Sustaining the American Southwest is the Colorado River. But demand, damming, diversion, and drought are draining this vital water resource at alarming rates.

The future of water in the region – particularly from the Colorado River – was top of mind at the 10th Annual Eccles Family Rural West Conference, an event organized by the Bill Lane Center for the American West that brings together policymakers, practitioners, and scholars to discuss solutions to urgent problems facing rural Western regions.

“The Colorado River is a critical source of water for Southern California, but its share of that resource is threatened by climate change and population growth in the river’s upper basin,” said Bruce Cain, a professor of political science and the Eccles Family Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West.

Each year, the Rural West Conference rotates across the West to bring Stanford scholars into dialogue with the communities affected by the issues they study.

This year the conference, co-hosted with Arizona State University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, was held March 27 in Tempe, Arizona, a city east of Phoenix.

How the Colorado River Created the Southwest as We Know It
Some have called the 1,450-mile long river – with its vast network of canals, tributaries, and dams – the region’s lifeblood and beating heart: It serves nearly 40 million people and supports countless economies, communities, and ecologies stretching from the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of California.

It flows across seven states – in the upper basin are Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, and in the lower, California, Arizona, and Nevada – and two countries, the U.S. and Mexico, and waters some 5 million acres of farmland.

How its water is distributed rests on an agreement from over a hundred years ago: the Colorado River Compact.

The compact transformed the Southwest, enabling infrastructure like the Hoover Dam and the Glen Canyon Dam to be built. It helped turn dry deserts like the Imperial Valley and Yuma into agricultural oases and made cities like Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Denver, and Phoenix possible.

But more water flows out of the Colorado River than in.

As Andrea K. Gerlak, a geographer from the University of Arizona, explained, when water rights were being decided, it had been a particularly wet season. “The data they had indicated that there was more water than there really was in the river,” said Gerlak.