The Mexican Water Treaty of 1944 committed the U.S. to deliver
1.5 million acre-feet of water to Mexico on an annual basis, plus
an additional 200,000 acre-feet under surplus conditions. The
treaty is overseen by the International Boundary and Water
Commission.
Colorado River water is delivered to Mexico at Morelos Dam,
located 1.1 miles downstream from where the California-Baja
California land boundary intersects the river. The river’s
natural terminus is the Gulf of California in Mexico, but because
of the dams and diversion facilities throughout the Colorado
River Basin, natural flow rarely reaches the Gulf. Water diverted
at Morelos Dam is primarily used to irrigate Mexicali Valley
farmland, and also supplies the cities of Mexicali, Tecate and
Tijuana.
By any objective standard, the southern coast of San Diego
County is enduring a long-running environmental nightmare.
Decades of billions of gallons of untreated human waste flowing
north from broken sewage infrastructure in Tijuana have
sickened a vast number of surfers and swimmers and many Navy
SEALs training at Coronado. Especially because of ailments
reported by border agents, some doctors worry that the health
threat goes far beyond active ocean users to include those who
spend extended time in coastal areas and breathe air that often
smells like a filthy portable toilet. Now there is fresh
confirmation of how uniquely awful this problem is. The
Surfrider Foundation has released a report on 567 sites in
which it tested water for unsafe bacteria levels and found
Imperial Beach — which has been closed for more than two years
— had far and away the dirtiest water in the United
States.
Tensions are rising in a border dispute between the United
States and Mexico. But this conflict is not about migration;
it’s about water. Under an 80-year-old treaty, the United
States and Mexico share waters from the Colorado River and the
Rio Grande, respectively. But in the grip of severe drought and
searing temperatures, Mexico has fallen far behind in
deliveries, putting the country’s ability to meet its
obligations in serious doubt. Some politicians say they cannot
give what they do not have. It’s a tough argument to
swallow for farmers in South Texas, also struggling with
a dearth of rain. They say the lack of water from Mexico
is propelling them into crisis, leaving the future of farming
in the balance. Some Texas leaders have called on the Biden
administration to withhold aid from Mexico until it makes good
on the shortfall.
Yesterday, Senator Steve Padilla (D-San Diego) introduced
Senate Joint Resolution 18, which urges the Center for Disease
Control to conduct an investigation into the health impacts
surrounding the ongoing pollution crisis in the Tijuana River.
For decades, the Tijuana River has been contaminated with
billions of gallons of trash, sediment, and wastewater as a
result of sewage infrastructure inadequacies has created
recurring and worsening pollution problems for the County of
San Diego and the southern California coastline. Just this past
January, a storm surge caused 14.5 billion gallons of raw
sewage and pollution to wash up on the banks of the River as
well as overflow into the nearby coastal wetlands, one of the
few remaining such ecosystems left in Southern California.
On a recent morning, visitors wandered around Mexico City’s
Metropolitan Cathedral, Latin America’s oldest — and one of its
largest. Walking from chamber to chamber, tourists snapped
images of dramatic ceiling-high altars, soaring columns and
sculptures. But there’s another unintended detail that stands
out: the cathedral is leaning. … This sinking, which is known
as land subsidence, crops up across the world. While it can be
subtle in many places — it pushes land down around an inch
or two a year in much of the U.S. — the rates in
Mexico City are some of the highest in the world. Some
areas in Mexico City are slipping as fast as 20 inches a year
in recent decades, according to researchers. Overall, the
clay layers under the soil have compressed by 17 percent in the
last century.
County public health officials say that a two-week
investigation showed “no conclusive evidence” of increased
gastrointestinal illness at a South Bay health clinic that
claimed its patients suffered such symptoms since Tropical
Storm Hilary inundated the heavily polluted Tijuana River in
August 2023. Public statements about a rising trend in
the incidence of gastrointestinal symptoms such as abdominal
pain, diarrhea, nausea and vomiting spurred the county to
dispatch experts to South Bay Urgent Care from Feb. 5 to Feb.
18 during a period when several inches of rain fell across the
region. A close review of patient charts during that
fortnight, said Dr. Mark Beatty, an assistant medical director
in the county’s epidemiology and immunization department, did
find incidences of gastrointestinal illness, but at rates no
greater than were observed at other medical providers in the
area.
California officials are cheering Mexican President-elect
Claudia Sheinbaum’s victory as one for the California climate,
too. “Having an engineer whose background is working on
climate, it’s a big deal,” said Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia,
a Democrat representing California’s inland border region who
was in Mexico City with Sheinbaum’s team on Sunday to witness
her landslide victory. … California politicians already
enjoy close relationships with their Mexican counterparts and
have agreements in place to work on a host of climate issues,
including drought, land conservation, recycling and
cross-border truck emissions. … Josué Medellín-Azuara,
an environmental engineering professor at the University of
California, Merced said he was hoping for more collaboration on
water infrastructure and drought resiliency in particular.
