 Me too. Welcome to the Longmont Museum, a center for culture in northern Colorado where people of all ages explore history, experience art, and discover new ideas through dynamic programs, exhibitions, and events. My name's Justin Veach. I'm the manager of the museum's Steward Auditorium and we are coming at you live and direct from the Steward Auditorium this evening. I'd like to thank all of those who make our programming possible, the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, the Steward Family Foundation, the Friends of the Longmont Museum, and our many museum donors and members. We simply couldn't do all that we do without you, so thank you. For more information about all that we do here or to find out about how you can support the museum's work, visit longmontmuseum.org. Tonight, we offer part three of our four part big picture climate change series, Water, The Essence of Life, co-presented by the mighty KGNU community radio out of Boulder, Sustainable Resilient Longmont, and the City of Longmont's Sustainability Program. This week, the Steward Auditorium becomes climate change central with each night dedicated to a different element. On Monday, we explored air. Last night was on fire. Tonight, we'll tussle with water. And tomorrow, we'll wind things up with Earth on Earth Day, appropriately. Each program features a panel comprised of climate change scientists and other experts sharing what they've learned about these vast and shifting realms. The week will culminate with Sustainable Resilient Longmont's annual Earth Day celebration on Saturday, featuring programs for children and teens and ending with a panel discussion on climate change, diversity, equity, and inclusivity, which will be broadcast in both English and Spanish. You can find out more info on Sustainable Resilient Longmont's Earth Day on their Earth Day programming at srlongmont.org. The Big Picture Climate Change series is marvelously co-curated, and the panel's definitely moderated by men and other than journalists and co-hosts of KGNU's How on Earth, Susan Moran. All of our live streaming programming can be viewed on the museum's live stream page, as well as Facebook and local Comcast Cable. For those of you viewing on Facebook, you're invited to submit questions for our panel in the comments field. We'll do our best to get to as many of those during the Q&A portion at the end of the program. Now, allow me to introduce the co-curator of the Big Picture Climate Change series and our moderator, Susan Moran. Susan is a freelance journalist and editor and a host and producer of How on Earth, the KGNU science show. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Economist, Biographic, Nature, and More. Susan was an adjunct journalism instructor at CU Boulder for seven plus years. She has served on the board of the Society of Environmental Journalism, was a night science journalism fellow at MIT, and a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at CU Boulder. She was previously on staff at Reuters, Business 2.0 magazine, and other news orgs. She's got a couple of masters, one in journalism from Columbia University and another in Asian studies from UC Berkeley. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Susan Moran back for round three of our Big Picture Climate Change series. Thank you so much, Justin, and thanks so much to the Longmont Museum and particularly KGNU, our sponsor. So, I'm super honored to have recruited a smart and thoughtful and passionate group of experts. I'll just say their names now and introduce them more in a bit. Via Zoom, we have Dr. Stephanie Mullen. Welcome, we've got Brad Udall and Frank Kinder of Northern Water. I'll tell you more in a bit, but I want to say, needless to say, water is the essence of life. More than 70% of Earth's surface is water, but climate change has dramatically altered the water cycle and too much or too little of it can have and does have devastating effects, as we've discussed to some degree in the air and fire panels this week. What creates conditions of too much or too little is often a political question. It touches on water management, water equity, policy, and so much more that we'll explore. So, I thought as we crawl out of this long, dark tunnel of COVID, it seems like an opportune time to take stock, to listen, to learn from each other, and maybe even change our perspectives and views and create new possibilities for living on Earth. We wanna learn from you as well. So, as Justin alluded, please think of questions along the way, queue them up, type them in, and we'll get to them, if not before 8.30, right around 8.30 after our introductions and the panel discussion. So, keep those coming, we really appreciate them. And then the program will end at 8.45. So, I want to introduce first, Brad Udall. Welcome, so honored to have you here. Brad is the senior water and climate research scientist at the Colorado Water Center at Colorado State University. He has an extensive background in water and climate policy issues. He's the former director of the Western Water Assessment at the University of Colorado, as well as the director of the Getschis-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and Environment, also at CU Boulder. And Brad also was the lead author of the Water Sector Chapter of the Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. That was 2009. That's a publication of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and he also co-authored the Western Water Assessment's Climate Change in Colorado Report. And as many of you know, Brad is of the renowned Udall family, kind of like our Kennedys. Many of them have devoted themselves to public service, including environmental issues. For a glimpse, Brad's uncle, right? Stuart Udall served as the Interior Secretary under two presidents, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. And Brad's brother, Mark Udall, served as a U.S. Senator from Colorado from 2009 to 2015. So welcome. And then we have a Frank Kinder. Welcome aboard. And he and his team at Northern Water, which is a water utility serving a water conservancy district that itself serves about a million people in Northeast Colorado. Services there include landscape efficiency grants, consultations, audits, training, and events, and a demonstration garden, perhaps you can tell us about. Last year, Northern Water was recognized as an EPA WaterSense promotional partner of the year. Frank has a bachelor's degree in finance and masters in geography and environmental studies from the University of Colorado. He previously worked at Oracle and as a sustainability consultant for the U.S. military and at Colorado Springs Utilities in commercial water conservation. Welcome. And then hopefully you can all see, and we can see Dr. Stephanie Mullen. She's an associate professor in the Department of Sociology in Colorado State University. As an environmental sociologist, Stephanie specializes in environmental and natural resource sociology and governance and rural development. She conducts community-based research focusing on the impacts of resources extraction, energy production, and environmental deregulation on communities. Her recent interests and research include environmental justice, environmental health, and the intersection of water and public health and racial justice issues, and the socio-economic effects of market-based economies. Dr. Mullen also is the author of a book called The Price of Nuclear Power, Uranium Communities and Environmental Justice, as well as many other journals, papers. So welcome all three of you. So honored to have you. And before I have each of them talk for up to six minutes or so, we're gonna play a brief clip from the documentary called The Human Element that James Baylog and his Earth Vision Institute produced a couple of years ago. Tangier really is sort of a canary in the coal mine for what's gonna happen to a lot of low-lying cities along the American coastline. You know, a large city like, say, Norfolk or Miami, Manhattan, they can come up with the funding necessary to protect themselves. But some of them we're probably gonna have to relocate. So it's gonna be a mix of protecting some areas and abandoning some areas. We're gonna have to decide as a people how we're gonna handle the situation because we as a society do not have the resources