Colorado River

The Colorado River through the Grand Canyon National Park holds lessons for managing an essential and diminishing resource in a rapidly warming climate.

Governor Mark Gordon said the Colorado River shortage focuses attention on water storage concerns in Wyoming.

Seven years ago, a pulse of water on the Colorado River at the U.S.-Mexico border temporarily reconnected it to the Pacific Ocean. Scientists used the so-called "pulse flow" to study what plant and animal life returned to the desiccated delta along with water.

A massive new infrastructure bill is slowly moving its way through Congress this summer. But a coalition of elected officials, farmers, conservationists and tribal leaders want to make sure it doesn’t include new big pipelines or dams along the parched Colorado River.

Another dry year has left the waterway that supplies 40 million people in the Southwest parched. A prolonged 21-year warming and drying trend is pushing the nation’s two largest reservoirs to record lows. For the first time this summer, the federal government will declare a shortage.

Emergency water releases from reservoirs upstream of Lake Powell have begun to preserve the nation's second-largest reservoir’s ability to generate hydroelectric power.

As drought strains much of the state, and tens of thousands of newcomers move to the busy Front Range each year, towns like Severance are thinking about growth – and water usage – in ways that they never have before.

As the Western U.S. steels itself for another summer of dry, fire-prone conditions, some are turning their attention to recovering from last season's blazes.

The conversation around water speculation has been heating up in Colorado in recent months. At the direction of state lawmakers, a work group has been meeting regularly to explore ways to strengthen the state’s anti-speculation law.

Dry conditions are the worst they’ve been in almost 20 years across the Colorado River watershed, which acts as the drinking and irrigation water supply for 40 million people in the American Southwest.