The amount of energy consumed to pump water from Lake Havasu to Los Angeles in the Colorado River Aqueduct varies from year to year depending on the constancy of pumping. For example, while the lowest amount of water diverted to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California was 0.55 MAF in 2005, the lowest amount of energy consumed was 1.3 million MWH in 2007. If water does not need to be pumped from Lake Havasu to Southern California consistently, the MWD is able to produce energy and sell it. Thus, the irregularity of the amount of energy used to transport water in the Colorado River Aqueduct correlates with the amount of energy bought or sold per fiscal year. The amount of water pumped to Southern California has, on average, increased from 2001 to 2016. In some years, such as in 2011 and 2012, MWD intentionally left water in Lake Mead so that it did not fall below “shortage conditions,”. The Central Arizona Project pumps 1.6 MAF of water up 2800 feet of elevation, 336 miles from Lake Havasu to Phoenix and Tucson. To do this, requires 2.8 million MWH of energy, which is supplied from a coal plant: Navajo Generating Station in Page, AZ. While this plant is not in the study area, it is considered a regional connection, and is important to consider given the large supply of energy it provides to the study area as the eighth-largest plant in the United States.In the LCRB, the dominant types of power generation are hydroelectricity and natural gas,macetas 7l with a yearly average energy production of 5.5 million MWH and 2.9 million MWH, respectively.
Hydroelectric production gradually decreased over the study time frame from roughly 6.6 million MWH in 2001 to 5.5 million MWH in 2016, while natural gas increased from 560,000 MWH in 2001 to 3 million MWH in 2016. Despite their individual trends over time, hydroelectricity and natural gas both follow a seasonal trend, with the highest net generation of energy occurring during the summer months, and natural gas peaking directly after hydroelectricity. The presence of solar in the region has grown since 2010, with the highest annual production in 2016 at about 860,000 MWH, and an average annual production of just 180,000 MWH. There is one wind power plant, but the amount of electricity this plant produces is negligible when compared to the other electricity sources. The price of electricity gradually increased from 8.7 cents/KWH in 2001 to 11.3 cents/KWH in 2016, while still following the same seasonal trend.The top six crops that took up at least 1% of production areas in at least one year of the study time frame, 2008 to 2015, included alfalfa , cotton , durum wheat , double-crop lettuce/durum wheat , lettuce , and citrus. In each year of food production analyzed, alfalfa had the highest percentage , followed by fallowed cropland, with average annual acreage of about 142,000, and 70,000, respectively, and a total average active cropland of about 271,000 acres. There was a slight overall upward trend of total production area from 294,000 acres in 2008 to 303,000 acres in 2015 of active cropland. This trend holds even when considering the drastic decrease of areas under production in 2009 at 142,000 acres down from 294,000 acres in 2008, and another small drop in 2015 by just 6000 acres. From 2012 to 2013, a drought year in the UCRB, areas under production increased from 292,000 acres to 295,000 acres.
The FEW nexus changes with environmental and economic stresses, depending on the flexibility of the governing and market systems. The scenarios were meant to be an example of how governance, market supply and demand, and climate vulnerabilities may impact the FEW nexus and create resource tipping points. In the study area, water governance particularly influences drought management and crop production strategies, giving the system less room to respond to climatic and economic changes.The first scenario depicts how the costs and supply of water, energy, and food production might change in an extreme drought situation. With a decrease in water availability, water and energy prices would increase, but agriculture production would roughly stay the same due to water governance in the region. This would have occurred, for example, if Lake Mead had decreased to 1030.75 ft. At or below an elevation of 1075 ft, Lake Mead is at a critical drought state. At 1050 ft, Lake Mead is below the capacity at which the Hoover Dam can produce hydroelectricity. If it were to stay at this elevation for an entire year, this would amount to a decrease of 36% of the average annual electricity generation from 2001 to 2016. Reduced water availability has previously been shown by Bain and Acker to result in higher operating costs, and higher prices of energy for hydroelectricity in the Colorado River Basin. Additionally, for those that pay for water from a utility, a drought of this magnitude could increase water prices. According to a report from the Public Policy Institute of California, the 2012-16 California drought resulted in an increase in water prices through drought surcharges due to increased supply and treatment costs for suppliers. However, those that rely on water rights for their water, such as on certain Indian Reservations, would continue to receive the same amount of water with no price increase. The Bureau of Reclamation could make a deal with Reservations to hold onto some of their water with some form of compensation. In this case, irrigation will decrease, which was assumed for the drought scenario.