Amid extreme drought affecting Rio Grande tributaries, Mexico
is struggling to make water deliveries to Texas as required by
an 80-year old treaty. Martha Pskowski is a reporter with
Inside Climate News and spoke with Living on Earth’s Paloma
Beltran about how the situation is linked to climate change and
farmer livelihoods in both the US and Mexico.
Maria-Elena Giner faced a room full of farmers, irrigation
managers and residents in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas on
April 2. The local agricultural community was reeling.
Reservoirs on the Rio Grande were near record lows and the
state had already warned that water cutbacks would be
necessary. The last sugar mill in the region closed in
February, citing the lack of water. But Mexico still wasn’t
sending water to the U.S. from its Rio Grande tributaries, as a
1944 treaty requires the country to do in five-year intervals.
… The IBWC, based in El Paso, implements the boundary
and water treaties between the two countries. Giner’s team had
spent 2023 working to reach an agreement with Mexico to ensure
more reliable water deliveries on the Rio Grande. In December,
she was confident the U.S. and Mexico would sign a new
agreement, known as a minute. But at the final hour Mexico
declined to sign.
The Colorado River is flowing again in its delta. While this is
welcome news for birds and people, the long-term progress to
keep the Colorado River alive in Mexico with habitat
restoration and water deliveries depends on high stakes
negotiations currently underway. For the third time since
2021, the United States and Mexico are collaborating to deliver
water to improve conditions in the long-desiccated delta.
Environmental water deliveries began mid-March and will
continue into October …
Claudia Sheinbaum, front-runner in Mexico’s presidential race,
aims to overhaul water governance in the agriculture sector,
the top user of the country’s scarce supply, with a potential
investment of 20 billion pesos ($1.2 billion) per year. Julio
Berdegue, a member of Sheinbaum’s campaign team focused on
water and the agricultural sector, told Reuters the candidate’s
six-year plan will review existing water concessions, crack
down on illegal use, update irrigation technology and revamp
national water entity CONAGUA. He cautioned the plan,
details of which have not previously been reported, was still
in development and could change. Sheinbaum has said she plans
to reform the National Water Law and develop a strategy to
confront pervasive issues in Mexico, which is suffering from
crippling drought, widespread water shortages, and heat waves
in recent days so severe that howler monkeys are dropping
dead from trees.
A collision of climate change, urban sprawl and poor
infrastructure has pushed Mexico City to the brink of a
profound water crisis. The groundwater is quickly vanishing. A
key reservoir got so low that it is no longer used to supply
water. Last year was Mexico’s hottest and driest in at least 70
years. And one of the city’s main water systems faces a
potential “Day Zero” this summer when levels dip so much that
it, too, will no longer provide water.
Cassandra Sutcliffe has been using her inhaler more often to
treat her chronic bronchitis. She lives on an oceanfront
property in Imperial Beach, one of the southernmost
communities impacted by sewage and toxic chemicals that spill
over the U.S.-Mexico border. “The smell makes your eyes
water and your throat close up,” said Sutcliffe, one of many
residents who have reported having similar symptoms and who say
they find relief when they leave town. “I was told by (my
doctor) that the environment could be the contributing factor
(to) my failing health.” … A newly formed task force,
spearheaded by Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre and
comprised of San Diego researchers and physicians, aims to
change that. The group has yet to decide on its formal name,
but it does have an end game.
Learn the history and challenges facing the West’s most dramatic
and developed river.
The Layperson’s Guide to the Colorado River Basin introduces the
1,450-mile river that sustains 40 million people and millions of
acres of farmland spanning seven states and parts of northern
Mexico.
The 28-page primer explains how the river’s water is shared and
managed as the Southwest transitions to a hotter and drier
climate.
Martha Guzman recalls those awful
days working on water and other issues as a deputy legislative
secretary for then-Gov. Jerry Brown. California was mired in a
recession and the state’s finances were deep in the red. Parks
were cut, schools were cut, programs were cut to try to balance a
troubled state budget in what she remembers as “that terrible
time.”
She now finds herself in a strikingly different position: As
administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s
Region 9, she has a mandate to address water challenges across
California, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii and $1 billion to help pay
for it. It is the kind of funding, she said, that is usually
spread out over a decade. Guzman called it the “absolutely
greatest opportunity.”
Water is flowing once again
to the Colorado River’s delta in Mexico, a vast region that
was once a natural splendor before the iconic Western river was
dammed and diverted at the turn of the last century, essentially
turning the delta into a desert.
In 2012, the idea emerged that water could be intentionally sent
down the river to inundate the delta floodplain and regenerate
native cottonwood and willow trees, even in an overallocated
river system. Ultimately, dedicated flows of river water were
brokered under cooperative
efforts by the U.S. and Mexican governments.
For the bulk of her career, Jayne
Harkins has devoted her energy to issues associated with the
management of the Colorado River, both with the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation and with the Colorado River Commission of Nevada.
Now her career is taking a different direction. Harkins, 58, was
appointed by President Trump last August to take the helm of the
United States section of the U.S.-Mexico agency that oversees
myriad water matters between the two countries as they seek to
sustainably manage the supply and water quality of the Colorado
River, including its once-thriving Delta in Mexico, and other
rivers the two countries share. She is the first woman to be
named the U.S. Commissioner of the International Boundary and
Water Commission for either the United States or Mexico in the
commission’s 129-year history.