to protect everything. The human enterprise is based on a belief that we more or less are able to know what the future holds for us and for our children. Summers will be hot, winters will be cold. The land will be here, the ocean will be over there. But when those basic expectations change, it throws everything into disarray. Thanks for that clip. So we're gonna start with Brad Udall. Thank you. So good evening, everyone. Thanks for joining us. And if you can all bring up my slides, I'll start. The first image is a picture of Hoover Dam and behind it in Lake Mead, the nation's largest reservoir. Most of you probably know that the dam here blocks the Colorado River. And that white band you see represents a year's worth of missing flow. In the year 2000, this reservoir was completely full. And since that point in time, this reservoir and the one just above it, the nation's second largest reservoir, Lake Powell, have lost about 60% of their contents. And you can see that in that inset image there, which is a line graph from the year 2000 out to 2020, the contents of those two different reservoirs. And I study the connection between climate change and water. And so I wanna walk you through a couple of slides on the water cycle and how it's changing. And then also give you a quick introduction to the Colorado River beyond what I just gave. So as Susan intimated early, she talked about these, this dramatically altered water cycle, too much, too little. And I have written now four different climate assessments. Susan, you alluded to a couple of those. I've done national climate assessments, international ones, state of Colorado ones. Every one of these assessments has an executive summary at the front. And they're literally oftentimes 10 bullet points. And the changes in the water cycle make it in the top two or three of the impacts of climate change. So what are those impacts? So in the US, the location of where we're gonna get precipitation changes less to the south and more to the north. In Colorado, that dividing line probably runs through the middle and that dividing line will change as it continues to warm through the 21st century. The timing of precipitation changes. Oftentimes in places you see a shortened winter and a more lengthy summer. The type of precipitation in our Western climates changes. More rain and less snow. This is especially being felt in places like California where it's a maritime climate. And their precipitation occurs at very close to 32 Fahrenheit. So with just a little bit of warming they get rain and not snow. The intensity of precipitation occurs. We see more precipitation in shorter periods of time. The atmosphere is actually a bigger sponge now. As it warms, it holds more water vapor. So it has a bigger evaporative load and then when it decides to come out it comes out all at once. We're gonna see more dry days and hence longer mini droughts in addition to longer bigger droughts. And of course more evaporation from soils and water bodies and snow packs. Plants are gonna use more water. Again, I mentioned this thirstier atmosphere that holds about 7% more water vapor per degree Celsius increase. Earlier snow melt and runoff in Western water snow dominated areas including about two weeks here in Colorado earlier now than what we saw in the 20th century. And that then folds into this bigger annual pattern of runoff where you see less later in the summer. You have reduced water quality as a result and we're even in Colorado with its cold water seeing harmful algal blooms and less oxygen as waters warm in rivers and lakes. All of this results in more fires, more dust on snow, higher human water demands. And let me end and shift with just this Colorado River introduction because I think we'll get into more on the Colorado River as the evening goes on. So here's an image of the basin itself. If you look carefully in the middle of that you can see a split between the upper and lower basin. There's seven different states. There's two nation and importantly Stephanie 29 different tribes in this basin. It's 8% of the area, the lower 48. It's about the size of the Hudson River in terms of its annual flow. We talk in terms of acre feet at one foot of water on top of one acre which is equivalent roughly of an Olympic swimming pool. And there are about almost 15 million acre feet in it per year. The worst drought in our gaged record which goes back to 1906 started in 2000 and it's roughly a 20% decline. And hopefully I'll talk more about how of that 20% decline, scientists now think about half of it's due to climate change. There's a whole bunch of irrigated acreage in the basin including much of our winter vegetables get produced on the Mexico-US border. It was fully allocated in 1922 by a very famous Colorado River Compact. Around 2000 we began to use about the same amount as was supplied and since that time of course the supplies have gone down and unfortunately it no longer reaches the ocean. So it is an interesting basin for all of us. Those red arrows represent places where that water is used throughout the West. Las Vegas 90% dependent. A quarter of the water in Los Angeles is Colorado River water. Phoenix 50% of their water is Colorado River water. Tucson has no surface water. And all those red arrows in Colorado here where we live 50% of the water we use comes out of the Colorado. So that's why this river system is so important to us even though we actually don't live within the basin. Peck and ask about that. Thank you so much. Next we have Frank Kinder from Northern Water. All right, I'm so glad to be here. I'll actually use the previous slide from Brad to I want to direct your attention to the upper right. If you see that uppermost arrow that is pointing to the water that our organization brings from the basin over to the district we serve. So this gives you an idea of the size and the scale and I'll go into some details about how that works and why. As mentioned I'm Frank Kinder program manager of water efficiency at Northern Water. We are a water conservancy district serving 1.5 million acres, just about over one million people and 600,000 acres of irrigated farmland and productive agriculture. All together in that we have 33 cities and 29 rural districts. And so a conservancy district, if you're unfamiliar is an entity that was put together to serve large areas of water and develop it particularly after the Great Depression. And so these occur around the state and they're funded through tax assessments in order to provide a consistent reliable supply of water for different uses. Originally that was really focused on a lot of industrial agricultural work. As you can see we do serve the front range and out east and we do that through the Big Thompson project. Importantly the state has recognized that as the state has grown water use is changing from agricultural use to municipal. And so it put together the water plan in 2015 to try to focus on what to do with water as the state continues to grow. And there's a water gap. And that gap focuses on multiple efforts to help meet the need through different measures including development and conservation. But it's important to note that 89% of the water in our state goes to agriculture. Only 70 municipalities and 3% to landscaping. And so I wanted to give you an overview of how the water is used in our state. Importantly districts like mine provide conservation services and ours as described include conservation audits and consultations themselves and grants and I'll go into some of those details to help people adapt landscapes and water use behavior to be climate resilient and to be more resilient specifically to drought. We operate a network for weather stations to help deliver and apply water effectively as well as training for everyone who uses waters from property managers to HOAs to facility managers and residential users. So you can find this information on our website and I'll go into some details of what that looks like. Consultations are really focused on commercial users. So if you're sitting in Longmont we have worked with the city of Longmont. We are working with some of the HOAs here and our real objective is to train people to be active water managers. Moving from a passive water use approach to something that's much more focused on if we're using the right amount and if