As climate change drives drier winters and shrinking snowmelt across the West, Southern California and Arizona are rushing to diversify their water supplies — investing in recycling, storage and Colorado River imports to guard against another crippling drought.
With fire season approaching, public officials in SoCal are debating not only whether the region has enough water to battle potential blazes like the one in Pacific Palisades, but also whether supplies will be sufficient in the coming months and years to meet basic drinking needs.
SoCal’s tenuous access to water is tethered to the California Aqueduct in the north and to the Colorado River Aqueduct in the east, which looms large as a possible new source for potable supply serving the California communities.
To make sure customers are not solely dependent on the upstate Bay-Delta, State Water Project source, Metropolitan Water District and its 26 Southern California member agencies announced in July that construction will begin on a new series of pipes and pumps that will allow water from the Colorado River to be pushed into local communities that previously haven’t been able to tap into it.
“Two years ago, when State Water Project deliveries were severely curtailed because of the record-breaking drought, these communities — home to nearly 7 million people — did not have the water they needed to meet demands,” Metropolitan board chair Adán Ortega Jr. said in a statement. “We are fulfilling our commitment, moving quickly to address this problem.”
Looking at options
The $54-million July allocation for the so-called Sepulveda Feeder Pump Stations Project in Los Angeles County is part of a larger regional effort to expand Southern California’s water portfolio.
Metropolitan has invested heavily in storage, recycling and new conveyance infrastructure to reduce reliance on a single source. A two-pronged approach — new supplies from the Colorado River and a portfolio diversification that includes new technology known as Pure Water — will help the region better cope with another crippling drought like the one that struck in 2020-22, the driest three-year period on record in California.
Planning is underway for a Pure Water Project helping Metropolitan’s Las Virgenes Municipal Water District near Malibu. It’s a transformation of recycled sewer water into drinking water that will give the district a potential 30% boost in supply.
With desalination not likely to happen due to cost and environmental concerns, Las Virgenes has turned to another new technology known as OceanWell, a subsea system that leverages natural hydrostatic ocean pressure to produce fresh water.
“We look at water as — we have one bucket to share in California,” said Jay Lewitt, a Las Virgenes and Metropolitan board member who helped lead a Sept. 18 to 19 inspection tour of the Colorado River Aqueduct with area water experts and government representatives.
“We’re fighting over one bucket, so my theory is, bring more water in,” Lewitt said.
The fight to which he refers is the current negotiation involving stakeholders in the Colorado River water. Distribution of the water is governed by a web of agreements that grew out of the 1922 Colorado River Compact. But that contract assumed the river would keep producing water at sufficient rates. It is not, and the struggle over who has rights to the increasingly scarce resource is intensifying.
New agreement, new dangers
According to a new analysis released this month, water use in the seven-state Colorado River Basin, which includes California, continues to outpace natural flows, threatening to drain key reservoirs to dangerously low levels within a year unless immediate action is taken.
The report, authored by six veteran river researchers and former officials, warns that Lake Powell (on the border between Arizona and Utah) and Lake Mead (on the border between Nevada and Arizona) — the system’s two largest reservoirs — could be left with less than 4 million acre-feet of usable water by late summer 2026 if consumption and other factors remain unchanged. The reservoirs currently have a combined 6.3 million acre-feet of water. (An acre-foot is about the size of a football field with one foot of standing water.)
The report stresses that climate change has fundamentally altered the river’s hydrology, producing longer growing seasons, drier soils and less efficient snowmelt runoff. Forecasts from the National Weather Service now point to warmer and drier conditions heading into winter, with 2026 inflow projection by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the Colorado River master, pegged at well below average.
On a broader note, since 1999, storage in 12 major federal reservoirs across the basin has declined by about 60%, dropping from more than 56 million acre-feet to about 22 million this month, according to data cited in the report. Only four years this century — 2005, 2011, 2019 and 2023 — have produced more water for the reservoirs than was consumed.
‘Approaching a cliff’
The dwindling supply has raised red flags like never before, and the basin states and their water agencies are haggling over what kind of cutbacks will be necessary, and by whom. As the jockeying for consumption rights continues, Metropolitan Water complains that California would bear more than half the required cuts, with the six other states—Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming — picking up the rest. The burden would cause irreparable harm to California’s farms and cities, Metropolitan says.
“We need to make sure that we’re partnering in ways that are going to work for the long term, and try to do it in a way that has good buy-in from everyone,” said Shanti Rosset, Metropolitan’s Colorado River policy manager and one of the instructors on the September aqueduct tour.
Lewitt warned, “If there’s not a deal, then the federal government imposes it, and I assume nobody wants that.”
In short, the basin must decide who absorbs the pain, how costs are shared and whether the federal government will step in if voluntary consensus fails. The outcomes will determine water, power and economic stability across the Southwest for decades.
The report concludes that without immediate cuts, the system could enter 2027 — when new management rules are set to begin — with little to no storage cushion.
“We are approaching a cliff,” the authors warned. “The time for action is now.”