New Mexico Water Agency Finds Innovative Way to Protect Headwaters

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New Mexico Water Agency Finds Innovative Way to Protect Headwaters

The Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority in New Mexico doesn’t own the land where its water originates, but it just donated $1 million to help protect it.

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In June, New Mexico’s largest water authority pledged $1 million over five years to the Rio Grande Water Fund to protect the headwaters that provide drinking water for about half the state’s population.

“This is a huge deal,” said John Fleck, director of the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program.

The contribution is remarkable for its size, and for the fact that it is a public utility – the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority – investing in lands it doesn’t own.

“That, I think, is just a super-smart investment on the part of the Water Authority,” said Kimery Wiltshire, with Carpe Diem West, a California-based consultancy that works on conservation issues across the Western states.

The Rio Grande Water Fund is a public-private partnership started in 2014 that gathers 50 foundations, private businesses, water utilities and federal, Pueblo, state and private landowners.

The fund’s goal for the next 20 years is to protect San Juan-Chama and Rio Grande watershed lands from catastrophic forest fires by funding forest restoration projects on about 600,000 forested acres, namely through thinning and prescribed burns.

That, in turn, protects the water downstream. The project was shepherded into existence by the Nature Conservancy, which is creating similar partnership funds across the U.S. West and internationally.

The $1 million contribution from the Water Authority is one of the biggest for the Rio Grande Water Fund to date. In many ways, it reflects remarkable public and political foresight.

This February, the Water Authority unveiled “Water 2120,” a management strategy that peers 100 years into the future on behalf of the people of Albuquerque and Bernalillo County. The goal is to predict future water needs, figure out where the water can come from and how to protect those resources.

Historically, water agencies in the American West operated from a viewpoint that water “was just showing up in their service area. And they didn’t even have to think about what happened upstream,” Wiltshire said. “That started to shift pretty dramatically in the past seven to eight years,” as climate change has increased the size, intensity and frequency of fires across the West.

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