Before we discuss water markets, we need to understand water rights, i.e.,
Clear water rights: This means that people overlying aquifers have a defined but limited right to withdraw water. Without this adjudication of the water in the aquifer, everyone has an incentive to overpump (before a neighbor does), and the aquifer will drop too fast/crash.
Surface water rights (to streams or irrigation canals) need to be specified as consumptive or diverted. If they are consumptive, that means that 100 units of water are taken away and never come back; if they are diverted, that means that 100 units are taken away, but some (unknown) quantity will flow back to the stream or into the ground. Many problems with water rights originate in this distinction, i.e., I cannot sell 100 units of diversion rights if that water is going onto a truck that will leave the area. Even worse, diversion rights "consume" different quantities of water in as place, temperature, crop, irrigation method, etc. changes. That's why they are hardly ever moved around.
Water rights need to be specified as "paper" or "wet", i.e., paper rights may exist on paper (duh!), but they do not exist in reality. Wet rights, OTOH, mean rights to flowing water. The Western US is full of examples of where a river was overallocated and some rights turned out to be paper instead of wet. The original allocation of Colorado River water -- 15 million acre feet -- was based on a flow of over 16 MAF. Unfortunately, it seems that average flow on the Colorado is 14.3 MAF. Oh, and Mexico was supposed to get the extra water. Too bad, amigos.
Bottom Line: Property rights musst be clear before water can be traded.
14 June 2008
Water Rights
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6 comments:
David:
How does water law deal with non-stationary flow rates, such as what we are seeing in the Colorado River and the Appalachacola River (from Atlanta through north Florida to the Gulf of Mexico)? During extended periods of drought, flow rates decrease. Do allocations also decrease proportionally? Or, do our water laws simply increase the income of lawyers as flows decrease?
FC: In the best case, everyone gets athe same % of the higher or lower level. With the Colorado (and other examples), the allocation was in acre-feet, so TROUBLE (and laywers fees) mounted as flows fall.
On the Colorado River, those with "present perfected" water rights get their water first, ahead of everyone else, and their full allocation. This would be the Imperial Irrigation District (2.6 to 3.1 million acre-feet) and a handful of other irrigation districts (Palo Verde & Yuma & Coachella Valley) who get another 500,000 acre-feet or something like that. The IID allocation is more than any other state, more than Las Vegas, more than Arizona. It's huge.
Essentially their water rights were established prior to modern water law. Next in line after them is Metropolitan Water District.
What it means is that IID & others will get all of their water before Metropolitan. If there isn't enough for IID, then Met gets zero.
That is why there is so much focus on IID & it's water.
Earlier this year, the seven states signed some sort of shortage agreement as to what to do if the flows aren't adequate, but this did not affect those with the perfected water rights. I don't think it affected Metropolitan very much either, except that MWD will be allowed to store water in Lake Mead.
We are facing the problem of a legacy of 150 years of statutory and case law on water rights that were predicated on entirely different public policy: settle up the country, develop irrigation systems, prevent "waste". Only in recent years have we begun to value in-stream water. Most water rights holders can not legally transfer their water outside of their native watershed.
A second obstacle to easy water marketing is the issue of "carriage" water; that is to say, you can't deliver only 250 cfs through a canal designed to carry 2,000 cfs; you'll just have a puddle. We simply do not have the facilities in place to permit much more water to be marketed than we do now.
@ Chris: Excellent summary.
@ Philip: I disagree with this: "We simply do not have the facilities in place to permit much more water to be marketed than we do now." It's easy to trade water in "pools" (e.g., Lake Mead or the Sac Delta). It's indeed hard to move bits and pieces through dry canals -- but there are not many of those.
You are right about the Delta and Lake Mead; some people currently receiving water from the Delta pumps could forgo that right in exchange for money, and let the water go elsewhere (leaving legalities, third party impacts, and timing issues aside). That might free up a million acre feet or so. But the gigantic figures thrown around by the self proclaimed experts, lamenting all the water allegedly wasted by "low value" crops? Where and how will that water be gathered and delivered?
As to your last point, there *will* be lots of dry canals if water transfers are implemented in a ham-handed way. If a large percentage of the growers using Delta water sold out, the remaining growers would be saddled with an irrigation system that would require very substantial reconstruction.
I am not against water sales/transfers at all (in fact the entire CVP was made possible because of a water transfer by Miller & Lux in the 1930's), but it is not a magic bullet.
Your comments about just shutting down Westlands are pretty intemperate. If you ever actually saw the place, you would see the most sophisticated irrigation systems in the world, some of the most productive farm land in the world, and enormously valuable economic output, even with today's water disaster; as well as some damn fine people. And, no, I don't farm there.
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