This op-ed was published by The Arizona Republic on August 29, 2021. Read it on the azcentral.com website.
Dustin Garrick, associate professor in the Faculty of Environment, School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability
Opinion: Australia offers a stark warning about the consequences of crisis decision-making, and how quickly decades of progress can unravel when trust is lost.
Hunched around a small boardroom table, a group of policy wonks known as “water buffaloes” were in a familiar place: debating the fate of a drying Colorado River. There are no solutions, just strategies to buy time, they concluded.
That was in 2010. More than 10 years later, time – and water – is now running short.
In a summer defined by heat, drought and fire, August 2021 marks the first water shortage declaration in the Lower Colorado Basin, affecting the water supply for around 40 million people and an economy within the top 10 globally.
That it’s taken this long to trigger a shortage is a testament to those creative strategies – fallowing farmlands, increasing water-use efficiency, taking voluntary cuts – and, overall, a paradigm shift in managing the basin to account for its economic and ecological resilience.
The easy trade-offs on the Colorado are over
All of this progress is supported by efforts to broaden the inner circle and address legacies of exclusion for Indigenous and environmental voices across a region that spans nine states, two countries and 29 tribal nations.
Arizona is on the sharp end of this transition due its junior priority, but the last 20 years of planning have transformed an existential risk into an opportunity. The state’s water leaders have moved from a defensive position to a more proactive one with a portfolio of options, and a readiness to come up with more.
The successes are encouraging: over the past two decades, the Colorado River basin has shown that the science – and art – of cooperation and conflict resolution are as important as its climate and hydrology.
Despite these encouraging signs, the shortage declaration is expanding the political theater during a period of perennial crisis. August is a line in the sand: the end of the era of incrementalism, of buying time. There’s not enough water, and the easier trade-offs and creative solutions are giving way to tough choices about who loses, how much, and what, if any, steps can ease the pain
Today there is a growing chorus of calls to break “the chains that unnecessarily tie us to the past” and move faster to cope with a drier future arriving too suddenly.
What happens when you lose trust
We’re worried because we have seen this before. Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin has long served as the bellwether for water-scarce regions. The Murray-Darling is a “sister basin” for the Colorado River, bearing a striking resemblance in terms of their climate and culture. Even as their paths have diverged in important ways, the Murray-Darling offers a preview for the West.
The summer of 2006-7, the driest summer of the Murray-Darling Basin’s longest drought, offers a stark warning about the consequences of crisis decision-making, and how quickly decades of progress can unravel when trust is lost.
The prime minister at the time, John Howard, called for “radical and permanent change” – a 10-point plan backed by $10 billion in spending that created a new federal authority for water management decisions to break the stalemate between the states.
His plan also enshrined water markets and basins as the way to make trade-offs and claw water back to restore river ecosystems.
Water markets went horribly wrong
Water markets, however, were never meant as a silver bullet in Australia.
Just last year, Australia’s competition commission warned of deficiencies that undermine confidence: a lack of transparency, unregulated brokerages and complexities that favor larger agribusinesses with the resources to navigate the market.
Inadequate metering and enforcement created prime conditions for theft as the value of water increased.
Australia shows that markets can be an important tool, but also that markets should be the servant of sound governance and planning, not the master. It’s easy to get the hierarchy mixed up.
Unless communities have a big role in creating and governing water markets, trading can foster individualistic connections to water that can crowd out the civic duty to cooperate and contribute to the river’s sustainability.
A locally crafted, state supported process for charting rural futures can reduce the fear of unfettered markets by allowing communities to cope with the double whammy of climate change and structural changes in the agricultural economy.
In Australia, it became winner-takes-all
Collaboration takes time, and is often seen as too slow to manage an emergency. In Australia, in 2006-7, frustration with the slow pace of progress boiled over and the new 10-point plan replaced the former cooperative approach of the National Water Initiative.
Efforts to speed up proved counterproductive in the long run. The ambition of the 10-point plan – and the resources to implement it – were there, but implementation became mired in accusations of corruption and conflict.
What Australia lost sight of was the crucial importance of managing conflict. A winner-takes-all mindset creeps in quickly during a crisis, blinding us to the broad benefits of collaboration. Urgent water reforms driven by an absolute reduction in water availability, coupled with increasing demands are always contested.
The fear of cities “buying and drying” up agricultural lands runs deep and wide from Owens Valley, Calif., and Crowley County, Colo., to Arizona’s La Paz County.
Hard choices can leave some high and dry, and if they don’t recognize those choices as legitimate, then they will reject them. Communities can tear themselves apart and future water reforms become even more politicized. When coupled with the individualism of water markets, water reform becomes impossible to navigate.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
A new vision (and value) for water
River management in crisis must embody the ideals of cooperation, interconnectedness and interdependence between people and the river. We need a vision for river management that transcends the overriding emphasis on individual rights and strengthening collective action, both locally and basin-wide.
Around the globe, new modes of collaborative river governance are taking shape, as communities come together to plan and manage their water. The very value of water is shifting, as are the ways of valuing it. Water is life: for people, for industry, for farms, for ecosystems.
We need to keep what’s already working in the Colorado River Basin: a growing, but fragile, experience of cooperative federalism, and a capacity for adaptive innovation even during crisis.
Colorado’s “water buffaloes” have been learning by doing for decades, and we must keep working to plug the gaps: respecting Indigenous sovereignty, reconnecting the river to the sea and investing in safe, accessible water for all.
New spaces for people to come together at a basin level in the Colorado River have been forged, supported in part by large infusions of philanthropy.
How Arizona can lead this effort
The system is not perfect, but we have the tools to solve these urgent problems, together: understanding and setting limits on water extraction, navigating rural transitions, and ensuring continued monitoring and transparency as water begins to move from historic to new users.
As Australia shows, downstream states are particularly vulnerable to what happens upstream. But they are also well positioned to build new coalitions for working across state lines and finding creative ways of sharing risks and benefits, a leadership role that Arizona can and should step into.
Australia has prided itself in its ability to learn from the struggles of the U.S. to manage its water. Now, the tables are turned, and Australia’s struggles are the beacon that should draw the eyes of the world – and the attention of the Colorado River’s diverse decision-makers.
Sometimes the messages from Australia can take a while to travel around the world. This August, we don’t have time to wait.
Dustin Garrick, Ph.D., is associate professor of Global Water Policy at the University of Waterloo and research fellow at the University of Oxford. Erin O’Donnell, Ph.D., is a water law and policy specialist at the University of Melbourne Law School, focusing on water markets, environmental flows and water governance. Reach them at dustin.garrick@smithschool.ox.ac.uk and erin.odonnell@unimelb.edu.au.
