Nevada — the driest state — has no statewide water plan

Nevada is suffering from a debilitating drought, experiencing the impacts of a warming climate and, some say, is deficient when it comes to long-term water planning for the state as a whole.

Debate is mounting over the need to begin development of a comprehensive water plan taking into account available water supplies, drought, climate projections and development that will tap limited water resources across the nation's most arid state.

Planners and elected officials have water resource plans in place across the state – in Reno-Sparks, Las Vegas, the Carson River Basin and elsewhere. But a number of experts are now pushing for a more holistic approach addressing water supply issues statewide, efforts similar to ones taken by neighbors of the Silver State including Utah, Arizona and California.

"Our suggestion is rather than a silo approach we need a much broader approach," said Steve Bradhurst, executive director of the eight-county Central Nevada Regional Water Authority, which encompasses 65 percent of Nevada's land mass.

The Colorado River Basin, which provides Las Vegas with its water, has experienced the driest 14 years in 100 years of record and faces a worst-case shortfall of 8 million acre-feet of water per year by 2060, according to a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation study cited by the authority. Plans by the Southern Nevada Water Authority to pump billions of gallons of groundwater from beneath remote valleys along the Nevada-Utah line and pipe it to the desert metropolitan area continue to generate impassioned controversy and are now in the courts.

Western Nevada is now in a third year of a drought that has lowered rivers, lakes and reservoirs and forced the Reno-Sparks area to tap backup drought supplies for the first time in 20 years. The "bulls eye" for the current drought lies about 100 miles to the east, where a dried-up lower Humboldt River this year cut off access to all irrigation water to farmers in that important agricultural area.

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