WSP09398

• File Number: 8507
• Description: Rio Grande Project
• State: CO
• Basin: Rio Grande
• Date: 7/1/1997
• Title: Water Management Study: Upper Rio Grande Basin part 3
• Water Supply Pro - Doc Type: Report/Study

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Addressing the Basin's Problems

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Grande's bosque and other areas indicate that significant ecological change
will occur in the foreseeable future if current management regimes are
extended. Global warming is expected to add more stress to the ecosystem.

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Changes in Federal Priorities and Budgets. National political pressures
to curtail federal spending undoubtedly will affect the availability of funds to
support the management of the Basin's water and related resources. The
shrinkage of federal funds (or failure to grow as fast as in the past) will
reinforce emphasis on local control and responsibility.

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In short, we expect that the pressures for more efficient resource uses and
for greater flexibility in the management system will continue to mount.
Existing institutions eventually will change to accommodate these pressures,
or new institutions will emerge.8 These changes might occur gradually and
piecemeal over the next several decades. Given appropriate conditions,
however, they could occur suddenly, and one need not possess much of an
imagination to see how this might happen. A prolonged drought might
induce major corporations to locate elsewhere, a change in the ecosystem
might cause widespread mortality in the bosque, or a pivotal court decision
might force the issues of tribal water rights or environmental protection in
one way or another.

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Against this backdrop, we anticipate that conditions conducive to cooperative
management of the Basin's resources will strengthen. In particular, we
anticipate that groups who believed they had little to lose by sustaining the
status quo increasingly will realize that they have much to lose if they do not
aggressively look for innovative solutions to satisfy at least some of the
demands of others. The killing of thousands of endangered Rio Grande
silvery minnows in 1996, when irrigators diverted all water from the river,
induced environmental groups that heretofore had been essentially
powerless to raise the threat of lawsuits. This threat induced parties that
otherwise would have remained aloof to participate in heretofore-unheard-of
cooperative efforts to address the minnow's instream needs.

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If competition continues to outpace the ability of resource-management
institutions to shift resources from low to high-value uses, the likelihood of

, Meaningful institutional changes can occur in innumerable forms and places, and often
seemingly prosaic changes hold the greatest potential. In a 1993 conference on resolving
water-related conflicts, for example, Charles Dumars (1993) highlighted the importance of
simplifying the legal processes governing legal documents regarding claims to water and
making these processes more accessible to citizens.

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