New Colorado River Rules Buy Time. They Don’t Solve the Crisis

The Colorado River has been telling us something for more than half a century, and this year the message got harder to ignore. In the 1960s, the river stopped flowing regularly into its delta, once a thriving 2-million-acre wetland where the river met the Gulf of California. Today, Lake Powell and Lake Mead—the two largest reservoirs that buffer the system against drought—are at their lowest combined levels since Lake Powell began filling. Water Year 2026 was among the driest of the last century.  

The message is clear: we are using more Colorado River water than the river can reliably provide. As warming continues to reduce its flows, using less water is not preparation for some future crisis. It is a requirement of the basin we have now. 

In this context, the U.S. Department of Interior finalized new operating guidelines to replace rules dating to 2007. It's worth understanding what these guidelines actually do—and what they don't—because the gap between the two says a lot about where the basin stands right now. 

What the framework does 

The seven Colorado River Basin states (Colo., N.M., Utah and Wyo. in the Upper Basin and Ariz., Calif. and Nev. in the Lower Basin) spent years trying to negotiate a long-term, consensus-based approach for the post-2026 era. They couldn’t, which forced the hand of the federal government (which operates the two big dams that form Lake Powell and Lake Mead). The federal plan is a 10-year "Decision Framework" covering 2027 through 2036, paired with detailed operating guidelines for the first two years, 2027 and 2028.  The structure provides near-term certainty while allowing operations to adjust as actual hydrology, rather than hoped-for hydrology, unfolds. It also gives the seven states continued opportunities to reach agreement. 

The first two-year plan calls for the Lower Basin states collectively to take an annual shortage of 1.25 million acre-feet, and to conserve another 0.7 million acre-feet from 2026 through 2028 (with the understanding that federal dollars will compensate water users for conservation). While this more than doubles the maximum cuts required under the outgoing guidelines, the Lower Basin states’ Colorado River water supply will be greater than their actual water uses in recent years. Just weeks after the Record of Decision was adopted, the United States and Mexico announced Minute 334, a new two-year binational agreement that commits the two countries to sharing Colorado River shortages and adds a 0.25 million acre-foot shortage for Mexico. For both the near- and long-term under the U.S. federal framework, Upper Basin states’ contributions remain voluntary. 

Notably, the framework is not a conservative approach to managing scarcity. The guidelines are built to maximize water available for delivery, which correspondingly reduces the odds that the reservoirs actually refill. That's a trade-off, and it was a deliberate one—the reductions and voluntary conservation commitments across the basin represent what the states were willing to accept, rather than what the reservoirs—or the river itself—need to recover. 

The risk that remains is significant. If the next couple of years are as dry and warm as recent years, Lake Mead could reach day zero—where Hoover Dam will not be able to release more than a relative trickle of Colorado River water to farms, cities, and Tribes in California, Arizona, Nevada, and northwest Mexico. The longer-term framework allows for shortages as deep as 3 million acre-feet in a single year, but even that is not a guarantee of reservoir protection through a run of bad hydrology. It does go meaningfully further than what the Lower Basin states said at the start of negotiations that they could accommodate—which is its own kind of progress, even if it isn't the durable, long-term solution the basin ultimately needs. 

Uncertainty 

Within days of the federal government’s adoption of a Record of Decision for the new guidelines, Nevada filed a lawsuit against the Department of the Interior, arguing the plan places the full weight of mandatory reductions on the Lower Basin while asking nothing binding of the Upper Basin states. That litigation now hovers over the basin as an added variable, one more source of uncertainty layered onto an already uncertain system. Many speculate that additional lawsuits may be filed.  

Where Audubon stands 

As a conservation organization focused on birds across the Americas, we are not in the business of telling states how to divide their water. We care about the river and the basin as a whole, and Colorado River management works for people and for birds only if the states can find a way to share the water without breaking it. 

Consensus matters, independent of where the lines get drawn. The states are stuck with each other through the shrinking Colorado River they all depend on. And they have more to gain from agreement than from years of litigation and brinkmanship—even when agreement means each side must compromise. The alternative isn't a better deal for anyone; it's more uncertainty, which is its own cost. 

One area where the federal guidelines take a step forward is establishing a pool of conserved water in Lake Mead to provide Colorado River Basin Tribes with water for settlements or to mitigate shortages to Tribes. That’s a meaningful step in the right direction as Tribes, which are sovereigns with treaty-based water rights, have often not been able to benefit from these rights, and are newly at risk of shortages. 

We also see that this round of guidelines does not meaningfully center environmental needs. That's not a surprise: when decision-makers must manage from crisis to crisis—dead pool in the nation's two largest reservoirs is not a hypothetical anymore—there's little bandwidth left for the river's ecological function. Healthy watersheds, forests, floodplains, and river systems are foundational to water reliability. Unlike man-made infrastructure, they support long-term water security and improve in value over time. Deprioritizing these nature-based solutions doesn't defer costs; it compounds them.  

With conservation partners, Audubon proposed terms for the new guidelines that give federal dam managers greater flexibility to respond to the river’s ecosystem and species needs as well as infrastructure protection and hydropower generation. Conservation organizations in 2007 proposed “Conservation Before Shortage” which suggested the use of voluntary, compensated reductions as an alternative to forced reductions for water users least able to accommodate them. Ignored at the outset, this proposal proved over time to be a major solution for the federal government and states on the Colorado River. We remain hopeful that management solutions we identified for post-2026 will be considered as needs mount. We are also pleased to see that Minute 334, the U.S.-Mexico Colorado River agreement, includes provisions to sustain recently restored habitat in the Colorado River Delta.  

The conservation opportunity 

Here's what makes me optimistic: the basin is nowhere near having exhausted its practical options. Enormous potential remains for water conservation throughout the entire Colorado River Basin that doesn't require anyone to give up their way of life. What these projects and programs require is investment that mostly has not happened yet, in places where water supply still feels comfortable enough (because users have senior rights or are otherwise shielded from shortages) that conservation is not yet urgent. 

Agricultural infrastructure upgrades—lining canals, automating delivery systems, adopting more efficient irrigation or switching crops—can cut water use substantially while improving farm profitability. Urban water reuse and recycling can stretch municipal supplies further than most cities have pushed them. At the same time, investments in the Colorado River Basin’s resilience can reduce the risk of fires that damage watersheds and threaten water supply and storage infrastructure, increase the basin’s natural storage to replace what’s lost as snowpack diminishes, and help protect and restore habitats for threatened birds and wildlife. 

Notwithstanding the legal challenge, life goes on. One way or another, the federal government will continue to manage the Colorado River’s big reservoirs with implications for water supplies. Farmers, cities, Tribes and the river itself continue to rely on a water supply that is shrinking. While the states contemplate their conflicts, they should all agree on the value of investment in water conservation. How quickly they can move in that direction will matter as much as any rules in a Record of Decision.