not, how to do that better. And so we do that in an objective manner to work with industry and owners to have beautiful functional landscapes but to do that using just the right amount of water to reduce that waste. In support of the consultations we provide audits. It's a great way to provide an initial understanding of your water use, your irrigation systems status and then to go into an understanding of what to do to get better. Importantly also, we're continuing to grow in the Northern Front Range and all along the Front Range truthfully. So we're working with cities to adopt more water resilient growth strategies. We're partnering with the Sonoran Institute with the state and other important entities like the Babitz Center and Lincoln Institute to help provide training to use the best methods for new development so we can keep as much water in the rivers and in agriculture and other important uses as we grow. Importantly too, we're training the landscapers to provide these solutions to the customers they serve. They might be individual landscapers or they might be taking care of a school district or a hotel or other folks who use a lot of water. And we're doing this in a way that provides this training at a reduced cost. So we're really trying to maximize the available resources to as many different entities as we can working with the state's nonprofits and NGOs to do so. Here are two examples that you'll be able to find on our website. We're really trying to put the best solutions out and they're approachable. Right now they're in a virtual format so take a look on our website northernwater.org to find out those opportunities. One recent innovation is design services because people would like to have a beautiful landscape but they're not sure what to do. So we've partnered with Denver Botanic Gardens to provide examples and designs for some of the cities including Berthet and Evans and cities surrounding Longmont, including Longmont itself. And so these are beautiful drought tolerant low water landscapes that add property value and they're quite functional. So you can look for some of those in the region through our grant programs. We delivered 13 grants in 2020, 10 in 2019 and we're tracking for 17 this year. So this is a partnership opportunity to work with HOAs, municipalities and businesses to provide demonstration examples of low water landscapes that should inspire others. So those can be replicated and then become common practice. That's our real goal. And so to find out information from us you can go to northernwater.org look on in the community efficient water use and here you can contact our team and see if we can help you provide opportunities for safer efficient water use in your landscape. Thank you so much. So next we have Dr. Stephanie Mollum. She's a environmental sociologist at Colorado State University. Hello everyone. Just wanted to make sure I was sharing my screen. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about water and social justice from the perspective of sociology and again, I'm a social scientist at CSU and work as well with the Colorado Water Center. So I've been thinking about these issues quite a bit and teach these issues as well. So today I'm gonna just talk a little bit about first what the heck an environmental sociologist is because I think that's a pretty obscure term and I'm trying to make that better known so that people understand what a role we can play in evidence-based policy and issues like water, right? Because you wouldn't necessarily think a social scientist would have a lot of voice in this sort of thing. As an environmental sociologist, what I study and what others study are the relationships between the social and the biophysical. We examine how societies and economies interact with the natural world. We look at how resources, things like environmental goods like clean air and bike paths and public transportation and environmental bags, things like toxicants and pollutants or industrial facilities, waste sites, right? How are those things distributed within society? Who decides or who has a seat at the table to make decisions about where those things end up and why and how we use land and how we use water, right? What does this mean for sustainability? And as a sociologist, we look at institutions, so groups and systems and look at the role that those institutions play and what role inequities play. So what does sociology have to do with water? Well, water is water and society interact with each other all the time. And one term for this is hydro social systems. So thinking about the ways that society, civilization really depend upon water. In fact, water touches all social systems and economies and vice versa, right? Without one, there's not really the other and societies have had deep impacts on our water systems as our other panelists have just reviewed, right? And really important ways. Scarcity of water can be physical or actual water scarcity and or it can be economic. In other words, it can be structured by the ways that we distribute water, the ways that we set up systems of access to water or block those systems of access. And one big area that we look at as social scientists is the food, energy, water, nexus. Of course, our food systems and our energy systems are some of our biggest water uses. But often the role of water in those is invisible. And so we as social scientists who look at institutions, it's important to understand the way that we've constructed institutions to make invisible the water that's used and how if we are concerned about water justice and access to water, making that more visible and understanding how we might better conserve water within food and energy systems is increasingly vital. Of course, for reasons that our other panelists have looked at. Scarcity and access can also be constructed and affected through privatization. In fact, I just hosted a panel through my Center for Environmental Justice on water privatization on Monday talking about the ways in which private ownership of water, so ownership of water by corporations, for example, can impact the ability of members of the public or communities, for example, to access that water in really important ways. And this relates to neoliberal policies in particular. So when we talk about neoliberal, that means liberating markets, right? It's not the kind of liberal that we might think of when we think about political persuasions or affiliations. It has to do with the idea of the economic theory of making markets as free and as liberal as possible. And a big components of that are deregulation. So making sure that we don't have a lot of rules that impinge on the ability of businesses to operate. And also this really important component of privatization, meaning that we take a resource or a relation like water and we commodify it and put it for sale in a marketplace rather than having it be something that is available to everyone. And of course, with water, as Susan said in our introduction, right? Water is vital for life. Water is life in so many ways. And so commodifying and creating markets for water where people must pay for a vital resource and where access can be constrained or can even be prevented. There are some serious environmental injustice issues with that in terms of access to clean and healthy water. And empirical evidence shows us that these systems often don't work as intended. And in fact, many municipalities and even states that privatize their water systems can end up going back to municipalizing those systems. Of course, water and climate crises intersect in vital ways. And in many ways, climate crises is water crisis. Of course, leading to predictive problems like mega droughts, more sudden and rapid precipitation, but also more chronic and persistent droughts like we're experiencing here in Colorado, more intense natural disasters and especially hurricanes, sea level rise and risk to human settlements. And of course, we're even seeing the beginning of climate refugee and climate migrant movements because of this. The point here being that even when we look at climate crises and the way that water relates to those, all of these impact societies, economies, governments, communities and families. So we can see the social impacts at multiple scales. So the takeaways here are that water and society