Colorado River as it meanders south towards the Grand Canyon, taken near to Horse Shoe Bend AZ. Source: herdiephoto, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Insights from a New Comprehensive Water Accounting Study
The Colorado River, a lifeline for over 40 million people and over two million hectares of cropland, barely trickles into the Gulf of California’s shores. The river has reached a critical juncture due to decades of overuse and climate challenges.
A new study published in Nature provides a comprehensive water budget, shedding light on the intricate dynamics of water consumption and offering a roadmap toward sustainable management. The river’s dwindling flows underscore a pressing need for strategic interventions to ensure its survival and continued support for millions of people and vast agricultural lands.
The Heart of the Matter
The multi-year study conducted between 2000 and 2019, provides a granular analysis of water usage patterns, pinpointing agriculture as the dominant consumer. The findings indicate that irrigated agriculture accounts for a staggering 74% of direct human water use, with cattle feed crops such as alfalfa and grass as significant water guzzlers, accounting for 46% of direct water consumption.
Water consumed by each sector in the Colorado River Basin and sub-basins (including exports), based on 2000–2019 averages from the study New water accounting reveals why the Colorado River no longer reaches the sea (Fig. 4).
The Colorado River’s Dilemma
The Colorado River’s plight tells a tale of natural variability alongside a stark reflection of human choices and their impacts on natural resources. The study’s revelations about the scale of agricultural water use, especially for cattle feed, invite a critical reassessment of water allocation priorities and the sustainability of current agricultural practices.
Navigating the Waters Ahead
Addressing the Colorado River’s challenges requires a multifaceted approach, combining policy reforms, technological innovations, and shifts in agricultural practices. The study advocates for a balanced water budget and the adoption of water-efficient technologies and crops.
With cattle feed crops utilizing a considerable portion of the river’s water, the study suggests reevaluating crop choices and water use efficiency. Implementing more sustainable practices, including alternative cropping patterns and enhanced irrigation techniques, could substantially reduce water stress. Moreover, it underscores the importance of collaborative water management strategies involving all stakeholders to ensure equitable and sustainable use.
Final Thoughts
The Colorado River’s diminishing flows serve as a wake-up call to address the unsustainable patterns of water consumption that threaten this critical water source. The comprehensive study lays the groundwork for informed decision-making, urging immediate action to safeguard the river’s future. Through collective efforts and sustainable practices, there is hope for restoring the balance and ensuring the Colorado River continues to sustain the Southwest for future generations.
A new documentary explores the dangers that climate change poses to agriculture — and the seed savers who are working to make food systems more resilient.
By Charly Frisk, Yale Climate Connections
Planting seeds is a radically hopeful act. Sowing a seed is predicated on the idea that there will be a future — one that will support and nurture the seed.
Join young documentary filmmaker and climate storyteller Charly Frisk as she travels across Nordic regions to meet with people who are working to preserve the diversity of the world’s seeds. She encounters seed savers recovering ancient varieties from older generations, visits farmer’s markets that are revitalizing old traditions, and tours gene banks that are working at the intersection of science and culture.
A key take-away from the film is that the seeds used to grow food have become radically less diverse since the 1900s. In place of a profusion of varieties that vary across geographic regions — or within a single field — many farmers now use agricultural systems in which plants of a single food crop are genetically similar to each other. The world has lost 75% of seed diversity among food crops since the 1900s, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.
That lack of diversity presents a severe risk to the security of global food systems. Without seed diversity, it’s difficult for plants to adapt to pests, diseases, and changing climate conditions — a particular concern as the world warms. But the film offers hope that seed biodiversity will be preserved, ensuring our food systems are resilient to climate change — safeguarding the ancient, diverse, heirloom varieties that enrich our lives here on planet Earth.
Charly Frisk is a master’s student at the Yale School of the Environment.
Tractor spraying on crops. Photo by Ferencz Istvan, Pexels.
While agrochemical corporations promote “flawed solutions,” said one advocate, “we need deeper, transformative approaches to actually solve the root problems of our broken food system.”
Even though synthetic pesticides—the majority of which are derived from fossil fuels—contribute significantly to planet-heating pollution and increase the vulnerability of food systems, industrial agriculture interests continue to recklessly portray further pesticide use as a sensible response to the climate emergency’s worsening impacts.
That’s according to a recent report published by the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA), which details how agrochemical corporations exacerbate the climate crisis by refusing to admit that pesticides are part of the problem and instead promoting “false” solutions that enable them to keep peddling their highly profitable petroleum-based products.
The January report outlines how policymakers can help mitigate the climate crisis and build just and sustainable food systems by setting targets to drastically curb pesticide use, supporting agroecological farming practices, and protecting the rights of low-income individuals, disproportionately people of color, who are most harmed by pesticides, including farmworkers and residents of areas where the toxic substances are produced and applied.
