How to direct investments to help the Great Salt Lake?

I recently attended the Blue Industry event hosted by the Sorenson Impact Institute in-Salt Lake City. This event convened private sector investors, policy leaders, and local Utah companies to discuss the challenge of the Great Salt Lake and the role of different capital streams in providing financial resources to tackle this broad problem. The room was eager to find ways to help, to leverage some of the benefits that private investment can bring to complex challenges, and to add to the impressive efforts already underway in Utah.  

One of the hurdles standing in the way of these efforts is the scale of the problem. It’s hard to direct outside investment at a problem as big as the Great Salt Lake; but breaking the big issue up into many pieces presents a set of small, local problems that are easier to define and fund. Following this logic, the obvious question is how to accomplish this difficult task of breaking up the problem into many solvable pieces. Some ideas on how to do this are outlined below.

The recipe for solving complex water supply-demand challenges often includes the following ingredients:

Shared pain (impact) across geographies and water use sectors

• Flexibility to achieve outcomes through local decision making

• Clear repercussions or regulatory backstops if targets are not met

Here are some ideas on how these ingredients might be applied toward the goal of breaking up the big problem, ensuring that water users take ownership of their slice of the problem, and ultimately achieving stability for the Great Salt Lake:

Share the Pain. While we all would love to see the lake full again, that seems very unlikely at this point. Utah will likely need to tackle the Great Salt Lake imbalance from two directions:

1. Shrink the demand: the state could take on the task of reducing the lake’s footprint (accepting a smaller lakebed) and investing in managing the exposed dry lakebed to prevent dust and air quality problems.
2. Increase the supply: water users across the tributary basins could take on the task of reducing their consumptive use (depletions), so more natural streamflow actually reaches the lake.

Shared pain means that two significant and complimentary efforts are occurring in parallel.

Provide Flexibility. Any water use reduction targets will involve dispute and conflict. One step to avoid conflicts or to move beyond dispute will be to give greater power to local river basin leaders across different economic sectors. State leadership, acting through DNR, could distribute (allocate) the overall demand reduction targets of the Great Salt Lake down to river basin scale targets. Basin roundtables formed among various water use & economic sectors should be given a defined timeline to negotiate and develop a consensus on how to achieve the basin-scale target, with the state giving them flexibility (and support) to define the best path forward. This is where a blend of compensated reduction, pooled investment, and creative ideas can take hold working toward a defined goal.

Clear Backstop. There will need to be some form of backstop to the basin-scale flexibility and voluntary reductions described above. A backstop could be the threat of water right curtailments in the river basin if the target demand reductions are not achieved within some defined timeline. If the above ideas on basin-directed strategies for water use reductions are not successful, then the state government will have to act and those state actions are going to be unpopular. No one wants that sort of outcome, so it’s time to get moving on actions that are more locally defined and less heavy handed.

These ideas are gathered together based on observations from other states. Colorado has implemented a Basin Roundtable format for river basin planning and state funding distribution. California is in the process of implementing the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, a contentious and long overdue groundwater management policy. Nebraska has worked through its local Natural Resource Districts to find a supply-demand balance for the shared Ogallala Aquifer. Equally informative is the current state of the Colorado River Basin, with failure to successfully define ownership of the problem ultimately leading to 20 years of falling reservoirs and the current stalemate headed to the courts.

The interest of private capital in a natural resource challenge like the Great Salt Lake is exciting and the Blue Industry event did a good job of convening ideas, stories, and perspectives. From my perspective, one step that would help attract capital and help to direct investment would be breaking up the Great Salt Lake problem into many bite-sized pieces. One way to achieve this is to give every water use organization a specific target for use reduction that represents their slice of the shared problem. Utah state agencies have demonstrated a seriousness and commitment to addressing the problem of the Great Salt Lake, with significant state investments and policy changes being deployed. Water users need to understand their role and obligation, and private capital can help if we can point it in the right direction.