Fig. 1: Study area in the Colorado River basin.
From: A strategic environmental water rights market for Colorado River reallocation
Our study area within the context of the Upper and Lower Colorado River basins contributes 24% of natural mean annual flow of the Colorado River into Lake Powell26. The area’s dominant in-basin water use is irrigation, which consumes 588 million cubic metres per year49. The area has had a longstanding rural–urban water conflict between in-basin users and 16 major transbasin diversions that export 595 million cubic metres per year to eastern Colorado50, largely for rapidly growing cities there (for example, Denver). The study area model contains 107 environmental stream reaches that have been designated as holding ecological importance (that is, instream flow water rights) by the state of Colorado27. Our model also covers the San Juan River basin within the state of Colorado (Supplementary Fig. 3) because it lacks a law that enables unprotected transactions that the Upper Colorado River sub-basin has, allowing comparative study. Map data from the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy51,52, Colorado’s Decision Support Systems53,54,55,56,57, the Colorado Department of Transportation58, Environmental Systems Research Institute and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Reservoir data from the Bureau of Reclamation36.