“Governments are investing billions of dollars to address climate change, but these investments will fall woefully short unless they incorporate pesticide use reduction strategies and promotion of agroecological growing practices.”
“Reductions in pesticide use and the adoption of agroecology would decrease greenhouse gas emissions, while also reducing acute poisonings, long-term diseases like cancer, and other health impacts that rural communities face from pesticide exposure,” Nayamin Martinez, executive director of Central California Environmental Justice Network, said in a statement.
As the report explains: “Pesticides contribute to climate change throughout their lifecycle via manufacturing, packaging, transportation, application, and even through environmental degradation and disposal. Importantly, 99% of all synthetic chemicals—including pesticides—are derived from fossil fuels, and several oil and gas companies play major roles in developing pesticide ingredients.”
Pesticides, the offspring of a World War II-era marriage of Big Ag and Big Oil, help drive global warming to a greater extent than many realize, as the authors document:
Other chemical inputs in agriculture, such as nitrogen fertilizer, have rightly received significant attention due to their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. Yet research has shown that the manufacture of one kilogram of pesticide requires, on average, about 10 times more energy than one kilogram of nitrogen fertilizer. Like nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides can also release greenhouse gas emissions after their application, with fumigant pesticides shown to increase nitrous oxide production in soils seven- to eight-fold. Many pesticides also lead to the production of ground-level ozone, a greenhouse gas harmful to both humans and plants. Some pesticides, such as sulfuryl fluoride, are themselves powerful greenhouse gases, having nearly 5,000 times the potency of carbon dioxide.
Despite mounting evidence that pesticides are helping to accelerate planetary heating, “climate change impacts are expected to lead to increases in pesticide use, creating a vicious cycle between chemical dependency and intensifying climate change,” the report notes. “Research shows that declining efficacy of pesticides, coupled with increases in pest pressures associated with a changing climate, will likely increase synthetic pesticide use in conventional agriculture. An increase in pesticide use will lead to greater resistance to herbicides and insecticides in weeds and insect pests, while also harming public health and the environment.”
That agricultural production is a substantial contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution is increasingly acknowledged, but the role played by pesticides is “infrequently addressed” and “many proposed solutions would not result in meaningful GHG emission reductions,” says the report.
It continues:
An example of a false solution is precision agriculture, which promises to reduce the use of petroleum-derived pesticides and fertilizers by using computer-aided technologies to more accurately determine need (pest presence) and then more accurately apply pesticides to intended targets. However, precision agriculture maintains a system dependent upon chemical- and energy-intensive technologies and materials, while diverting attention from and investment in more effective climate-friendly strategies in agriculture that have additional social and public health co-benefits, such as agroecology. Precision agriculture also increases the power and control of agrochemical companies, many of which own the precision agriculture platforms and the data inputted by farmers.
Another flawed solution, carbon markets, allows agribusinesses or farmers to sell carbon credits to corporations to “offset” continued greenhouse gas emissions—perpetuating reliance on fossil fuels. Carbon markets have a poor track record in terms of long-term climate mitigation, and have been shown to worsen economic and racial disparities.
Co-author Asha Sharma, organizing co-director at PANNA, said that “our new report reveals how oil and gas companies and pesticide manufacturers have followed a similar playbook—strategically promoting flawed solutions to the climate crisis, like carbon capture and storage and new digital agriculture tools, which in reality offer minimal climate benefits.”
“Corporations tout these novel technologies to protect their reputation, while they continue to profit from fossil fuels,” said Sharma. “We need deeper, transformative approaches to actually solve the root problems of our broken food system.”
The report makes the case for agroecology, which it defines as “a way of farming rooted in social justice that focuses on working with nature rather than against it.”
Agroecology “relies on ecological principles for pest management, minimizing the use of synthetic pesticides, while prioritizing the decision-making power of farmers and agricultural workers,” the report notes, adding that such an approach improves “the resilience of our agricultural systems to better withstand climate change impacts.”
The report makes three key recommendations for policymakers:
Establish measurable goals in climate policies to reduce synthetic pesticide use in agriculture;
Promote the transition to biodiverse, agroecological food and farming systems, such as by establishing and funding programs that provide increased technical assistance and incentives to farmers to adopt or continue these farming practices; and
In line with international law, adopt regulations that uphold and promote the rights of groups most impacted by synthetic pesticide use.
“Transitioning our agricultural systems to those that uplift ecological and social justice principles will not only help mitigate climate change, but also reduce the negative health impacts of industrial agriculture,” says the report. “While the work toward future policy and practice change continues, we can collectively support the advocacy work of impacted communities and organizations fighting for more equitable and sustainable food and farming systems right now.”
Co-author Margaret Reeves, a senior scientist at PANNA, argued that “governments are investing billions of dollars to address climate change, but these investments will fall woefully short unless they incorporate pesticide use reduction strategies and promotion of agroecological growing practices.”