or watersheds and systems shape societies and vice versa. Scarcity and access to water are shaped by institutions, by power and by physical conditions. So it's important for us to realize the social and institutional aspects of water access and water privatization. We can participate in water justice and equity. I encourage you to look at the work of Farhana Sultana, for example, who does amazing work on the global South to give us a bit more of an international perspective. And that water is always present across scales and we can get active in it through advocacy and activism as well as political action. So I'll leave us with a bit of an idea of what we can do. And now we can address water inequity and water scarcity through systemic change. One of the ways that we can do this is by moving beyond neoliberal policies. And this graphic that you see here is the donut economics idea presented by Kate Rayworth, where we can get in that donut, where we don't overshoot ecological limits and don't go into social shortfall by building more distributive and regenerative systems that replenish people in the planet. And this could relate to how we can change some of those big water uses. All institutions and systems can be changed. That is what we can remember from this takeaway. So I'll leave it at that. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Dr. Mullen. And we are toward the end of the panel, gonna give everyone an opportunity also to talk about takeaways. I think we might return to that slide. It was pretty dense and there's a lot there. Something you said made me wanna start with this. A little more personal note. I'm curious to hear from each of you in what ways water has shaped you. I mean, I know what 60 plus percent of our bodies are water, but I mean more enough to inspire you to make this the focus of your profession. And Stephanie, I know you've been working on all sorts of different environmental justice issues, but I'm thinking like a trip down the Colorado River, John Wesley Powell inspired, or something that has really got under your skin in working in or covering water. It's so pervasive, it's so essential, it's so personal in some ways. So maybe Frank, anything come to mind for you? Frank Kinder? Sure. Well, during graduate studies, you're exposed to a lot of different research on the challenges internationally, especially some of the lesser developed countries and just the amount of time people spend fetching clean water. And it particularly impacts a lot of the women in the industries and women in the different countries and you see that that's a trade-off. And so they're unable to make a lot of other improvements in their lives. And I was able to take a trip to Africa in 2010 and see that up close. And of course it helped me commit my life to helping to maximize the resources that we all use. And in some ways we take for granted. And so my goal is to help us understand and appreciate and then act on the ways to use water which touches all of us every single day. And I think that we have so much ahead of us, but as we heard from Brad, it's quite a dire situation. Absolutely, Brad, you know. So when I was 15, my mother took me down the Grand Canyon. I was probably one of the first 10,000 people through the Grand Canyon. And at the time it was life-changing actually. I later studied water and my engineering education became a water engineer early in my career. It turns out, as you alluded to, my family has been intimately involved in the development of water projects in the West, including both my father Morris and my uncle Stewart, being involved in this huge project called the Central Arizona Project, which delivers water into Phoenix and Tucson, those two cities that are very dependent on Colorado River water at this point. And oddly, I'll mention one other touch point of my life that's interesting, which is the Colorado River Compact divides the river at a place called Lee's Ferry, named after John D. Lee. It turns out Lee is my great-great-grandfather. He had- On and on, wow. So in an odd way, my entire life has been, has revolved around this Colorado River. And I didn't plan it that way. It just happened to turn out. You just can't get away from it. Thank you. Stephanie Mullen, how about you? So I kind of came upon my interest in water accidentally. I've been interested in environmental justice and sociology since I was an undergraduate at Truman State. And then I did my graduate work at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. And moving out to the West really made me appreciate, first of all, what water scarcity felt like, having grown up in the Midwest, that isn't something that's as familiar, right? It's much easier to take water for granted, I think. But it was my interest in energy systems and studying extractive industries in particular that really made me appreciate just how vital water was, of course, for our daily lives, but also it played invisible roles in a lot of the systems of extraction that I was looking at. I started doing research in communities in the Four Corners region who do uranium, mining, and milling, for example. And even in these very arid spaces, it became quickly apparent to me that the role of water was vital to understand and that I wouldn't really be able to do a solid job of understanding the nature of environmental injustice, environmental health issues that were emerging without understanding the role of water in those places. So I was given the opportunity when I started at Colorado State to teach a course in sociology on water and social justice. And that really allowed me to bring, to research that as much as possible and to bring those issues to the table for our students at CSU. So it was a beautiful accident in a way. Thank you. So I wanna dive into the science. All of you had so much about the Colorado River Basin, drought, less snowpack, how foreboding it looks for summer. And I was just looking this morning at the U.S. Drought Monitor. And I think the data is pre, we just had a pretty sweet snowstorm here. In fact, it was difficult to drive here on Monday. So this may be, the data may be a bit dated, but it said that parts of the Southwest are now experiencing record levels of dryness for the past 12 months, far from here, but still New England year to date precipitation ranks in the top 10 driest on record. And even though this week we've had good amount of snowfall, but the entire state of Colorado, I think it's still in drought mode, especially some areas in the Western slope classified as being extremely or extremely dry, the most dangerous categories. So give us a sense of maybe starting with Brad Udall, what's the state of the science and how do things look right now? So Susan, let me talk about five peer reviewed papers that have come out since 2016 that are super interesting. So the drought started in the year 2000 and calling this a drought for starters is probably wrong. Scientists are now using a term, aridification, which is a mouthful, to indicate this long-term warming and drying we're seeing in the American West. That's interesting, because it sounds almost euphemistic relative to drought. I mean, more, you're saying, it's sort of like last night in the fire panel, Michael Kodas, the author of Megafire, was saying only half facetiously, maybe my next book's gonna be called Gigafire, because these million acre fires we've had and they may be the new norm. So it seems like drought is becoming mega drought, extreme drought, but why so bland as to call it. So we can also call it a mega drought. There's a brand new paper out last year that talked about an emerging mega drought in the American West. This 19 year period, 2000 to 2018 is the second driest period as measured by June, July, August soil moisture going back 1200 years. And scientists have warned us for years that climate change and mega drought are gonna go hand in hand and all of a sudden here we are in one. And so maybe that's actually a better term, frankly. But aridification is something that's being used and it's not a great term, but it's this warming and drying. So with respect to those five papers, and maybe I'll talk too and then we can get back to a couple of the others. But in 2016, Connie Woodhouse, tree ring specialist, University of Arizona, well-known scientist put together a team. They