Climate change

Lake Mead and Lake Powell could reach water levels low enough to halt hydropower production.

Colorado’s “first-in-time, first-in-right” prior appropriation doctrine is coming under increasing scrutiny as rivers and reservoirs dry out.

With drought continuing to grip the American West, Colorado is declaring one of its last, mostly free-flowing rivers as over-appropriated.

Experts warn that climate change has rendered old assumptions outdated about what the Colorado River can provide, leaving painful water cuts as the only way forward.

Climate change and the decades-long drought are fueling bigger and more dangerous fires, leaving devastation up and down watersheds.

Colorado West Slope water officials turned up the volume on the call for action around water and climate change, calling it a “train wreck.”

Colorado has a new turf replacement program that will finance residential areas to switch their yards to more water efficient landscaping.

This year, the first-ever Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan is set to launch, and water officials expect 2020 to bring unprecedented changes to the way the river is run, including cutbacks in water use by some states.

Colorado's drought may continue into the fall, bringing a third year of below-average snowpack and streamflows and high wildfire danger.

The snowpack is crucial to the West’s water supply, ecosystems and economy. But climate change threatens to make the region’s snowpack thinner and less reliable. We talk to a leading snowpack researcher about how scientists are analyzing the past, present and future of the West’s snow.