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Cody, Kelsey C ¹

¹ CU Boulder, Environmental Studies Program

The central challenge facing municipal and industrial (M&I) water providers is to provide safe and reliable supplies of water. Two primary forces are converging on the American West, and on Colorado’s Front Range especially, that make it difficult for municipal and industrial providers to continue to meet that challenge: (1) population growth and the presumed accompanying increase in demand, and (2) uncertainties over the physical and legal availability of water stemming from climate. Multiple approaches can be used to mitigate the impacts of and adapt to these conflating forces, a combination of which are often applied by individual utilities in Colorado; however, projects are typically designed and implemented as discrete efforts across a mosaic of jurisdictional boundaries. This has the potential result in suboptimal system performance and inequitable social and ecological impacts.

To assess these effects, through common pool resource based poly-centric case study analysis of M&I water provider institutions in Nevada, California, and Colorado this study seeks to understand the extent to which the degree of fragmentation observed on the Front Range may pose challenges for effective adaptation to climate change, existing or exacerbated climate variability, and the region’s ongoing population growth. Crucially, adaptation will require moving water through a network to locations of high demand – if providers are not sufficiently integrated, this could significantly increase costs (Hoeksema & Schwartz, 2003; Figure 1). Questions of resilience (Walker et al., 2004) and institutional design (Ostrom, 2005) are addressed, with evidence from cases and arguments from theory (Nowak, 2006; Figure 2) supporting cooperation and mutualism as effective strategies.

Indeed, cooperation and regional integration are often well adapted to prevailing social and ecological pressures in the American West – including (a) competition at higher scales, such as the Colorado River Basin and where there are transbasin diversions, (b) pervasive environmental concerns, such as groundwater depletion and ecological damage, (c) and the need to fund conservation and infrastructure projects, such as watershed restoration and pipelines. The implications of these findings are highly relevant for Colorado, and two questions for managers arise: whether opportunities exist to improve institutional and legal arrangements in Colorado to better facilitate water resource management on the Front Range, and, more generally, how regional water provision, both inside and outside of M&I (Figure 3), might be improved under conditions of an uncertain water supply and demand conditions.

Hoeksema, J., Schwartz, M., 2003, Expanding comparative advantage biological market models: contingency of mutualism on partners’ resource requirements and acquisition tradeoffs: Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, v. 270, p. 913-919.

Nowak, M., 2006, Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation: Science, v. 314, p. 1560-1563

Ostrom E., 2005, Understanding Institutional Diversity: Princeton University Press

Walker, B., C. Holling, S. Carpenter, A. Kinzig., 2004, Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social Ecological Systems: Ecology and Society, v. 9(2).