looked at flows on the Colorado River and what we call runoff efficiency. How much runoff, how much flow in the river you get for a given amount of precipitation? And what they found was that since 1988, the runoff efficiency was significantly lower than the rest of the 20th century. And they dug into it and they said, temperatures are causing this. And what they further said was that we normally think of drought as being a lack of precipitation but temperatures can also cause drought. And you alluded in your opening that it's not just the amount, but the timing. And is it largely because it's coming later, it's not percolating as much, it's evaporating faster, what explains the timing? So good question. So last year we had 100% of snowpack on April one which should pretend a good runoff season. We got 52% of runoff. This year we had about 80% in the Colorado River basin and we're gonna get under 40%. And the approximate cause of this is the warmth and drying of last summer. Soils dry out and in order to get runoff that soil buffer has to get recharged first. And it's because we now dug ourselves a hole going back nine months, that's part of the problem here. It's also partly reductions in precipitation but it's the soil moisture we're increasingly pointing the finger at it as being a significant cause of these problems. This is where it ties in so much with fire. I mean, we gave these all their own panel but so much the dry soil, more fodder or more likely to accelerate the fires. So Frank Kinder of Northern Water, I wanna ask you, basically as a water manager of sorts, I mean you talked and we can talk more later about sort of landscaping for the future. We didn't call it zero escape but in a low water intensity gardening but beyond commercial or even residential as a water utility, how does this land and how the heck are you planning now for the future and for whom? I mean, you're the one who said in Colorado, I think it's 89% of the water consumption is agriculture and we'll drill a little deeper into that but really from a water management perspective, how do you do it? Well, the challenge is that in many ways Northern Water and entities like it are supplemental water providers and so when there is a shortfall in native supplies or the supplies that cities use in close proximity to their region, Northern Water may end up supplying more water but we are dependent on a larger system. As Brad showed with the pictures of Powell and Meade, there's a deficit already and so we have an obligation to provide a certain amount of water in conjunction with the upper basin states through the Colorado Water Compact. However, we provide water through the supplies that we manage and those are familiar to many people up here, Carter Lake, Horse Tooth Reservoir, Boda Reservoir and so for us, we focus on utilizing that water as efficiently impossible as possible in its collection which is done up in Rocky Mountain National Park and it's delivery and pumping. So we are really focused on every step of that process, minimizing waste along the way as well as new development and you might be familiar with some of Northern's projects to help set additional water aside from the Colorado River in multiple projects. That's the name we use for developing water and placing it in storage for additional use and we're doing that on behalf of the cities in this region and so for us, we focus very heavily on watershed protection and watershed management to help as much of those areas to be as safe and effective in the way that they capture and deliver that water. There's a lot of water quality aspects to how those watersheds are managed. Now of course, on everybody's mind are the fires that we just experienced which include the areas that deliver that water to Northern and so we keep a very close eye on the water status and the snowpack and measure it daily and we are then in contact with these cities to let them know what we're expecting and then we communicate that and it is determined with all those stakeholders. So it is, I would say it is an ongoing evolutionary decision and it really is dependent upon when that snowpack melts and how quickly and of course, how much there is available. And are all of your estimates and the management based on say this assumption that population in the semi-arid areas which has been booming is gonna continue to boom? So it's business as usual in terms of population and then it's a matter of allocation which obviously is not simple, but who gets what? Well, as the state has grown, much of the water has transferred from agricultural and industrial uses to municipal sectors. But that's not an easy automatic thing to do. Water use is different for a municipality than it is for a farm, right? So the irrigation in a farm starts in the spring, goes in the summer and kind of turns off in the fall but we wanna use water all year round in our cities and so that requires a little different water use profile and so when we work with these cities up here, the ownership of the water is in the private sector and then entities like Northern Water deliver that water to different owners and so water can be moved around in different geographical regions as it's bought and sold and so that is the way Northern Water moves water. As cities grow, there is pressure to move that water from the more historic uses to more municipal and our job in my team is to intercept and do that as efficiently as possible and we have similar groups doing that for the agricultural sector. Thanks and Dr. Stephanie Mullin, I'm gonna have you chime in here because it's not just about water quantity, it's water quality and water equity because on the one hand, there's part of me going, should we be paying more? Shouldn't more of us know what the cost of water is and use it more efficiently, particularly in this drought-ridden area and yet so many people can't even afford to pay the water bills they have. What's your observation or your sense of sort of the equity side of this? It's not just a straight up budget so and so, municipal gets this, ag gets this, communities get this but in terms of the equity side of allocation, how do you see it? Well, I think I won't pretend to have the answers to that question in my water course that I teach mostly to seniors and juniors. We have three weeks where we talk about that very question because it is such a paradox, right? How can we value water adequately without pricing people out of being able to access water? And especially when we look at the global South and when we take into consideration international issues of poverty and development, and get into those, we really need to think about equity issues much more broadly to bring this back home to Colorado. We really wanna think about how we can adequately value water in a market system, but also perhaps think about the ways that we need to move beyond that economic language as being the sole barometer of how we assign value to resources or some cultures would refer to water as a relation, right? And so moving more in that direction or perhaps not more in that direction, but valuing equally those views of water not simply as a resource that can be commodified and given an economic value and that being the only way that we can adequately value water, but really starting to appreciate once again and pay attention to the cultural systems that always have or for centuries have valued water as a relation and in very different ways. I think one of the risks that we run if we charge, and right, we can make a lot of arguments that what municipalities charge for per gallon of water, for example, does not convey the value of water, right? And that- Meaning it's too little. I'm sorry. Meaning we don't pay enough. Right, exactly. And that there's not drastic differences between what different kinds of water users might pay in that system, right? So when you look at the tiers of water prices, you don't necessarily see a difference in rates, even though we might have industrial users, for example, that could use water to extinction. For example, when we look at the presence of unconventional oil and gas production in the state of Colorado, and even though they use a small percentage of our fresh water, it's still water that's used to extinction. So thinking about the ways that we can, if we're going to talk just strictly