Bilingual Report Addresses Water Supply Needs in U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

By Stephanie Doster

A new, quarterly report is available today that provides citizens, resource managers, and policy makers in the United States-Mexico border areas with climate summaries and forecasts—essential information for making decisions about water supply and agriculture in a time of climate change and rapid growth.

The report, the Border Climate Summary (Resumen del Clima de la Frontera), is written in both English and Spanish and focuses on the southwestern United States and four northern Mexican states: Sonora, Sinaloa, Baja California, and Chihuahua.

The summary is produced by the Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS) project and the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth (ISPE) at The University of Arizona and a number of other investigators and collaborators, including Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada (CICESE) in Baja California.

“The focus of the project is to engage stakeholders in urban and agricultural areas in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States,” said Gregg Garfin, a CLIMAS investigator and deputy director for science translation and outreach at ISPE. “The summary provides a vehicle for us to establish a dialogue with stakeholders to find out what climate-sensitive decisions they make and how we can apply existing knowledge or develop future research to inform their decisions.”

For the agriculture sector, climate information may help farmers decide when to plant crops, when to irrigate, or what kinds of crops to plant if, for example, a dry winter and hot, dry spring are projected.

“Maybe we can learn about when particular insect pests emerge and cause serious outbreaks, and if that’s related to climate in a consistent way, we might be able to provide farmers with information that helps them decide whether and when to invest in pesticides,” Garfin said.

For urban water managers, the report can help them determine how much groundwater to pump or whether to prepare for floods or increase or decrease allocations to agricultural stakeholders, Garfin said. The summary also will include information about the monsoon and tropical cyclones, which have delivered heavy blows to Sinaloa, Baja California, and even farther north.

“In Mexico, emergency management is a major purveyor of weather and climate-related information—things like droughts, floods, and fires. They’ll want to be not only apprised of climate forecasts and hydroclimatic assessments, but participate in getting the information out and producing the information,” Garfin said.

The report comes at a critical time in terms of climate change in northern Mexico and the southwestern U.S.

“The whole border region has been through a severe drought and climate change projections call for more drought. That means there is a good chance that water supplies will be less certain,” Garfin said. “Temperatures in the region are projected to increase. That has implications for evaporation, stress on agriculture, and maybe planting and harvesting.”

The region also is experiencing rapid growth, and with that comes rural-urban conflicts over water: who gets it and who pays for it, especially during shortages. Severe droughts likely will exacerbate the situation and require water allocation decisions, Garfin said.

The report is part of a broader project funded by the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI). The goal is to mobilize, improve, and disseminate climate knowledge about droughts, floods, and cyclones. In addition to producing the borderlands summary, researchers will assess urban and rural vulnerability to climate change and work with managers whose decisions are closely tied to climate. They also will study policy questions related to water use and energy by pairing cities: Tucson and Sierra Vista in Arizona and Hermosillo and Cananea in Sonora.

“We want to draw the connections between climate variations and water management decisions in an agricultural and urban context,” Garfin said. “We want to make the information useful and accessible.”

Other collaborators include the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy and the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS), both at the UA; the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR); the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Earth System Research Laboratory (NOAA-ESRL)/Western Water Assessment; El Colegio de Sonora (COLSON); and Institito Mexicano de Tecnología del Agua (IMTA).

A second project, funded by the NOAA Sectors Application Research Program (SARP), dovetails with the IAI project. It focuses primarily on the confluence of water and growth, focusing on Tucson, Nogales (both in the United States and in Mexico), Hermosillo, and Puerto Peñasco. The IAI collaborators, the University of Sonora, and the Mexican weather service are involved in the project.

“Ultimately, we think that by pulling together the climate and policy worlds and understanding the full context, we will help improve the resilience of these urbanizing areas and help agricultural areas respond to climate changes and to uncertainties in water availability,” Garfin said. “We as scientists learn from stakeholders and they learn from us, and we come to a shared understanding. That is when we can start making progress.”