2023-05-22 20:29:04
This content was published on May 22, 2023 – 20:16
(Updates with statements from the president, Joe Biden)
Los Angeles (USA), May 22 (EFE).- Three US states, California, Arizona and Nevada, reached a historic agreement on Monday to try to save the Colorado River, afflicted by drought, and remove less water from it, avoiding supply problems in the main cities on the west coast of the country that are fed by it.
Specifically, these three states commit to saving 3,700 cubic meters of river water until the end of 2026 to deal with the drought, which has reduced its flow by up to 20%, the US Department of the Interior said in a release.
In parallel, the federal government will compensate cities, Native American tribes and districts of those three states with up to 1.2 billion dollars -financed by the Inflation Reduction Act- if they use less water.
“We are dedicating record resources to improve the long-term sustainability of the Colorado River. (…) It’s critical to building a resilient future for states, tribes and communities across the West” , declared the president of the United States, Joe Biden, following the agreement was made official.
This consensus can mean saving 13% of the water that California, Arizona and Nevada have assigned from the Colorado River.
The rest of the states that feed from that waterway – Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico – have already expressed their agreement with this arrangement.
The Colorado River runs from the Rocky Mountains (Colorado, USA) to the Gulf of California (Baja California, Mexico) and supplies water and power to 40 million people and 30 other tribal nations.
“This is an important step forward toward our common goal of forging a sustainable path for the (Colorado River) watershed, which millions of people call home,” said Camille Calimlim Touto, commissioner of the Department of the Interior’s office in charge of the management of water resources.
The agreement, which comes following almost a year of negotiations, represents a temporary solution to try to balance the situation of a river particularly affected by the climate crisis and two decades of scarce rainfall.
With the saving of water, an attempt will be made to control the drop in the level of lakes Mead and Powell, which have two of the largest reservoirs in the United States.
Heavy rains in the western US during the first months of 2023 helped to alleviate the Colorado crisis, but the situation has remained concerning.
Two months ago, the Department of the Interior gave the seven states an ultimatum to save between 2.5 and 5 billion cubic meters of water from the Colorado River by the end of 2026 or else it would intervene.
The lack of understanding resided, above all, in the tensions between California and Arizona, which are the states that extract the most water from Lake Mead and sought to protect the agricultural areas of the Imperial Valley (California), in the first case, and safeguard the water supply in Phoenix and Tucson (Arizona), in the second. EFE
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