in terms of economic characterization of water, right? Thinking about the ways that we might price different kinds of water use differently so that everyone can still access water, which we all need to survive. And Frank Kinder, how does this strike you? I mean, how do you, or do you try to strike this balance? Are we paying, who should pay and how much? Because a lot of people can't pay. Right, there's a great deal of focus on affordability of water and equity in water. And in our world, there's also the understanding that as water moves from the entities that own it, particularly some of the rural communities and farming communities, that when it goes out of a basin and leaves a city, that is an economic loss. And that is very difficult to replace in a lot of these small rural towns. And so it's not something that is just easily done without a consideration for who is winning and losing in that situation. So there's a great deal of focus in affordable retrofits for low income users. That's something that a lot of cities are undertaking to try to provide maximum affordability and then provide rate classes within municipal environments that allow for affordable domestic indoor water use so that everybody can have access to clean water that's also safe and meet their basic needs. And that's what cities really strive for. And for folks that are of higher incomes, there can be higher rate classes and more discretionary water use. So that is a big focus of cities and that's also a focus of districts when water projects are considered is how do we equitize those decisions most appropriately? Brad, do you want to chime in there? You know, my work places me in contact with ag users in the West. And that's the real worry. As you see Colorado river flows decline, what's going to happen to them? Because clearly they're going to bear a large share of the brunt of these flow reductions. And you know, it's easy to think, well, economists have told us for years, we just pay them off and they'll be just as happy. Well, it's not that simple. Maybe it works for a season or two, but they lose markets and they want to farm and have to deal with loss of labor and the local community loses their money as well, right? So it's not that simple. Maybe some of these communities can actually change crops. There's real interest in that to using less water, but it's not something they probably can do on their own. They need help. You know, there's new machinery that's needed, new types of labor, new knowledge, new markets, new transportation. It's a really big deal to ask people to change the crops they're growing. What's an example of some of the changes that should or are happening, like from alfalfa? From alfalfa, so in the lower basin of Colorado river in places, people put 10 feet of water on an acre, 10 acre feet per acre to grow alfalfa. They also get 10 cuttings out of it. Okay, which begs the question to me, do we need to grow alfalfa? Not just should there be maybe a less water consumptive crop, but where is that alfalfa going? It's, is it really about food security? I guess basically the bottom line is, does ag get too big of a share? And is it romanticized some? After all, there's so many subsidies in the farm bill. Not to diss it. I mean, it's a cultural question. It's also, as you said, so much of farming and ranching is the center of economies, but so increasingly is solar and wind farms. So I guess to be provocative, do you think ag gets here in Colorado and say in the whole arid west, a too large a share? Frank, how about you? Frank Kinder. Well, I will say that when the Colorado Water Plan was in development, it included a lot of stakeholder outreach and meetings in every county and as many different types of entities as possible. And the state said that the rural vistas, the agricultural economy and the historic aspects of water use were quite important and their economic impact was significant and it still remains so today. I mean, we are a food producing state and it is an arid environment where truthfully the water development that has occurred has allowed that food production to happen. We would not be producing the amount of food and the animals that we consume that we do without historical projects and prior generation support for them. And going forward, I think we are seeing more pressure on that because we value clean rivers and water recreation and other water aspects as much. And I think the state is wrestling with what our future looks like because there are different impacts and outputs from those different sectors and that's going to be very challenging with the price of water. And then the pressure is on those sectors on if they wanna keep in the industry or not. So much on that front, I'm also cognizant of the time and I wanna bring you in Stephanie Mullen and others to talk about, don't forget, was it you Brad or Frank who alluded in your intro to the fact that within the context of the Colorado River Compact, there what, 29 tribal nations in the upper and lower basins together and they hold some of the most senior water rights and yet until very recently, right, they haven't even had a seat at the table, the policy making table. How is that changing and should it be changing more? And if you, Stephanie, could give a sense of what does that mean, water scarcity on tribal land? Where they have the senior rights but they don't have control or they haven't had control over that water. So I don't wanna speak as if I can represent a vast array of tribal communities or tribal nations, first of all, but I do think through the Center for Environmental Justice and through my own research, I work with quite a few of the Pueblo and tribal communities and nations in Northern New Mexico, for example. And what's going on in the Rio Grande basin I think is illustrative of what we're talking about as well, where you have these systems of water rights, that in a settler colony, like the United States were created in the mid 1800s and after that. And so these conventions, which are very powerful that we operate under like first in time, first in rights and of course, many tribal communities and nations, sovereign nations, they do have senior water rights within those systems but as you said, there's not meaning opportunities for meaningful participation in terms of having those rights recognized, having the ways in which those nations preceded all other water users by centuries, if not millennia, actually having that adequately recognized. And I think that I will just speak to perspectives that were shared. I mentioned that we had a panel on water privatization on Monday through the Center for EJ and the Colorado Water Center. And Cynthia Naha, who works for the Santa Domingo Pueblo as their natural resource director and she is a native woman. She was talking quite a bit about the difficulties that their Pueblo communities are dealing with in terms of agricultural sustainability and many other issues related to almost permanent water scarcity for those communities. And so I think at the very least, we wanna talk about having a meaningful seat at the table for those nations, but the point is more often made that those nations need to really be constructing the table and inviting others in, right? And that perhaps we need to be rethinking that idea of first in time, first in right and how that's actualized in these conversations. I hope that answers the question or starts to. Yeah, well, thank you. And Brad, you've been somewhat immersed in this. Maybe give a sense of how things are changing and for whom. I appreciate Stephanie's notion that it really feels awkward speaking on behalf of tribes. And there should be someone represented here. We could only have one virtual panelist, so. So the problem with tribes is they were effectively cut out of the allocations early on. They have rights, but they're unquantified. They're completely unfunded. Less than 15 tribes in the Colorado River basin actually have quantified rights. And all of a sudden, they've decided that they're tired of this. And they have picked, I must say, hell of a time to come to the table because of the declining supplies. It really makes it difficult. And I don't mean that in a negative way. I just mean in a way that for us to solve this problem with declining supplies, it is really difficult. And