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Immigration and border security will be the likely focus of U.S.-Mexico relations under the new Trump administration. But there also is a growing water crisis along the U.S.Mexico border that affects tens of millions of people on both sides, and it can only be managed if the two governments work together. Climate change is shrinking surface and groundwater supplies in the southwestern U.S. Higher air temperatures are increasing evaporation rates from rivers and streams and intensifying drought. Mexico is also experiencing multiyear droughts and heat waves. Growing water use is already overtaxing limited supplies from nearly all of the regions cross-border rivers, streams and aquifers. Many of these sources are contaminated with agricultural pollutants, untreated waste and other substances, further reducing the usability of available water. As Texas-based scholars who study the legal and scientific aspects of water policy, we know that communities, farms and businesses in both countries rely on these scarce water supplies. In our view, water conditions on the border have changed so much that the current legal framework for managing them is inadequate. Unless both nations recognize this fact, we believe that water problems in the region are likely to worsen, and supplies may never recover to levels seen as recently as the 1950s. Although the U.S. and Mexico have moved to address these concerns by updating the 1944 water treaty, these steps are not long-term solutions. The Rio Grande flows south from Colorado and forms the 1,250-mile (2,000-kilometer) Texas-Mexico border. [Image: Kmusser/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA] Growing demand, shrinking supply The U.S.-Mexico border region is mostly arid, with water coming from a few rivers and an unknown amount of groundwater. The main rivers that cross the border are the Colorado and the Rio Grande two of the most water-stressed systems in the world. The Colorado River provides water to more than 44 million people, including seven U.S. and two Mexican states, 29 Indian tribes and 5.5 million acres of farmland. Only about 10% of its total flow reaches Mexico. The river once emptied into the Gulf of California, but now so much water is withdrawn along its course that since the 1960s it typically peters out in the desert. The Rio Grande supplies water to roughly 15 million people, including 22 Indian tribes, three U.S. and four Mexican states and 2.8 million irrigated acres. It forms the 1,250-mile (2,000-kilometer) Texas-Mexico border, winding from El Paso in the west to the Gulf of Mexico in the east. Other rivers that cross the border include the Tijuana, San Pedro, Santa Cruz, New and Gila. These are all significantly smaller and have less economic impact than the Colorado and the Rio Grande. At least 28 aquifers underground rock formations that contain water also traverse the border. With a few exceptions, very little information on these shared resources exists. One thing that is known is that many of them are severely overtapped and contaminated. The Colorado River flows through seven U.S. states and crosses into Mexico at the Arizona-California border. [Image: USGS] Nonetheless, reliance on aquifers is growing as surface water supplies dwindle. Some 80% of groundwater used in the border region goes to agriculture. The rest is used by farmers and industries, such as automotive and appliance manufacturers. Over 10 million people in 30 cities and communities throughout the border region rely on groundwater for domestic use. Many communities, including Ciudad Juarez; the sister cities of Nogales in both Arizona and Sonora; and the sister cities of Columbus in New Mexico and Puerto Palomas in Chihuahua, get all or most of their fresh water from these aquifers. View this post on Instagram A post shared by NOAA Climate.gov (@noaaclimate) A booming region About 30 million people live within 100 miles (160 kilometers) of the border on both sides. Over the next 30 years, that figure is expected to double. Municipal and industrial water use throughout the region is also expected to increase. In Texas lower Rio Grande Valley, municipal use alone could more than double by 2040. At the same time, as climate change continues to worsen, scientists project that snowmelt will decrease and evaporation rates will increase. The Colorado Rivers baseflow the portion of its volume that comes from groundwater, rather than from rain and snow may decline by nearly 30% in the next 30 years. Precipitation patterns across the region are projected to be uncertain and erratic for the foreseeable future. This trend will fuel more extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods, which could cause widespread harm to crops, industrial activity, human health and the environment. Further stress comes from growth and development. Both the Colorado River and Rio Grande are tainted by pollutants from agricultural, municipal and industrial sources. Cities on both sides of the border, especially on the Mexican side, have a long history of dumping untreated sewage into the Rio Grande. Of the 55 water treatment plants located along the border, 80% reported ongoing maintenance, capacity and operating problems as of 2019. Drought across the border region is already