W2190: Water Policy and Management Challenges in the West
Statement of Issues and Justification
Water has emerged as a focal point of science, economics and policy debates throughout the western United States. Growing urban and environmental demands will likely put considerable burdens on conservation and transfers from agriculture, which currently consumes about 80 percent of the water in the 17 western states. In addition, the quest to better manage water supplies will intensify efforts at water reuse and desalination technologies and infrastructure, and improved methods and institutions for managing groundwater resources. The difficulty of meeting emerging needs is exacerbated by the threat of global warming, which is expected to increase shortages and adversely affect the timing of stream flows in parts of the west. Adjusting to more competition, higher opportunity costs, and possibly fewer supplies will challenge all current water users, especially irrigated agriculture as it tries to meet current and future food security needs. Rural economies are at risk of losing a significant part of their economic base as the amount of water allocated to irrigation diminishes. Conflicts among states, between agricultural, urban and environmental uses, and between ground and surface water irrigators within states, continue to intensify. In some parts of the west quantity problems are compounded by quality concerns, especially salinity and nitrates. The proposed research addresses the technical issues, policy choices and institutional options for coping with these challenges.On the technological front, there is a continuing need to find technologies for meeting agricultural, urban and environmental demands with less water, and for assessing opportunities to more effectively manage demands and supplies, evaluate management and institutional alternatives, and assess long-run infrastructure needs. Vulnerability extends also to water quality issues that are likely to rise with increased effluent burdens from urban development and diminished streamflows for assimilation. There is also a critical need to address salinity problems resulting from a combination of long-term irrigation and insufficient water for leaching the salts below the root zone. Worldwide salinity problems are a threat to agricultural productivity and to ecological and wildlife concerns. Nitrates in groundwater are another quality issue that merits attention in several parts of the west. In most cases the dominant source of nitrate pollution is nitrate leaching, which often results from the application of excess nitrogen and irrigation water.
Current water issues that have emerged as especially important to the western states fall into two categories: those associated with understanding the regional economic impacts resulting from energy and environmental policy alternatives and from climate change; and those associated with the design and evaluation of institutions to meet emerging water resource needs. Under the Obama administration there are likely to be many initiatives to improve environmental quality, manage global warming and conserve natural resources. We must be prepared to contribute policy ideas and to evaluate the economic impacts from policy options affecting the western states. Impacts from global warming are especially important to the Western U.S. where rising temperatures have already begun to change the timing of stream flows, produce weather extremes and increase water scarcity. Analyzing these impacts effectively and accurately will require the development of watershed models which do a better job of integrating the contributions from economic, hydrologic and biologic assessments.
Conventional water conservation programs for irrigated agriculture are unlikely to be effective for meeting emerging needs, because such programs focus on reducing water applied to farms instead of water consumed by plants and are not tailored to the current structure of western agriculture. The voluntary conservation programs of the past may need to be replaced by more extensive use of subsidies and regulations before irrigation consumptive use can be significantly reduced to reflect reduced supplies and growing demands for non-agricultural uses. The historical emphasis on conservation measures for small farms (those less than $250,000 in annual sales) may need to be modified as conservation needs become more urgent. Small farms represent three-fourths of the participants in conservation programs, but only about one-third of total irrigated acreage.
Meeting tomorrows needs will also require new institutional arrangements that can better accommodate scarcity, new technologies and policy changes. Future institutional arrangements will need to do a better job of accounting for the changing inter-sector values of water, while also satisfying public objectives such as sustainability and inter-generational equity. This is expected to involve wider use of markets, auction technologies, more responsive political processes, water law revisions, new risk management programs and perhaps other changes. Some of the specific institutional challenges include: arrangements for conjunctive management of ground and surface water; developing procedures for extending crop insurance coverage to deficit irrigation; and identifying ways of reducing transaction costs associated with water markets.
The need for undertaking the proposed research becomes self-evident when we look at the myriad of stakeholders who stand to benefit from the resulting findings. These stakeholders include agricultural producers, irrigation and conservation districts, private water-supply organizations, state environmental/water quality management programs, consumers, federal agencies such as the Bureau of Reclamation, Army Corps of Engineers, USDA (NRCS and CSREES) and EPA, among others. The findings from the proposed research are expected to have a major impact on these stakeholders, all of whom are intimately involved in water allocation, planning and management decisions that affect western irrigated agriculture.
The proposed research has a high degree of technical feasibility. The research team consists of a multi-disciplinary group of water professionals with rigorous training in the conceptual-theoretical aspects of water economics and technology, as well as hands-on experience in policy analysis. The disciplines represented on preceding committees (W-1190) include agricultural and natural resource economics, irrigation engineering, agronomy, soil science and hydrology. Researchers from 14 states, ERS and ARS, and the Bureau of Reclamation are involved in the W-1190 project and are expected to contribute to this proposal as well. It is expected that contributors from other states and agencies may also choose to join this effort.
The proposed research is ideally suited to be conducted as a multi-state regional project because of the commonality of the issues to be studied across the participating states. All states in the region need to find cost-effective ways of reducing the consumptive use of water by irrigated agriculture. Similarly, integration of water conservation policy with institutional changes and agricultural production risks are rapidly emerging as issues of major concern to irrigated agriculture in practically all western states. Economic impact assessments leading to improved resource policy necessarily involve issues that cut across state lines. Finally, concerns about the efficacy and adequacy of current water laws, institutions and procedures in addressing the changing and challenging water needs of irrigated agriculture, and the need for efficient and equitable inter-sector mobilization of water are shared by most every state in the region. All three objectives of the proposed research address issues of common concern and can be addressed most effectively as a regional project.
The likely impacts from the successful completion of the proposed research include: 1) provide improved irrigation management strategies for limited water; 2) provide information on the potential agricultural risks and income losses associated with irrigation water shortfalls due to federal and state policy decisions, as well as the impact of potential mitigation strategies; 3) development of a deficit irrigation insurance product for the Topeka RMA Region (Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska); 4) provide critical conservation and economic information, across farm-size groups, needed to more effectively balance conservation needs between small farm and environmental policy goals; 5) assessment of economic and natural resource implications of alternative global warming policies; 6) identification and assessment of procedures for improving water markets; and 7) assessments of current and proposed laws, institutions, and procedures for meeting existing and emerging water demands.
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