Colorado River Faces ‘Devastating Consequences’ If Another Dry Winter Lands, Experts Warn

Another warm, arid winter could leave Colorado River reservoirs nearly dry.  That is one of the projections a group of Colorado River experts released Monday, building on a previous report released last September assessing the future of the waterway’s federally managed dams under different hydrological scenarios. The new report forecasted the impacts of another dry winter and a wetter one, which it found would not provide enough water to extricate the basin from the depths of a climate change-fueled drought.  “Both scenarios demonstrate the need to adopt significant additional measures to permanently decrease consumptive uses across the entire Basin,” the authors wrote. The Colorado River and its tributaries serve 40 million people across seven Western states, 30 tribal nations and Mexico. S., the Colorado River Basin is split into an upper basin containing Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, and a lower basin comprising Arizona, California and Nevada. Water use in the basins, between 11 and 13 million acre feet recently, has consistently outstripped what nature provides, leading to some reductions in usage but an imminent need for much steeper cuts. ICN Weekly Saturdays Our #1 delivers the week’s climate and energy news – our original stories and top headlines from around the web. Get ICN Weekly Inside Clean Energy Thursdays Dan Gearino’s habit-forming weekly take on how to understand the energy transformation reshaping our world. Get Inside Clean Energy Today’s Climate Tuesdays A once-a-week digest of the most pressing climate-, written . Get Today’s Climate Don’t miss a beat. Get a daily email of our original, groundbreaking stories written -winning reporters. Get ICN Sunday Morning Go behind the scenes with executive editor Vernon Loeb and ICN reporters as they discuss one of the week’s top stories. Get ICN Sunday Morning Justice & Health A digest of stories on the inequalities that worsen the impacts of climate change on vulnerable communities. But the new report finds the supply-and-demand imbalance is likely to persist under a range of weather and usage scenarios. If water year 2027, measured from the beginning of October 2026 to the end of the following September, is similar to water year 2025, one of the five driest since 2000, and human consumption is on par with the lowest levels this century, the U. S. would overconsume the natural flow of the river by 2.59 million acre feet (one acre foot of water can serve between 1 and 3 households depending on the climate).  Such a drain would “risk a crash of the Basin’s water storage system,” the authors found.  Lakes Mead and Powell, the two largest reservoirs in the U.