LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — The Colorado River, lifeline to 40 million people across the Southwest, is sliding deeper into what experts are calling “water bankruptcy."
"We have overused the account," Thomas Rebermark, policy director with the Stockholm International Water Institute, told Channel 13.
“We’re constantly overusing more than we actually get from the water system," he continued.
Watch: Why the Colorado River is a "hotspot" for "water bankruptcy"
In a United Nations report published earlier this year, researchers define the idea:
The concept of water bankruptcy draws attention to the evidence that societies rely on both renewable water flows and long-term natural storage, comparable to drawing on income and savings, and that in many basins and aquifers, sustained withdrawals have exceeded renewable replenishment and safe depletion thresholds.
Across regions and levels of development, water systems are under unprecedented pressure. Rivers, lakes and wetlands are degrading, groundwater resources are being depleted beyond sustainable limits, and glaciers are retreating at accelerating rates. These trends signal not only growing stress, but in many contexts a structural imbalance between water demand and available resources.
The Colorado River is named as a "hotspot" in the report because it demonstrates "over-promised" water.
Rebermark says the Southwest is not the only part of the world facing this sort of crisis.
"Whether it's the Colorado River or it's with the Nile or the Mekong or other examples also in Europe that we see that we have overused the income stream," Rebermark explained.
"It doesn't mean that water disappears overnight, but it means that every decision we take now is harder and more even more important. So that's why we also need all hands on deck," he continued.
Local trends of declining water:
This winter, the Upper Colorado Basin saw some of the lowest snow totals in recorded history. As a result, federal officials made a decision to limit water releases from Lake Powell downstream in the coming months. Officials say that will result in substantial drops in Lake Mead's elevation.
"All we’re seeing are depletions,” Kyle Roerink, advocate with the Great Basin Water Network, said.
“We are dealing with changing snowpacks, changing runoff patterns, increasing evaporation rates, drier soils, and other natural phenomena that are depleting our bank accounts and our savings accounts," he said.
Water managers face an encroaching deadline for the river and are expected to make key decisions by October on how to divvy up the shrinking Colorado River going forward. Negotiations between the seven basin states take place behind closed doors, leaving much of the public in the dark about what cuts could be coming down the pike.
"The state of negotiations right now is another unprecedented consideration that we are grappling with here in the desert Southwest. We have never seen all the states at loggerheads as they are right now. We have seen other states go toe-to-toe over the years, but never anything quite like this, and it is weighing heavily over the managerial decision-making, such as this issue that we're talking about right now," Roerink said.
"We really don't know how things will work yet in 2027 and in 2028. But what we do know is that reservoir levels are going to be at their lowest levels ever. And so this is a dark cloud hanging over us, and unfortunately, it doesn't seem like it will be spitting out any water in the near future," he continued.
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