stoking domestic and bilateral tensions. Competing water users are struggling to meet their needs, and the U.S. and Mexico are straining to comply with treaty obligations for sharing water. View this post on Instagram A post shared by SOURCE Global (@sourcewater) Cross-border water politics Mexico and the United States manage water allocations in the border region mainly under two treaties: a 1906 agreement focused on the Upper Rio Grande Basin and a 1944 treaty covering the Colorado River and Lower Rio Grande. Under the 1906 treaty, the U.S. is obligated to deliver 60,000 acre-feet of water to Mexico where the Rio Grande reaches the border. This target may be reduced during droughts, which have occurred frequently in recent decades. An acre-foot is enough water to flood an acre of land 1 foot deep about 325,000 gallons (1.2 million liters). Allocations under the 1944 treaty are more complicated. The U.S. is required to deliver 1.5 million acre-feet of Colorado River water to Mexico at the border but as with the 1906 treaty, reductions are allowed in cases of extraordinary drought. Until the mid-2010s, the U.S. met its full obligation each year. Since then, however, regional drought and climate change have severely reduced the Colorado Rivers flow, requiring substantial allocation reductions for both the U.S. and Mexico. In 2025, states in the U.S. section of the lower Colorado River basin will see a reduction of over 1 million acre-feet from prior years. Mexicos allocation will decline by approximately 280,500 acre-feet under the 1944 treaty. This agreement provides each nation with designated fractions of flows from the Lower Rio Grande and specific tributaries. Regardless of water availability or climatic conditions, Mexico also is required to deliver to the U.S. a minimum of 1,750,000 acre-feet of water from six named tributaries, averaged over five-year cycles. If Mexico falls short in one cycle, it can make up the deficit in the next five-year cycle, but cannot delay repayment further. Since the 1990s, extraordinary droughts have caused Mexico to miss its delivery obligations three times. Although Mexico repaid its water debts in subsequent cycles, these shortfalls raised diplomatic tensions that led to last-minute negotiations and large-scale water transfers from Mexico to the U.S. Mexican farmers in Lower Rio Grande irrigation districts who had to shoulder these cuts felt betrayed. In 2020, they protested, confronting federal soldiers and temporarily seizing control of a dam. U.S. President Donald Trump and Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum clearly appreciate the political and economic importance of the border region. But if water scarcity worsens, it could supplant other border priorities. In our view, the best way to prevent this would be for the two countries to recognize that conditions are deteriorating and update the existing cross-border governance regime so that it reflects todays new water realities. Gabriel Eckstein is a professor of law at Texas A&M University. Rosario Sanchez is a senior research scientist at the Texas Water Resources Institute, Texas A&M University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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If you scroll through your old photos from the mid-2010sthe golden era of Snapchatchances are a fair number of those pictures feature a dog filter or a flower crown. Now, nearly a decade later, one TikToker has now been struck by a unique dilemma. “Your daughter wants to see her baby pictures, but she was born in 2016, user @themkidzmama3 posted in a video that has since gone viral. @themkidzmama3 I saw another creator do this and I realized my daughger was a victim of the snap chat filter era too #fyp #daughtersoftiktok #filtered #momsbelike #momsover30 #motherdaughterlove original sound – Feez As the Adele’s 2015 hit “Hello” plays, a slideshow of her daughters baby photos flashes across the screen. Each photo uses a different filter, from the dog ears to a Sia wig. It’s undeniable: Her daughter is a product of the Snapchat filter era. There was a time when baby photos were professionally staged and displayed proudly in parents’ homes. But with smartphones and social media parents now have the ability to snap hundreds of photos a day (not all of them keepsake-worthy). The TikTok video gained over 26.5 million views, with other parents’ relating to Snapchat filters of that era. “There’s gonna be money in defiltering apps in the future, one user wrote in the comments. Kids nowadays wont get photo albums, theyll get an icloud folder, another added. Following the virality of @themkidzmama3’s video, another mom jumped on the trend, showing off her daughters baby photos from the same era. “I have nothing to say for myself apart from Im sorry my princess. A true victim of the Snapchat era,” she wrote in the caption of the video. @miaboardman0 I have nothing to say for myself apart from Im sorry my princess. A true victim of the Snapchat era original sound – Feez Her slideshow includes a face-swap photo featuring mom-and-daughter and a picture with the ever-present flower crown. “The flower crown was a universal baby photo for 2016-2017,” one person wrote in the comments. Another confessed: The amount of photos I have of my baby as a chicken nugget.