in what context right now is it even being negotiated within the plan? So Darrell V. Hill is a member of the Hickory Apache tribes in the Colorado River basin. And he likes to famously say, if you know one tribe, you know one tribe. These tribes are very different. I mean, they are, to speak of them collectively even frankly is wrong, except for they represent this group of people who are entitled to water, who are not getting it. And there's a fundamental injustice that's been done here over time. And trying to solve this in a climate change era is especially difficult. I think there's hope for some solutions, but golly, I'd love to have solved this a long time ago and then right now, let me just say that. You're not the only one, right? So plenty more for us to discuss. I also want to give you some takeaways. But I thought at first, if we have some, let's field a couple of questions from you. And that may spark, get more questions from the audience. So thank you. Take it away, Justin. All right. We have a number of questions here from Martin. I'll, YouTube sent over to our Facebook page. Let's see. Well, this one's about agriculture. He's wondering, should we move to discourage agriculture when there are other states where water is more plentiful? Since it's the biggest water user in Colorado. Frank, kinder of Northern water, you want to take a crack? I think that's a challenging question because it's asking a whole lot of people to give up their livelihoods. And there's a lot of other folks dependent upon those producers as well. So I know that many people wonder how exactly we can be as efficient as possible. And there are significant efforts underway just to the east of Fort Collins. There's the irrigation innovation consortium, which works with the other actors to fund as efficiently as possible irrigation mechanism. So there are all those incremental efforts underway. There's terrific technology utilized, which has made substantial improvements. The greater question will be, as people want to move here, how much are they willing to pay for water and what does that mean to the economies? And some of the cities are founded and defined by their agricultural community, both rural cities and urban cities. You think of Boulder County right here. I mean, agriculture is a foundation and a force and I think is something that people identify with and it provides a sense of place. So to give that up would be quite challenging. I think we will wrestle with it, but it's not going to come easy. I was actually curious, what if we cut back our consumption of beef by, let's say, 50% in this country? Like what would be the impact upon water usage in this region? Just curious. It's potentially significant and I hesitate to quantify it. I will also tell people, though, that if you love visiting Colorado's high country in the summertime and enjoying those hay fields that make Steamboat Springs such a beautiful place, that's, they're growing hay for animals. So we all sort of have a role in this, not just in terms of consuming me, but these tastes that we've developed for these aesthetic areas that we seem to like. This is, it's a super hard question around animal ag and the growing of these forages and how to deal with this in a climate change world where we all know that beef has, especially greenhouse gas emissions associated with it. And on that note, I'll give a plug for the Earth panel tomorrow. One of the panelists, Keith Postian at CSU in the Natural Resource Ecology Lab, they're doing a bunch of this, sort of the ag-based greenhouse gas inventory work and doing work with Boulder County and other farmers and regenerative ag and sort of soil carbon secretation. So there'll be a big ag climate change focus tomorrow. Martin's got a number of different questions here. Another is, does Colorado agriculture create goals to reduce their water use through optimized irrigation technology as they do it? For example, in Israel, are you aware of Israel's... I know Israel is a leader in drip irrigation and in very precise allocation of every drop of water and they have helped, I think, revolutionize the industry. A lot of what we take locally comes from some of their examples and innovations. Yeah, let me just say that there's been, I think a lot of false promises made around this notion that irrigation efficiency is gonna save us. Effectively, much of the waste that people see out there is actually not waste. Traditional flood irrigation appears very wasteful, but what happens in a basin like the South Platte is that water actually ends up, back in the streaming gets used and diverted multiple times. It's not nearly as inefficient as you think. And for years, people have promised these enormous gains with sprinklers or drip and there's actually ample literature now in the scientific peer reviewed journals that say, frankly, oftentimes this increases water use, it doesn't decrease it. And I could get into the reasons for that. It's kind of complicated, but it's been proven that if you use these technologies wrong, water consumption actually goes up. I'm kind of astounded at that, but at least looking at advances in precision ag and all the sensors and soil moisture. It's true, in fact, in the Arkansas basin, if you wanna install sprinklers nowadays, the state engineer is very strict about what you have to do because what they found is people installed sprinklers and they grew more crops and their water consumption went up. Do we have another one, because otherwise I'll turn to... We do have... Martin has one last one. He asks, can you address how we're depleting fossil or a very slowly replenished groundwater in the Ogallala aquifer and others? That's an issue that other states, I think, are facing more so than ours. Northern water is not a user of the Ogallala aquifer, and I know that... And if you could just sort of lay out the geography of the Ogallala aquifer. So I believe that underlies Oklahoma and Nebraska, other states in the center of the country. And it is glacial water and it is pumped through wells and it is going down. And so there's been a great deal of effort to create collaboration and agreement on how people can reduce this. It is not replenishing furthermore, too. So what they're using doesn't just come back through rain or river. If it does, it's a very slow process that's slower than the usage. And so there have been some very important policy decisions made around this, but it is going to be a limiting factor. And I don't know if you want to speak on that more, Brad. Well, in the Colorado River, based on the issues of Arizona, where they're blowing through fossil water in places, and especially in the 1980s, Arizona as part of the Central Arizona Project Bill actually had to get its groundwater management together. And so they famously passed in the legislature something called the Groundwater Management Act. And these basins that had huge reserves of fossil groundwater were supposed to get into safe yield by 2020 so that what they were taking out equaled what was going in. One county actually elected not to do that, Pinell County, between Tucson and Phoenix. There's farming there. And they just elected, they said, hey, we're just going to burn this up over time. We're going to be out of business at some point in time and we don't care. And that's precisely the county that in the next few years is going to see much of their Colorado River supplies disappear because of low levels in Lake Mead and Powell. So some places are electing to do it. And if they want to do it, I suppose it's their choice, but this is a gift. If I can, I won't even use it, that they're electing to spend one time. Well, I want to give each of you a minute or two to share with us some takeaway messages, something you really want to drive home for people. And I want to start with you, Stephanie Mullen. So if we can call up her slides, especially it seemed like you had those last couple ones. You want me to put up the last couple of slides? Is that what you said? Yes, we will. Yeah, I got a little ahead of myself there when I was given my initial presentation. So again, as a social scientist, I'm concerned with looking at the ways that we organize our societies in relationship to our resources like water and then how institutions relate to those. And the slide that I put up before, I just