'We should make it attractive to farmers to conserve water,' Jennifer Morales and Patrick Belmont write.
Utah’s best option for conserving the necessary 1 million acre-feet is to use water markets. Water markets allow farmers to temporarily sell or lease some of their water to another user. In the current system, if a farmer only needs to use 80% of their allocated water, they don’t have any easy way to give the excess to someone else. The process to transfer a water right takes months to complete.
Water markets provide a permanent but flexible solution. They use basic economic principles to incentivize conservation by allowing farmers to profit from leaving water in the river. Markets also give municipalities and conservation groups access to water that was previously unavailable. If conservation groups can offer to purchase water from farmers, farmers may choose to use less water for irrigation because they would make more money conserving it instead.exploring how they could work here.
One other challenge legislators face is finding a way to ensure that water left in-stream will actually make it to the lake. Currently, there is no guarantee that conserved water won’t be used by someone further downstream, and lawmakers have steered clear of setting real targets for water flow or elevation in the Great Salt Lake.to the lake each year is the only way to avoid catastrophe for northern Utah’s economy, environment, and quality of life.
Outdated water policies got us into this mess, but by acting boldly we can leave the next generation in a position to be leaders in conservation and water management. We owe it to future Utahns to act today.is a research manager at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University.is a professor of hydrology and head of the Department of Watershed Sciences at Utah State University.
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