The growing leadership of women in water. The Colorado River’s persistent drought and efforts to sign off on a plan to avert worse shortfalls of water from the river. And in California’s Central Valley, promising solutions to vexing water resource challenges.
These were among the topics that Western Water news explored in 2018.
We’re already planning a full slate of stories for 2019. You can sign up here to be alerted when new stories are published. In the meantime, take a look at what we dove into in 2018:
Amy Haas recently became the first non-engineer and the first woman to serve as executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission in its 70-year history, putting her smack in the center of a host of daunting challenges facing the Upper Colorado River Basin.
Yet those challenges will be quite familiar to Haas, an attorney who for the past year has served as deputy director and general counsel of the commission. (She replaced longtime Executive Director Don Ostler). She has a long history of working within interstate Colorado River governance, including representing New Mexico as its Upper Colorado River commissioner and playing a central role in the negotiation of the recently signed U.S.-Mexico agreement known as Minute 323.
This issue of Western Water discusses the challenges
facing the Colorado River Basin resulting from persistent
drought, climate change and an overallocated river, and how water
managers and others are trying to face the future.
“The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday weighed in to support the
Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians in its lawsuit against two
water districts, backing the tribe’s claims that the local
agencies are infringing upon its rights by over-pumping
groundwater from the Coachella Valley’s aquifer.”
“A landmark water-sharing agreement between the Klamath Tribes
and cattle ranchers is getting startup money as continuing
drought promises more irrigation restrictions this summer.”
“Two rivers on opposite sides of the country — the Klamath and
the Chattahoochee — may provide lessons for the inevitable and
growing dispute over how we manage our most precious natural
resource.”
“Some southern Oregon ranchers will have to reduce or completely
shut down irrigation in the parched Upper Klamath Basin this
summer as a result of a historic assertion of water rights by
other users in the region.
On Monday, several groups, including the Klamath Tribes and
irrigators in the federal Klamath Project, made formal calls
for water, asking Oregon to enforce rights they won earlier
this year.”