want to unpack that a little bit. Again, and site Kate Brayworth here, she's an Oxford economist who is the one who created this visual in her book, Donut Economics, which I highly recommend, because a lot of these ideas that we're talking about, right, about how to think about maybe water use in agriculture a little differently, for example, have to do with building more regenerative systems, specifically more regenerative agricultural systems, but more regenerative economic systems, writ large, as well as more distributive systems. And the goal of doing those, kind of rebuilding those systems is to be able to be in this space where we're not overshooting ecological boundaries, especially things like climate change and of course, really to the point in this panel is fresh water withdrawals and other issues related to water in particular while not falling below social foundations. And those include things like resource access, right? Food, water, but also things like affordable housing, democratic systems, political voice. So a big takeaway for me is to think about not necessarily individual action, right? As a college professor, that's always what my students wanna know when we learn these disheartening things is what can I do as an individual? How can I vote with my dollar, for example? But in these systems where it's often structural and systemic issues that are creating the problems, we need to think about how we can use that individual action to build collectivities and collective systems that are different and that are more distributive and regenerative. So thinking about how we can help build institutional change and systemic change. And for me, one of the first things I tell my students is thinking a little differently about our economic system that for most of our lifetimes, for the students I teach, right? Especially since the 80s and places like the United States have been dominated by these kind of market-based pro privatization, pro deregulation approaches to resources like water. So how can we rather quickly build systems that are different and are more concerned with social well-being and ecological well-being? And I'll leave it at that. Thanks, but we could have a whole panel on sort of grassroots movements and what does it take to affect change, whether it's policy change or other. Frank Kinder of Northern Water, how about you? I think people really would appreciate water more when it becomes scarce. And we see that when drought restrictions are in place in municipalities. I grew up in California during the 80s when people painted their lawns green because they wanted to have a green lawn but there was no water, right? And they put down astroturf. And so those make a mark on people and they make them aware that water can be a scarce resource and that we've been really good at delivering safe, equitable, available water for many, many decades. And so when people want to do more, what I tell them is they should take interest in how much water they use and take action on what they can do. And I think they can do that through learning who provides their water and learning about where that water comes from. And many times it's very far away. People think that there's a river or a lake nearby and that's where their water comes from but that can be really from two to 300 or even more so. And there's a great deal of energy involved in getting that water there. And then there's even more energy involved in cleaning that water so it's drinkable. And so all those factors add up to a pretty significant footprint in what a gallon of water looks like when you're using it. And that's also then going to require more energy and chemicals when you use that water because it has to be treated and then it is returned. And as Brad said, it's used again and again and again and that's the beauty of water. So if you'd like to take a closer look at what you can do, I encourage you to see how much water you're using and then you have opportunities to use less and be wise with your water use. You can do that through upgrading your fixtures with WaterSense approved fixtures. You can also look at rebates and programs from your utility provider and it might be in your HOA. You can say, you know, that piece of turf that we have is really not useful to us. Let's renovate it, let's make it a native grass, let's make it perhaps a dog park or a planting bed and you can start to participate and then support those changes. They can be scary but they can have long-term benefits for all of us and that's what I would advocate for. Thank you. And Brad, whether you wanna focus on the individual or a lot more than that. So I wanna, as you know, Susan, I wanna talk kind of bigger picture stuff here and let me just say Colorado River major problems. I'm actually kind of optimistic that we're gonna get good solutions there just because we have good governance. People know each other. It's a fairly tight community of people who work on these issues. They communicate regularly. They like each other. They talk. They understand. It's good governance. It's not gonna be easy, mind you, but what I worry about is this larger climate change problem. And, you know, climate change is water change. I've been saying this for almost two decades. Now climate change is water change. Some of the most fundamental impacts that we're gonna get hit are these changes in the water cycle. Climate change is a problem unlike any we've experienced. And, you know, we sometimes try and compare it to World War II where we had this great enemy to focus on and this need to get things done. And the enemy's us in this case, right? And it's our lifestyles and how we built this economy. We have got to undergo systematic change to fix this problem. Within that are great opportunities. Technology, what's going on right now in the tech sector is really exciting. I mean, solar power. One example, okay. Solar power, one penny per kilowatt hour recently in Saudi Arabia bid. I mean, solar power's gonna get so cheap we're gonna figure out how to make hydrogen out of it, probably how to make liquid fuels, maybe even make methane out of it, at least in the temporary situation to solve some of these really difficult to decarbonize sectors. So that's where I get both excited and worried. We're on, you know, three Celsius warming probably right now. Technology's been in that curve a little bit but we're not doing enough politically and that's where I really get worried. The Udall genes kick in here. Our system is not working for us. It's looked like minority government for years and we cannot live under what looks like minority government, Senate filibuster. Majority of the majority rule, which was how the house used housework for a long time which is a minority. They wouldn't pass bills if a majority of the majority didn't support it which is effectively a minority. I mean, we have widespread citizen support for really key things on important things like gun safety with 80% support, we can't get it done. This political system needs to be fixed so that we can solve this huge problem like climate change because having what administration like the Biden administration fix it and then have another administration come in and undo it, isn't gonna work. There's still time for another Udall in politics. It won't be me. I can understand completely. Do we have any more? I think we have time for one more or we'll call it a night. Well, I wanna say thank you so much to the panelists, Dr. Stephanie Mullen, Frank Kinder from Northern Water and Brad Udall. Thank you so much. I know there's a round of applause out there. We'll just do it right here. Yeah. And thanks so much, Justin Beach and the Longmont Museum and KGNU, our sponsor and thanks to all of you out there and we do hope you'll come tomorrow night for the Earth panel. There'll be a big ag, obviously, climate angle to that. And thank you, Susan and thank you all. Thank you all, all of you out there and internet land for joining us. See you tomorrow, same time, same bad channel. Good night. Yes, thank you. I wish I was down there with you all. I feel like I missed out. Thank you for accommodating this. Sounds good. I just got my second vaccine today. So I'm almost ready to go. Thank you. Thank you all. Yeah, thank you for some excellent questions and for, like I said, for accommodating this.