For West, climate change is about water

Joel Connelly, a columnist in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: With the Gallatin Mountains glistening from the fall's first snows, water experts, lawyers and economists gathered last weekend to look at THE key resource that sustains the West -- its water! The conference, "Fresh Water: Exploring New Frontiers," took place against a prolonged drought in much of the region.

….Whether we are realists or deniers on the topic of global warming, the future will dictate changes in how the West manages its vital resource.

Conservatives should cheer. The best options for managing water lie not in past rigid rules of Western water law, or big bureaucracies such as the Bureau of Reclamation. Irrigation dollars from Uncle Sam did make the desert bloom, and created a hydroelectric system that has given the Northwest an economic leg up for more than six decades.

At the same time, however, bureaucracies have left the West with big-scale miscalculations. The Colorado River provides water to 25 million Americans. Its waters are, however, allocated based on a forecast annual flow of 16.4 million acre-feet -- nearly 2 million over what the river has averaged in the past century.

…Is there a better way to manage water? Yes. A paper by Brandon Scarborough and Bertha Lund -- published by the Property and Environment Research Center, sponsors of the conference at Big Sky -- lays it out.

"As an alternative, the voluntary buying, selling and leasing of water rights through markets is proving to be a successful and efficient strategy for restoring stream flows, especially in the Northwest," they write. "Montana, Oregon and Washington have adopted changes that facilitate the private and public exchange of water rights for in-stream flows."

…Multiple challenges face Western states in the near future. The winter snowpack in Montana melts earlier, leading to low stream flows, warmer temperatures and a long fire season. Huge coal-bed methane developments on the east slope of the Rockies threaten water quality in an already-arid region. "Saline water comes out of coal-bed methane wells: It basically sterilizes and destroys the soil," explained Gretchen Rupp of the Montana University System Water Center.

The San Francisco Bay-Delta is a watershed that includes 40 percent of California. It's the irrigation and a water supply for 20 million people, yet faces multiple dangers ... shaky century-old levees, floods, earthquakes and rising seawater. Visit the Delta some time. Thousands of Delta islands are below sea level. You can look up from farms and see boats sail by overhead on the other side of a protective levy.

What's needed? The West needs more data, models and predictions by which to plan. Experts give kudos to Seattle Public Utilities and the Portland Water Bureau for looking ahead and preparing for climate change.

As well, the West needs to get lighter on its feet, with pricing incentives to promote conservation or laws that enable buying and selling of water rights. "It is time to stop fighting battles and get things done," said Terry Anderson, the Montana State University economist who founded the Property and Environment Research Center.