and binational expectations, while not restarting it keeps the expensive plant largely stranded infrastructure.7
SOURCES
- Lifestyle Sustainability Directory
https://lifestyle.sustainability-directory.com/term/institutional-lock-in/ - Climatehubs.usda
https://www.climatehubs.usda.gov/hubs/southwest/topic/megadrought-and-aridification-southwest-united-states - U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
https://www.usbr.gov/projects/index.php?id=494 - U,S. Bureau of Reclamation https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/pao/lawofrvr.html
- Congressional Research Service https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/2025-02-18_IN11982_f193ae261584f91c132c52da409ae312c977ca9a.html
- Poudre Heritage https://poudreheritage.org/history/growing-communities/
- Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuma_Desalting_Plant