Annual Report 2023
Policy wins don’t happen overnight. Strong solutions are the result of rigorous research, extensive stakeholder engagement, thoughtful policy development, and careful fine tuning. This is the approach WRA took in 2023 to prepare for negotiations on new guidelines for the Colorado River.
Water demands on the Colorado River vastly exceed what the river can provide, and the situation is only expected to worsen as the West becomes hotter and drier due to climate change. The future of the Colorado River depends on our ability to implement equitable and forward-thinking strategies to conserve water and keep the river healthy and flowing.
But to develop innovative ways to address the challenges the Colorado River faces, we first needed to develop a new and more effective approach to protect the river. In 2023, WRA’s team of policy experts reflected on the history of the Colorado River – what has worked and what hasn’t in the century since the Law of the River was established.
History has shown that we need a more holistic approach to the Colorado River. We must embrace environmental stewardship, balance water supply and demand, ensure equitable access to water for basin Tribes, and protect the river that sustains our entire region.
Based on our research and expertise, we identified guiding principles for our work to protect the river and the communities, fish, and wildlife that depend on it. And it starts by ensuring that the mistakes of the past are addressed by dramatically reducing the amount of water we use across all sectors of the economy and developing policies that are proactive, equitable, and sustainable.
Future guidelines for the river must bring the river back into balance and reduce water use by 25% through strategies like incentivizing farmers and ranchers to use less, encouraging municipal water conservation, and retiring water-intensive coal plants. We also need to consider the current and future conditions on the river – there is less water in the river today and there will be less water in the river in the future – as climate change tightens its grip on the West. The river must be managed in a way that protects irreplaceable ecosystems and recreational uses.
Our principles also reinforce that future guidelines for the river and decision-making processes must address the historic and systemic exclusion of Tribes by promoting inclusion of Tribes in decisions about the future of the river and the protection of Tribal water rights. Decision-making processes must be transparent, accessible, and meaningfully inclusive to enable input from a broad range of impacted people, conservation groups, and stakeholders.
Not long after we developed our principles, the Bureau of Reclamation requested input on the scope of the new guidelines that will govern the river for the next two decades. WRA seized this opportunity and put forth our plan for equitable and sustainable guidelines to protect the river. We, and our partners, have encouraged the Bureau of Reclamation to think more holistically about the river, setting the stage for guidelines that safeguard the future of the Colorado River.
Previous river management guidelines focused on delivering water from one part of the basin to the other, but the Colorado River is not a simple water delivery pipeline. It is a dynamic, living system. As we develop new guidelines, we must consider ways to protect the health of the ecosystems that support our entire region. And after initial conversations, we were pleased to see Reclamation open the door to policy ideas that will build resilience and promote environmental stewardship.
WRA also engaged with other federal officials, state decision makers, and environmental organizations to develop actionable policies to protect the hardest working river in the West. We developed plans for an innovative program to encourage conservation and to ensure that conserved water could benefit river health. We developed computer modeling of the river to test our framework that would allow for water to be conserved and moved within the Colorado River Basin – wherever it is needed most to protect river health and support system stability, maximizing the environmental and community benefits of every drop of water saved.
Our research and policy development in 2023 prepared us to hit the ground running in 2024. We drew on our principles and worked with our partners to submit a detailed proposal for governing the Colorado River – one of just a handful that were submitted to the Bureau of Reclamation.
At WRA, we embed deep expertise and research into our policy solutions. This forward looking and detailed thinking in the months and years before that enables WRA to quickly implement impactful solutions.
