Ahead of a deadline next week, the seven states that share the Colorado River have revealed competing plans for how the river should be managed in the future.
A man looks out over the Colorado River near Page, Arizona on Nov. 2, 2022. The seven states that manage the river are divided about how to account for the impacts of climate change in new plans about sharing its water.
The Upper Basin states are now suggesting they could allow less water to pass downriver because climate change is causing theStates upstream and downstream of the dam have different ideas about how to manage the amount of water released from the reservoir, which has become a key sticking point in ongoing negotiations about the Colorado River's future.
Currently, the main barometers for the amount of water in the Colorado River system are the elevations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead. The new accounting system, which the Lower Basin states describe as"more holistic," would also include a handful of other reservoirs that are part of the Colorado River Storage Project. Those include Blue Mesa in Colorado, Navajo in New Mexico, and Flaming Gorge in Wyoming and Utah.
"We need to think about the whole basin as one interconnected system," Elizabeth Koebele, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno, said."I think there are elements of both plans that kind of get at that thought and maybe those are places that we could see come together in a future consensus plan."
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