However, a decrease in water available for irrigation does not necessarily mean production will decrease as seen in the increase of production of agricultural products during the drought year from 2012 to 2013, with a decrease in the total amount of water used for irrigation. However, higher energy costs to irrigate cropland coupled with higher water costs for farmers outside of Indian Reservations could potentially decrease the amount of production in areas that rely mostly on hydro power.Where the drought scenario depicts climate pressures on water availability, the global demand for alfalfa is a representation of demand for water. In this scenario, we look at the implications of the governance structure of the LCRB in supplying water in a static snapshot of global agricultural commodity markets. Specifically, we investigate the impact of a 3% increase in demand for alfalfa,planta frambuesa maceta the most widely cultivated crop in the study area. This scenario seems likely to occur due to the 160% increase in fodder exports from 2000 to 2010 from the United States, and 2.5% overall increase in fodder exports specifically from California, Nevada, or Arizona over the same 10-year period. Under this scenario, there would either be an increase in the overall total cropland from 271,500 acres to 279,600 acres, or a decrease in cropland for food crops. In either scenario, more water would be needed for crop production, assuming the current mode of production remains constant, with fodder production consuming the largest amount of water when compared to other crops. Demand on energy would increase for producing and transporting alfalfa and water, potentially meaning a higher demand for water to produce that energy. This increased demand on energy includes the energy needed to move water for irrigation, energy needed to export alfalfa, and increased demand for agricultural chemicals and machinery fuels.The goal of this study was to understand how the governance structure of the Colorado River constrains the utility of the nexus approach to deal with future stresses. A consideration of governance structures should be central to the development of food-energy-water nexus thinking to better understand and identify how stressing food, energy and/or water systems creates resource vulnerabilities and/or resource scarcities in all three sectors. To understand how food, energy, and water affect one another’s availability, individual sector units can be analyzed together to give a quantified picture of use.
In addition, price trends can be analyzed to look for correlations with other sector price trends or climatic changes. In the study area, we found that water is the limiting factor due to governance constraints, especially with predictions of increased drought in the future. The following sections describe the ways that governance constrains the possibility of implementation of FEW management strategies in the LCRB, and why therefore, it is a critical component of FEW nexus research. We also discuss how power, geopolitics, and institutional factors impact nexus implementation.First, policies limit the ability of resource systems to respond to market and climatic changes. In the LCRB in particular, we found that the Law of the River limits the prospect of responding to climatic changes such as increasing drought frequency and severity. With predictions by the IPCC that the southwestern United States is to become hotter and drier, a lack of adequate response due to rigid policy structures will impact all three sectors. The small response to drought in water used in agriculture in the study area was likely because much of the production occurs on Indian reservations, which have a high proportion of water rights in comparison to the rest of the Lower Basin states. While Metropolitan Water District leaving water in Lake Mead during drought years is a good example of a response to drought, it is a reactive response, similar to the DOI Interim Guidelines. Drought coupled with increased demand for water through more alfalfa production will strain water resources even further. Second, rigid policies in the most ‘geopolitical’ sector impacts the ability of that sector to respond to the needs of the other sectors. Management of the Colorado River is a complex geopolitical issue with many stakeholders, including governments of U.S. states and nation states, separated by rigid political boundaries. This directly impacts the ability of water managers to meld water allotments to current or predicted conditions. This is a very real concern as the IPCC has predicted that the Southwestern U.S. will experience higher temperatures and decreased precipitation. Since water is the life blood of this region, with over ¾ of the economy relying on its presence , drought will severely affect the region’s livelihood. In addition to drought, population growth could put more stress on the water system. Depending on the system analyzed, there will likely be a ‘limiting factor’. While some have argued against a focus on water , sector weights are context dependent. In semi-arid cases with access to a large amount of water, it is frequently a geopolitical issue, which often presents itself as transboundary conflict. Although we did not include Mexico in the analysis due to data constraints, it is well known that most years since 1960 the Colorado River has run dry before reaching the Sea of Cortéz. The impacts of this have presented themselves as a lack of access to a water resource in Northern Mexico that has resulted in social impacts such as a decline in the regional shrimp and fishing industries. The river’s riparian ecosystems were briefly restored through the implementation of Minute 319, a 2014 treaty between the U.S. & Mexico that authorized a pulse flow to the Gulf of California. This move “marked a sustainable reconciliation with the land and its people” by connecting communities back to a water source that was highly valued. Restoration projects such as this one harness the local to the international through governance, power, and the larger ecological and political systems at work. Entrenched in these cross-boundary water sources and restoration projects are politics of power at the international level. Through sub-national division of power at the state level, the U.S. monopolized control over the Colorado River, partly out of fear that “Mexico might lay claim to large quantities of the river’s flow,” a notion that maintains itself in the almost-century year-old Colorado River Compact. Transboundary politics therefore directly complicates the economic and hydraulic foundations of the nexus, specifically through divisions of power that persist through long-term sub-national agreements. While the Colorado River is an extreme form amongst global transnational boundaries, it should be considered at the regional-nexus level. Third, and similarly to the second, rigid policies in one of the sectors impacts the production and availability of resources in other sectors.