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

Conclusions and Recommendations

I),

requires that the agencies learn as they go. We are recommending only that
they begin the journey and have sufficient administrative and political
support to stay the course.

2. Initiate an Integrated Scientific Assessment of the Basin's Biological,
Physical, and Economic Characteristics

p."-'

We recommend that federal agencies with an interest in the Basin's
resources cooperatively undertake an assessment of the current status of the
biological, physical, and economic characteristics of these resources. This
assessment would help fill an important gap in the understanding of how
resource-management policies and activities affect the ecosystem and
economy. The central aim should be to provide resource managers-private
and public, nonfederal and federal-with better information to guide their
management decisions.

~;~:

~,)

,;,-,

r~~
-'"

-?.,
.,
;;,~,

.,

Resource-management activities in this Basin are highly fragmented
spatially and institutionally, and there has been no Basin-wide assessment
of how this management approach affects ecological conditions, causes
problems, and creates opportunities. Only one stretch, the bosque (riparian
cottonwood forest) of the Middle Rio Grande Valley, has been examined from
a comprehensive, ecosystem-management perspective (Crawford et al.
1993).1 There similarly has been neither a Basin-wide assessment of the full
set of competing demands for water and related resources nor an
examination of how alternative resource-management strategies would affect
the value of resource-related goods and services, levels of employment and
incomes, or perceived fairness of resource allocations. In short, there has
been no comprehensive analysis incorporating the management of the
Basin's scarcest and most valuable resources into the economic-development
strategies for communities, states, or the Basin as a whole.

r;;,

,
'"

-:.

v

,.

'.

Why is it appropriate for federal agencies to undertake this assessment?
Because nobody else will do so, even though there is substantial evidence of
the ecological risks and economic costs of failing to have a better
understanding of how resource management, ecosystem function, and
economic well-being interact. Management institutions in the Basin
currently do not take a broad, integrated view of this interaction and there is
entrenched resistance to such a view from various positions within the

1 The Bosque Management Plan did not, however, examine economic issues.

131

j!r3'11
. '" ~