Nowhere is the domino effect in
Western water policy played out more than on the Colorado River,
and specifically when it involves the Lower Basin states of
California, Nevada and Arizona. We are seeing that play out now
as the three states strive to forge a Drought Contingency Plan.
Yet that plan can’t be finalized until Arizona finds a unifying
voice between its major water players, an effort you can read
more about in the latest in-depth article of Western Water.
Even then, there are some issues to resolve just within
California.
It’s high-stakes time in Arizona. The state that depends on the
Colorado River to help supply its cities and farms — and is
first in line to absorb a shortage — is seeking a unified plan
for water supply management to join its Lower Basin neighbors,
California and Nevada, in a coordinated plan to preserve water
levels in Lake Mead before
they run too low.
If the lake’s elevation falls below 1,075 feet above sea level,
the secretary of the Interior would declare a shortage and
Arizona’s deliveries of Colorado River water would be reduced by
320,000 acre-feet. Arizona says that’s enough to serve about 1
million households in one year.
The Colorado River Delta once spanned nearly 2 million acres and
stretched from the northern tip of the Gulf of California in
Mexico to Southern California’s Salton Sea. Today it’s one-tenth
that size, yet still an important estuary, wildlife habitat and
farming region even though Colorado River flows rarely reach the
sea.
This issue of Western Water examines the ongoing effort
between the United States and Mexico to develop a
new agreement to the 1944 Treaty that will continue the
binational cooperation on constructing Colorado River
infrastructure, storing water in Lake Mead and providing instream
flows for the Colorado River Delta.
As vital as the Colorado River is to the United States and
Mexico, so is the ongoing process by which the two countries
develop unique agreements to better manage the river and balance
future competing needs.
The prospect is challenging. The river is over allocated as urban
areas and farmers seek to stretch every drop of their respective
supplies. Since a historic treaty between the two countries was
signed in 1944, the United States and Mexico have periodically
added a series of arrangements to the treaty called minutes that
aim to strengthen the binational ties while addressing important
water supply, water quality and environmental concerns.
California’s little-known New River has been called one of North
America’s most polluted. A closer look reveals the New River is
full of ironic twists: its pollution has long defied cleanup, yet
even in its degraded condition, the river is important to the
border economies of Mexicali and the Imperial Valley and a
lifeline that helps sustain the fragile Salton Sea ecosystem.
Now, after decades of inertia on its pollution problems, the New
River has emerged as an important test of binational cooperation
on border water issues. These issues were profiled in the 2004
PBS documentary Two Sides of a River.
Redesigned in 2017, this beautiful map depicts the seven
Western states that share the Colorado River with Mexico. The
Colorado River supplies water to nearly 40 million people in
Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming
and Mexico. Text on this beautiful, 24×36-inch map, which is
suitable for framing, explains the river’s apportionment, history
and the need to adapt its management for urban growth and
expected climate change impacts.
As part of the historic Colorado
River Delta, the Salton Sea regularly filled and dried for
thousands of years due to its elevation of 237 feet below
sea level.
The most recent version of the Salton Sea was formed in 1905 when
the Colorado River broke
through a series of dikes and flooded the seabed for two years,
creating California’s largest inland body of water. The
Salton Sea, which is saltier than the Pacific Ocean, includes 130
miles of shoreline and is larger than Lake Tahoe.
The Mexican Water Treaty of 1944 committed the U.S. to deliver
1.5 million acre-feet of water to Mexico on an annual basis, plus
an additional 200,000 acre-feet under surplus conditions. The
treaty is overseen by the International Boundary and Water
Commission.
Colorado River water is delivered to Mexico at Morelos Dam,
located 1.1 miles downstream from where the California-Baja
California land boundary intersects the river between the town of
Los Algodones in northwestern Mexico and Yuma County, Ariz.
The Colorado River Delta is located
at the natural terminus of the Colorado River at the Gulf of
California, just south of the U.S.-Mexico border. The desert
ecosystem was formed by silt flushed downstream from the Colorado
and fresh and brackish water mixing at the Gulf.
The Colorado River Delta once covered 9,650 square miles but has
shrunk to less than 1 percent of its original size due to
human-made water diversions.
This printed issue of Western Water examines how the various
stakeholders have begun working together to meet the planning
challenges for the Colorado River Basin, including agreements
with Mexico, increased use of conservation and water marketing,
and the goal of accomplishing binational environmental
restoration and water-sharing programs.
This printed issue of Western Water examines the
Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study and what its
finding might mean for the future of the lifeblood of the
Southwest.
This printed issue of Western Water explores some of the major
challenges facing Colorado River stakeholders: preparing for
climate change, forging U.S.-Mexico water supply solutions and
dealing with continued growth in the basins states. Much of the
content for this issue of Western Water came from the in-depth
panel discussions at the September 2009 Colorado River Symposium.
This printed copy of Western Water examines the Colorado River
Delta, its ecological significance and the lengths to which
international, state and local efforts are targeted and achieving
environmental restoration while recognizing the needs of the
entire river’s many users.