“Choosing to save a river is more often an act of passion than of careful calculation. You make the choice because the river has touched your life in an intimate and irreversible way, because you are unwilling to accept its loss.”
Current Advocacy Actions
Projects
Cooperative flow management for a Gold Medal fishery
Partnerships to protect and restore the Colorado River headwaters
As most Coloradoans know, water supply on the Colorado River is not keeping up with increasing water demands, and changing climate patterns have the potential to exacerbate this problem. Facing this reality, Colorado is considering the adoption of a demand management program.
Demand management would be a program under which water users are paid to temporarily and voluntarily cease water use. TU supports this concept because we see it as a step towards balancing water supply and water demand on the Colorado River system, and such a program also has potential to produce stream flow benefits. We also support the notion of allowing water users increased flexibility in how they use their water, including the option of using less or even no water on a temporary basis.
Over the past several years, TU has participated in policy discussions around the feasibility of demand management. We have also worked with water users to develop on-the-ground demand management demonstration projects. In these projects, we have raised funds to compensate farmers and ranchers for temporarily foregoing water use, and we use the projects to conduct research on the impacts of demand management on crops and stream flows.
Through both our policy work and our on-the-ground projects, we believe that a program that compensates water users for foregoing water diversions on a temporary and voluntary basis has potential to help address the supply and demand imbalance and to improve flow conditions in the Colorado River basin.
Learn More: https://cwcb.colorado.gov/focus-areas/supply/demand-management
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