Policy Debates over the Southern Nevada Water Authority Groundwater Development Project: Beneficial Uses of Water in a Desert

Welsh, Lisa W.; Endter‐Wada, Joanna

doi:10.1353/jsw.2017.0014

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 25 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Estimates suggest that the monetary value of transferring agricultural water rights may be twice that of continued crop production (Dozier et al, 2017). Efforts in Colorado and Nevada have proposed agricultural fallowing by purchasing and repurposing rural irrigation water for municipal use (Thorvaldson and Pritchett, 2006;Welsh and Endter-Wada, 2017). Such scenarios frequently require out-of-basin water transfers, altering natural water cycles and impacting the integrity of riparian ecosystems (Zhuang, 2016).…”

Section: Emerging Threatsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beneficial ‘inefficiencies’ of western ranching: Flood-irrigated hay production sustains wetland systems by mimicking historic hydrologic processes

Donnelly,

Jensco,

Kimball

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Ranching in the American West has long relied on riparian ecosystems to grow grass-hay to feed livestock in winter and during drought. Producers seasonally flood grasslands for hay production using stream diversions and low-tech flood-irrigation on riparian floodplains. Inundation mimics natural processes that sustain riparian vegetation and recharge groundwater. The recent doubling in use of more efficient irrigation approaches, such as center-pivot sprinklers, threatens to accelerate climate change impacts by unintentionally decoupling more inefficient, traditional practices that sustain riparian systems. To address this information gap, we developed an exhaustive spatial inventory of grass-hay production and combined it with monthly surface water distributions modeled from satellite data. Surface water data were classified by wetland hydroperiod and used to estimate the proportion of wetlands supported by grass-hay production in the Intermountain West, USA. Elevation and proportion of grass-hay relative to other irrigated lands were enumerated to examine differences in their positions and abundance within landscapes. Lastly, we overlaid the delineated grass-hay wetlands with LANDFIRE pre-Euro-American Settings layer to quantify the efficacy of flood irrigation in mimicking the conservation of historical riparian processes. Findings suggest that inefficient grass-hay irrigation mirrored the timing of natural hydrology, concentrating ∼93% of flooded grasslands in historical riparian ecosystems, affirming that at large scales, this ranching practice, in part, mimics floodplain processes sustaining wetlands and groundwater recharge. Despite representing only 2.5% of irrigated lands, grass-hay operations supported a majority (58%)of temporary wetlands, a rare and declining habitat for wildlife in the Intermountain West. Tolerance for colder temperatures confined grass-hay production to upper watershed reaches where higher value crops are constrained by growing degree days. This novel understanding of grass-hay agroecology highlights the vital role of working ranches in the resilience and stewardship of riparian systems.

show abstract

Section: Emerging Threatsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beneficial ‘inefficiencies’ of western ranching: Flood-irrigated hay production sustains wetland systems by mimicking historic hydrologic processes

Donnelly,

Jensco,

Kimball

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In addition to signifying modernization and development, big water infrastructure is constructed to underwrite capital accumulation and economic growth (Furlong, 2020;Swyngedouw, 2004;Welsh & Endter-Wada, 2017). Infrastructural development reproduces political economic inequalities along multiple axes of social difference, including gender (Siemiatycki et al, 2019), leading to new forms of political and economic differentiation (Bridge et al, 2018).…”

Section: Uneven Development and Accumulation By Dispossessionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This growth (e.g., in dams, canals, reservoirs, pumping stations, rural-urban water transfers and centralized urban or rural water-supply systems) is occurring in China (Crow-Miller, Webber, & Rogers, 2017;Kaiman, 2014), India (Iyer, 2012), Ghana (Han & Webber, 2020), East and Southeast Asia (Harlan & Hennig, 2022;Rogers et al, 2023), Central Asia (Menga, 2017) and throughout South America (Gerlak et al, 2020;McCulligh & Tetreault, 2017;Mills-Novoa & Hermoza, 2017;Roman, 2017). Even the western United States, which has been described as a completely plumbed hydraulic system, is witnessing the construction of new canals to transfer water out of irrigation and into Las Vegas (Welsh & Endter-Wada, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geographies of big water infrastructure: Contemporary insights and future research opportunities

