Water Resources Professional Project Reports

Document Type

Report

Publication Date

Summer 2023

Abstract

The Environmental Water Leasing Program (EWLP) is a federally-funded collaborative effort of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation that has paid irrigators in the Middle Rio Grande to temporarily lease water rights and forgo their water use so that it may be used to provide environmental flows for the endangered Rio Grande Silvery Minnow. The program operates in a sometimes socially contentious context, in a region with an overallocated, legally constrained water system, to offer much needed water management flexibility. While dynamic fallowing payments for ecosystem services programs like the EWLP are common policy adaptations to water scarcity and ecosystem degradation that are scaling up significantly due to water shortages and climate change, the program is unique for operating in an unadjudicated, relatively unmetered basin and implementing a shortage sharing principle. This paper looks at the program’s first three years, 2020 - 2022, to document the EWLP’s rules and design, examine participation, survey, and water delivery data to describe the benefits it offers to participants while delivering water to habitat locations for the endangered Minnow. The paper then outlines a policy evaluation framework that would model how the distribution of the program’s benefits, costs, and externalities will vary depending on the water year for all parties affected by the program. Conversations with program administrators and local experts and a review of program data and relevant literatures inform this paper’s multidisciplinary and multi-perspective approach to discussing the EWLP. In light of the range of outcomes the program produces, policy recommendations are offered to refine program design by including land management, monitoring, and verification practices and produce further local research to address unknowns. As the program continues to learn and evolve, this paper hopes to provide compelling evidence for the suggestions it offers as well as a common basis for community discussion.

Keywords

Environmental Water Leasing Program, Middle Rio Grande, water rights, silvery minnow

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