Voices from the industry
Conserve, protect & restore: Finding innovative solutions to water scarcity challenges in the West
By Laura Ziemer, JD
Westerners experience water scarcity at many different levels. Extended drought creates problems for individual ranch and farm operations struggling to find enough river flows to irrigate crops and for the fish that find that their habitats have heated up, shrunk or just plain dried up. Swings and cycles in regional weather patterns create basin-level scarcity that affects not only irrigators but also municipalities worried about meeting water demands.
At the largest scale, large swaths of the West can experience such dry conditions that fires compound water scarcity, and whole assemblages of aquatic species are pushed to the brink of extinction. Blue-ribbon trout rivers in Montana have been closed to fishing due to low river flows, and drought has continued more years than not in the Colorado River basin since 1999, causing a razor-thin margin between water supplies and demand within the basin. And, of course, California’s cycle of multiyear drought, floods and deadly wildfires are a sobering reminder of how vulnerable we all are to water scarcity in the West.
The seriousness and scale of these problems is why I’ve dedicated the last two decades of my professional life to finding collaborative solutions to water scarcity in the West. Through Trout Unlimited’s Western Water and Habitat Program, we have pioneered collaborative approaches to creating new water supplies with Montana ranchers, Yakima farmers and Colorado irrigators; created working architecture for drought response plans that operate at the basin scale; and assembled diverse coalitions of interests to come together around innovative changes to water management. Although these approaches vary in scale and focus, the one thing they have in common is they are built on trust. Trust among partners is needed to apply creativity to difficult, long-standing problems borne of too many demands and too little water. Most of what I have learned has come from walking irrigation ditches and listening to ranchers’ needs and then thinking hard about finding solutions that work for everyone.
My message is simple: On the ground throughout the West, partners are coming together to find innovative solutions to water scarcity challenges at a variety of scales. I have been privileged to work for Trout Unlimited, a group whose mission is clear — conserving, protecting and restoring trout streams — and whose staff and members value deeply the partnerships with ranchers and farmers as front-line land stewards. I am also grateful for the leadership and support of the Irrigation Association in these efforts because they know the value of
The Fort Shaw Irrigation District [FSID] in Montana worked with Trout Unlimited and other partners within the Sun River Watershed Group to upgrade their delivery system and improve flows in the Sun River. This photo shows crews burying pipe in FSID, Sun River basin, Montana.
investments in irrigation infrastructure improvements as a tool to create benefits for producers and for watersheds. The IA has been a partner in supporting some of the key federal elements to create durable conservation and water security outcomes: support for collaborative, watershed-scale solutions; bringing financing to these solutions based on streamlined federal funding and public-private partnerships; using and advancing the best science, technology and tools applied to water management; and recognizing that these watershed-scale, locally driven solutions require the development of a portfolio of projects addressing reliability of the irrigation water supply and watershed restoration. Progress and projects are not simple, but with partners like the IA, it’s a road worth traveling.
Laura Ziemer, JD, is senior counsel and water policy advisor for Trout Unlimited, the nation’s largest organization dedicated to trout and salmon
conservation. During her career, she has worked on collaborative, water-saving projects with various
groups. Ziemer has a reputation for finding smart, creative solutions for water challenges in the West.
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Photo credit: Sun River Watershed Group, FSID improvements
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