After Lake Mead’s water levels reached historic lows two years ago, the Colorado River’s water supply is much better this summer, but the improvement is not enough to prevent further cuts this year.

While conservation efforts and two harsh winters have improved the near-term forecast for the Colorado River, Lake Mead is currently 33 percent full, so cuts are likely this summer, Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton said Wednesday in Las Vegas.

“We will most likely see a reduction in the amount of water. But the good news is that we are no longer where we were two years ago and the lake is doing better,” Touton said.

In 2021 and 2022, levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead—the country’s two largest reservoirs—fell below critical levels, prompting emergency water shutoffs in Nevada, Arizona and California and federal actions to protect the lakes.

A prolonged drought of historic proportions on the Colorado River has severely impacted the region’s water supply, but recent water conservation efforts have federal, state and local policymakers cautiously optimistic.

During the second annual Southern Nevada Water Summit on Wednesday at the Springs Preserve, Democratic U.S. Rep. Susie Lee highlighted $141 million in federal funding for 20 water projects across Nevada under the bipartisan infrastructure bill, including funding for the Las Vegas Wash, which sends millions of gallons of treated wastewater to Lake Mead.

In 2022, Congress also passed the Inflation Reduction Act to provide $4 billion in funding to the Bureau of Reclamation to alleviate drought in the Western United States, with a focus on the Colorado River basin. These funds have already secured 1.7 million acre-feet of water savings through 2026, when current river management policies expire.

“We have been able to stabilize the system in the short term and are now focused on what this river will look like in the future, in the next decade, in the next two decades, knowing that climate change is real,” Touton said.

Touton praised the voluntary efforts of the states in the Colorado River basin to reduce their water consumption and emphasized an agreement of the Imperial Irrigation District in California on Monday decided to leave up to 700,000 acre-feet of water in Lake Mead through 2026.

A year of good water levels for the Colorado River in 2022 and 2023 gave the states a few more years of stability, but the river – which supplies water to 40 million people in seven states and parts of Mexico – was on the verge of collapse, federal water managers say.

“We were really on the brink of disaster if we had another dry year,” said Shana Tighi, a hydrologist with Reclamation. “Mother Nature was kind to us, and Congress was very kind to us, and those two things combined allowed us to get there voluntarily.”

In 2022, federal agencies gave Western states the option of either reaching consensus to voluntarily reduce water use or being forced to do so by the federal government. California, Arizona and Nevada agreed to collectively reduce water use by at least 3 million acre-feet by the end of 2026.

While the lower and upper Colorado River basins are each allocated 7.5 million acre-feet of water, for a total of 15 million acre-feet, officials admit that only 12.4 million acre-feet of water flows out of the river annually and that water volumes continue to decline due to climate change. Federal hydraulic studies show that water volumes are likely to decline by another 3 million acre-feet over the next decade.

“We need to find a way to deal with the really big bottlenecks caused by climate change,” Touton said.

Based on Reclamation’s latest hydraulic models, Lake Mead’s water level could drop to 1,050 feet by the end of 2025, a Stage 2 water shortage that would require further protection efforts, Tighi said.

“We are not out of the woods yet,” Tighi said. “These conservation programs work. Yes, it is painful, but it works and it preserves a very important and vital water source for this entire area.”