Colorado River to be focus of fight as water dwindles

By Mike Stark, The Associated Press
Updated: 12/04/2008 09:19:45 PM PST

SALT LAKE CITY - Drought, climate change and an increasing population in the West are pushing the Colorado River basin toward deep trouble in the coming decades, scientists said Thursday.

"Clearly we're on a collision course between supply and demand," said Brad Udall, director of the Western Water Assessment at the University of Colorado.

Although there is some disagreement about when the most dire conditions will materialize, scientists at a conference in Salt Lake City said they expect less water to be available in the coming decades.

Without fundamental shifts in water management, the result will be shortages and difficult decisions about who in the seven states the river serves will get water and who will go without, said Dave Wegner, science director for the Glen Canyon Institute, which organized the one-day conference at the University of Utah called "Adjusting to Less Water: Climate Change and the Colorado River."

"To me, it's not going to be a pretty debate," Wegner said.

The changes are already being seen in reduced water flows, higher air temperatures and an unrelenting demand on the Colorado, which snakes across more than 1,400 miles and provides water for farms, businesses, cities and homes. The river serves an area where about 30 million people live.

Tim Barnett, a scientist with Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, was one of the authors of a study released in February that said there's

a 50 percent chance that Lake Mead, which straddles the Arizona-Nevada border, could run dry by 2021. The Colorado also serves California, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah. Last year, officials from the seven states and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne signed an agreement aimed at conserving and sharing scarce river water.