Birkenholtz

2023

Geography Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Largescale “big” water infrastructure is once again at the forefront of the global developmentalist agenda and is receiving attendant scholarly attention. Given this parallel growth, now is time to take stock of current scholarly contributions and explore opportunities for future research. In this paper, I review recent developments and insights gained from research on big water infrastructure, and water infrastructure studies, generally, to highlight six key threads of current scholarship. These include the production of big water infrastructure as: (1) a temporal process embedded in colonialism and ecological modernization; (2) infused with infrastructural knowledges, practices and subjectivities; (3) a spatial‐geopolitical process; (4) subject to infrastructural and environmental material characteristics and capacities; (5) producing uneven development and enabling accumulation by dispossession; and (6) a contested process of differentiated socio‐material resistance. In reviewing this literature, I argue that these six research strands form key analytic considerations that could be employed by others studying the nexus between water development, political ecological change, and infrastructure. Before concluding, in the final section of the paper I present additional and ongoing future research directions including big water infrastructure as it intersects with socially differentiated human intimacy and embodiment, indigenous and racialized forms of dispossession, and financialization.

show abstract

“…Garrick and Hall (2014) argue that the water security concept “seeks to address disparate dimensions of water‐related risk in an integrated way,” and that framing different water challenges in terms of water security extends “across all dimensions of water, the full range of impacts, and indirect consequences and spill‐overs up to a global scale.” Scale considerations are imperative in assessing the water security implications of reallocation. Adverse outcomes from water transfers in parts of the U.S. West historically (Reisner 1993; Sanchez 2014) have demonstrated reallocation’s impact on water security at societal scales beyond the participants in the water transfer and have also led to recent public pushback where rural to urban transfers have been considered (Welsh and Endter‐Wada 2017a, b). Scale issues in water bank governance can emerge from institutional design factors and the jurisdictional extent granted to the managing entity.…”

Section: Connecting Water Security and Water Reallocationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Accumulating Interest in Water Banks: Assessing Their Role in Mitigating Water Insecurities

Carney

Endter‐Wada

Welsh

2021

J American Water Resour Assoc

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Reallocation is often promoted as a response to water security dilemmas in the western United States. Water banking is a form of reallocation utilized in several states to facilitate temporary water rights transfers. This article frames and examines water banking’s potential influences on water security from a hydro‐social perspective through a case analysis of water banking policy in Utah. It analyzes the challenges of integrating the market‐based economic incentives of water banks with the legal precedents of the prior appropriation doctrine to reallocate water in overappropriated basins with hydrologically interdependent uses. Key‐informant interviews and focus groups were used to examine water security’s meaning to stakeholders and analyze how water banking could affect the water security of disparate users and uses at multiple scales. Stakeholders predominately saw water security as assurance in water quantity, but water security was further equated by participants with the legal protections afforded by water rights. Multiple complexities in water bank implementation are to be expected when multiscalar contexts are considered, including societal and hydrologic tradeoffs in settings with diverse and interconnected interests. Our research shows that examining the potential ramifications of water banking policy through stakeholder perspectives can reveal nuanced insights on individual and collective water security issues not only within Utah but other arid regions in general.

show abstract

Policy Debates over the Southern Nevada Water Authority Groundwater Development Project: Beneficial Uses of Water in a Desert

Cited by 7 publications

References 25 publications

Beneficial ‘inefficiencies’ of western ranching: Flood-irrigated hay production sustains wetland systems by mimicking historic hydrologic processes

Beneficial ‘inefficiencies’ of western ranching: Flood-irrigated hay production sustains wetland systems by mimicking historic hydrologic processes

Geographies of big water infrastructure: Contemporary insights and future research opportunities

The Accumulating Interest in Water Banks: Assessing Their Role in Mitigating Water Insecurities

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About