Editor’s letter

By deepening droughts and drying up lakes and rivers, climate change is creating growing conflict over fresh water in many parts of the globe. The water wars have come to the sun-scorched American Southwest, which heavily depends on the dwindling Colorado River. As seven states and 40 million people face 30 percent cuts in river-water allocations this year, Scottsdale officials just turned off all municipal water to about 700 desert homes in an upscale neighborhood recently built in the Rio Verde Foothills of Arizona. (See The U.S. at a glance, p.7.) Shocked residents are paying a fortune to truck in water, and their various adaptations—including skipping showers and peeing outdoors to avoid flushing—are not sustainable. Homes bought for $2.5 million are virtually worthless. “It would be crazy to buy our house at this point,” said Rio Verde resident Donna Rice.

As a historic megadrought continues, the crisis in the Southwest will only grow worse: The Lake Mead and Lake Powell reservoirs are down to about a quarter of capacity, and could reach “dead pool” status by 2025—with water levels too low to flow downstream. That could cut off California, Nevada, and Arizona from this vital supply. Up to now, most “climate refugees” have been people who lived on low-lying Pacific islands submerged by rising seas and in hot and arid regions of developing nations such as Afghanistan, India, and Ethiopia. But affluent Americans may be forced to move, too—away from coastal communities repeatedly flattened by hurricanes, away from wooded areas in the West ravaged by wildfires, away from hillside California enclaves like Montecito where floods and mudslides have repeatedly swept away the homes of millionaires. (See Best U.S. columns, p.12.) As climate change gathers speed, the places people love for their wild beauty—seacoasts, forests, hillsides, deserts—are becoming dangerously inhospitable. The taps in Rio Verde won’t be the last to go dry.