One of the biggest and most important challenges facing New Mexico in the coming years will be how climate change affects water availability in the state. That was one of the key messages from a panel discussion hosted by the NM Political Report on Thursday as part of its News and Brew live event (…)

One of the biggest and most important challenges facing New Mexico in the coming years will be to address the impacts of climate change on the state’s water supply.

This was one of the key messages of a panel discussion hosted by NM Political Report on Thursday as part of its live event series “News and Brew”.

NM Political Report Environmental reporter Hannah Grover moderated a discussion with Daniel Timmons, Wild Rivers program director at Wild Earth Guardians, and Page Pegram, director of the Rio Grande office of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission.

“One way or another, we need to reduce the amount of water in irrigated agriculture,” Timmons said of New Mexico’s annual water deficit. He said the current process of “trying to do this on an annual basis” will not solve the problem.

He said this must be done in a “smart” and “fair” way, including finding more low-water-use crop species for farmers.

Pegram said there are several tools to address the problem, some that could be deployed immediately, others that would require other measures.

“We can manage our reservoirs differently,” she said.

She noted that reservoirs in the higher and cooler northern regions of New Mexico would be more efficient than Elephant Butte, where evaporation is high. Another option is storing water underground in aquifers.

“There is no evaporation underground,” she said.

Changing which aquifer can store which water would require an act of Congress.

She said the state is committed to working with all stakeholders to reduce water use in New Mexico.

“If that means making agreements to address water scarcity, then we are determined to do so in a fair and equitable way,” she said.

The federal government is heavily involved in water issues throughout the Western United States, including New Mexico. The largest part of this is the Rio Grande Compact, which the federal government ratified in 1939 as an agreement to divide the Rio Grande’s waters between Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas.

In recent years this has become a bone of contention and Texas filed a lawsuit against New Mexico.

“The lawsuit wasn’t even about the contract itself, but about what happens outside of the contract,” Pegram said. The issue involved groundwater extraction south of Elephant Butte; the water stored at Elephant Butte is considered Texas water.

The three states reached an agreement, but the federal government intervened and declared that it had to be involved in the process. At the beginning of the year, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the federal government.

“Now we’re almost back to square one. It’s kind of ridiculous. It’s a ridiculous predicament,” Pegram said.

She pointed out that the state currently owes 128,000 acre-feet of debt to Texas and that debt is growing. Once that debt reaches 200,000 acre-feet, New Mexico will be in even more trouble.

One problem is that New Mexico handles water differently than other Western states, Timmons said.

“The state engineer has never enforced water rights in the middle Rio Grande,” Timmons said, adding that the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District has never proven how much water it is entitled to.

Pegram agreed, but said, “Just wait.”

The panel discussed other topics, including the drying up of the Rio Grande, the role of sedimentation in the Rio Grande ecosystem, and the impact of snowpack versus monsoon on water issues.