Climate-Fueled Heat Waves Are Creating a Water Crisis in the Southwest |
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Tucson, Arizona — Deadly heat waves have become the summertime norm in Arizona and much of the Southwest in recent years. But this year, those heat waves are coming months before the height of summer. As an atmospheric “heat dome” planted itself over much of the U.S. West, temperatures outside Phoenix reached 101 degrees on the first day of spring, making Arizona the hottest place on Earth. The heat dome continues to shatter temperature records this week. What crucial snowmelt that remained in desert mountains quickly dissipated, all but guaranteeing water shortages and another violent forest fire season later this year.
A groundwater crisis decades in the making has already slowed the otherwise rapid expansion of suburban sprawl around Phoenix, leaving entire housing developments sitting empty in the desert. That water shortage hasn’t stopped state officials from offering lucrative tax breaks to companies building AI data centers that guzzle huge amounts of freshwater and electricity. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, has called for curtailing tax incentives for such data centers but faces an uphill battle against the GOP-controlled legislature.
All signs point to intense stress on the natural systems that make much of the Four Corners region farmable and livable. The most famous example of this stress is the decades-long battle between Western state governments over access to water from the Colorado River Basin. Record heat, even before this latest “heat dome,” has reduced mountain snowmelt that feeds the Colorado River, threatening water supplies for hydroelectric power plants, Grand Canyon wildlife, vast swaths of farmland, and about 35 million people.
Projections show that critical lakes and reservoirs in the Colorado River Basin could reach catastrophically low levels by mid-2027, according to Taylor McKinnon, the southwest director at the Center for Biological Diversity.
“We’ve got record low water storage basin-wide, an unprecedented heat wave decimating a record low snowpack, and decades of flow declines attributable in part to human-caused climate change,” McKinnon told Truthout.
Colorado River Is........