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There was a time when few people in the coastal Pakistani city of Gwadar understood what climate change was. After a decade of extreme weather, many more do. Rain battered Gwadar for almost 30 consecutive hours last February. Torrents washed out roads, bridges, and lines of communication, briefly cutting the peninsula town off from the rest of Pakistan. Homes look like bombs have struck them and drivers swerve to avoid craters where asphalt used to be. Gwadar is in Balochistan, an arid, mountainous, and vast province in Pakistans southwest that has searing summers and harsh winters. The city, with about 90,000 people, is built on sand dunes and bordered by the Arabian Sea on three sides, at a low elevation that makes it vulnerable to climate change in a country that has already seen its share of catastrophe from it. Its no less than an island nation situation, warned Gwadar-based hydrologist Pazeer Ahmed. Many low-lying areas in the town will be partially or completely submerged if the sea level continues to rise. The sea, once a blessing for Gwadars fishing and domestic tourism sectors, has become an existential threat to lives and livelihoods. Warming oceans mean bigger and more powerful waves, and those waves get whipped higher by summer monsoon winds. Warmer air holds more moistureabout 7% more per degree Celsius (4% per degree Fahrenheit)and that means more big rain events. Waves have become more violent due to the rising sea temperatures and eroded beaches, said Abdul Rahim, deputy environment director at Gwadar Development Authority. The tidal actions and patterns have changed. Hundreds of homes have been washed away. It is very alarming. Melting glaciers contribute to rising sea levels, another cause of coastal erosion. The sea level at Karachi rose almost 8 inches (almost 20 centimeters) between 1916 and 2016, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Its projected to rise another half-inch (about 1.3 centimeters) by 2040. In areas near Gwadar, like Pishukan and Ganz, waves have swallowed up mosques, schools, and settlements. There are gashes in the cliffs at the popular picnic spot of Sunset Park, and rocks have cascaded onto the shore. Beaches run flat for dozens of kilometers because no structures remain on it. Authorities have built seawalls from stone or concrete to hold back saltwater intrusion. But they’re a small solution to a massive problem as Gwadars people and businesses are fighting climate change on different fronts. Saltwater pools on government land, salt crystals glistening in the sunshine. In the Shado Band neighbourhood, former local councillor Qadir Baksh fretted about water seeping up through the ground and into his courtyard every day, held at bay only by regular pumping. Dozens of houses have the same problem, he said. Officials, including Ahmed and Rahim, said changes in land use and unauthorized building are worsening flooding. Locals said some major construction projects have destroyed traditional drainage pathways. Gwadar is the centerpiece of a massive Chinese-led initiative to create an overland route between its western Xinjiang region and the Arabian Sea through Gwadar. Hundreds of millions of dollars have poured into the town to create a deep seaport, an international airport, expressways and other infrastructure. The more sensitive projects, especially the port, are tightly secured by the Pakistani military, out of sight and off-limits to the public. But there is no proper sewage or drainage system for residents despite a decade of foreign investment, and Gwadars porosity, high water table, rising sea levels, and heavier rainfall are rocket fuel for the towns vulnerability. There’s nowhere for the water to go. In the past when it rained, the water disappeared up to 10 days later, said Baksh. But the rain that came last year hasnt gone. The water rises from the ground with such speed it will reach the four walls of my home if we dont run the generator every day to extract it. Officials say its because of climate change but, whatever it is, were suffering. Gwadars fishing community is also hurting. Catches are smaller, native fish are disappearing, and migration patterns and fishing seasons have changed, said Ahmed and Rahim. There is also algae bloom and the invasion of unwanted marine species like pufferfish. Illegal fishing and foreign trawlers are responsible for a few of these things, but its mostly rising sea temperatures. People have migrated from places like Dasht and Kulanch because of water scarcity. What agriculture there was in Gwadar’s surrounding areas is vanishing due to loss of farmland and livestock deaths, according to locals. It’s part of a wider pattern in which Pakistans farmers are seeing declining crop yields and increasing crop diseases due to climate extremes, particularly floods, droughts and heat waves, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There are heat waves and dust storms in Gwadar, said Ahmed. But the main impact of climate change here is that there is too much water and not enough of it. If nothing is done to address this problem, we will have no option but to retreat. The Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find APs standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org. Riazat Butt, Associated Press Mary Katherine Wildeman, Associated Press data journalist, contributed to this report.
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