DENVER — Nevada, Arizona and Mexico will again live with less water from the Colorado River as drought lingers in the West, federal officials announced Friday.

Nevada’s allocation will remain at 279,000 acre feet, a 7 percent reduction from its standard allocation of 300,000 acre-feet. Nevada is the smallest user of the Colorado River. 

Arizona will again go without 18 percent of its total Colorado River allocation, while Mexico loses 5 percent. California won't face any cuts because it has senior water rights and is the last to lose in times of shortage.

The cuts are based on projections for levels at federal reservoirs — chief among them Lake Powell and Lake Mead — released every August by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) will not be implementing any additional water restrictions on Las Vegas’ 2.3 million residents, according to SNWA spokesperson Bronson Mack.

“We’ve done a lot of our heavy lifting as a community over the last 20 years to prepare for this type of situation,” he said, noting that Southern Nevada has reduced its Colorado River water consumption by 36 percent over the last two decades.

Last year, the community consumed 212,000 acre-feet of water. The community is on pace to conserve more than it did last year — this year’s consumption is roughly 5.5 percent lower than at the same time last year, according to Mack. 

The Colorado River is a critical lifeline to seven U.S. states, 30 Native American tribes and two Mexican states, but decades of overuse and the effects of long-term drought worsened by climate change means there's far more demand for water than what actually flows through the river. Low reservoir levels at Lake Mead have triggered mandatory cutbacks every year since 2022, with the deepest cuts in 2023, which hit farmers in Arizona the hardest.

The study “underscores the impact that climate change is having on the river system and the critical importance of broad conservation strategies throughout the Colorado River Basin,” Mack said. “In a perfect world, we would be seeing higher lake elevations and moving our way out of shortage conditions.”

Meanwhile, the states are working to reach agreement by next year on new long-term rules to govern the river in dry years. The Trump administration gave a mid-November deadline for states to reach a preliminary agreement, or risk federal intervention. Negotiations have faced delays as states push back against how much water they should each give up.

The original 1922 Colorado River Compact was calculated based on an amount of water that doesn't exist in today's climate. That leaves the Upper Basin states of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah to share far less water after the required amount is sent to the Lower Basin states of Nevada, Arizona and California. Lots of water is also lost to evaporation and leaky infrastructure.

Fairly splitting the river's water in the era of climate change has been vexing for years, with all of the major users hesitant to give anything up as they anticipate a drier future. There has to be enough water in the reservoirs to reach the tunnels that usher water downstream, and key infrastructure such as the Hoover Dam rely on certain water levels in Lake Mead to generate electricity.

Mandatory cuts and emergency water releases are “reactive,” said John Berggren, a regional policy manager at Western Resource Advocates, a nonprofit focused on climate change.

“If we are going to be able to have a sustainable Colorado River and not just be responding to crisis after crisis, we need large amounts of flexibility built into this new set of guidelines,” he said.

States are considering a so-called natural flow approach to managing the river — where the Lower Basin would receive a certain percentage of the average natural flow from the prior few years.

The Lower Basin states have helped stave off deeper cuts by coming up with voluntary conservation plans. In the last few years, Arizona, Nevada and California have saved nearly half of what they use annually through programs largely funded during former President Joe Biden's administration.

“All states — not just a few — need to make meaningful cuts, and they need to do it now,” said Kyle Roerink, executive director of the Great Basin Water Network.

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