SALT LAKE CITY — Twenty-thousand acre-feet of water could fill nearly 10,000 Olympic swimming pools. It could provide more than 59,000 families water for the year. Or it could top off 6.5 billion 1-gallon jugs.

In Utah, where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints last week bestowed that same amount of water to the state to help ensure the future of the Great Salt Lake, it can also create a dividing line.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) views the donation — the largest such gift in the state’s history — as a reason to celebrate, marking it as a key step in the effort to reverse the decline of the nation’s largest saline lake.

“Whether the change is small or big, we have to celebrate that change to bring people along,” Cox said Friday at the University of Utah’s Wallace Stegner Center annual symposium, which this year focused on the future of the lake.

“Incremental change is the only way to get change. Paradigm change takes time,” he added (Greenwire, March 17).

But others in the state say the donation amounts to a drop in the ocean-like lake that has been dramatically shrunk by consumption and decades of drought. They say it isn’t so much a cause for celebration as it is a metaphor for the state’s superficial efforts to save the lake from vanishing.

Whether fallout from that split could further delay progress on addressing a potentially cataclysmic future — in which clouds of toxic dust from the dry lake bed sweep through the city, and vanishing waters decimate an ecosystem key to the Pacific Flyway and millions of birds — remains an open question.

At the University of Utah last week, prominent researchers and elected officials alike expressed optimism that the state will ultimately find solutions to the worst potential problems for the lake, but others invested in the lake warned a more aggressive tack is desperately needed.

“They’re moving fast but not fast enough,” said Timothy Hawkes, who spent four terms in the state House as a Republican lawmaker, where he won passage in 2019 of H.C.R. 10, a resolution that recognized “the critical importance of ensuring adequate water flows to Great Salt Lake and its wetlands, to maintain a healthy and sustainable lake system.”

Hawkes, who previously led Trout Unlimited’s Utah Water Project, added: “And the proof is in the pudding: Had we not had this anomalously wet year, we would be in a world of hurt right now.”

The Great Salt Lake — which contains 15.5 million acre-feet of water when it sits at a healthy elevation of 4,200 feet — dropped to a record low of 4,188 feet last November, continuing a multi-decade trend that has resulted in more than 800 square miles of dry lake bed, an area larger than the Hawaiian island of Maui.

But a series of winter storms has boosted snowpack and precipitation in the region, and the lake is now more than 2 feet higher, at an elevation of 4,190.9 feet according to U.S. Geological Survey data.

Researchers from Brigham Young University predicted earlier this year that the lake “is on track to disappear” within five years without significant increases in the amount of water that reaches the body (Greenwire, Jan. 6).

Depending on how much snowmelt flows into the lake this spring, however, that timeline could see a year or two added to it.

“What does it really buy us? A couple of years at least,” said Joel Ferry, executive director of Utah’s Department of Natural Resources. “It does give us a little bit of breathing room; it will help us significantly on our salinity, which I think is probably the most important thing that it does. But ultimately, we’re not out of the woods.”

‘A marathon, not a sprint’

Despite its significant role in the state’s economy — generating income from tourism along with industries like mineral extraction and brine shrimp fisheries — the Great Salt Lake’s falling levels had long been a non-issue to the state’s lawmakers.

Utah state House Speaker Brad Wilson (R) acknowledged that he failed to identify the problem until listening to a podcast on the topic nearly three years ago.

“I literally looked into the distance at Antelope Island and the small amount of water that still surrounds it,” said Wilson, who was outside jogging at the time and could see the lake.

He added: “I recognized that I’d taken for granted that the lake has always been there and always would be, and it really became clear to me how dire the situation was for our state and for this lake that I actually really, really love.”

Over the past two years, Utah’s Legislature has invested $1 billion in programs aimed at water conservation and infrastructure, part of an effort to bolster the lake’s water supply.

“We have done more for Utah’s water and to protect and preserve the Great Salt Lake than ever before in the history of our great state,” Wilson added, praising his colleagues in the state House for embracing the lake’s needs.

“They’ve come light-years in a very short period of time in a bipartisan way to be thoughtful and mindful about the things that we need to do to have a commitment to the lake,” he said.

Those outlays include $270 million to make agricultural watering more efficient and nearly $270 million to install new meters to tens of thousands of homes that use “secondary water,” or nonpotable water used outdoors (Greenwire, May 17, 2022).

The investments also put $40 million into creating the Great Salt Lake Watershed Enhancement Trust, which is tasked with “improv[ing] water quantity and quality for the lake.”

That program, managed by the Audubon Society and the Nature Conservancy, coordinated the Mormon church’s recent 20,000-acre-foot water donation, drawn from its shares in the North Point Consolidated Irrigation Co.

Marcelle Shoop, the trust’s executive director, told E&E News that the donation is expected to spur similar actions and defended the size of the donation — noting that its permanent status as a water source for the lake is valuable.

“It sets a precedent for other parties who are interested in doing something, because it shows that there’s interest and commitment to trying to take steps towards this,” said Shoop, who is also director of the National Audubon Society’s Saline Lakes Program.

In a Friday address at the symposium, Wilson highlighted a host of other legislative efforts, including the creation of the Great Salt Lake commissioner, a governor-appointed office to centralize oversight of efforts to restore the lake; a public service campaign to promote water conservation called “Utah Water Ways”; as well as bills to ease the expansion of water-efficient landscaping and increase funding for a state program to remove turf lawns.

Wilson pointed to congressional efforts aimed at shoring up the lake, including authorizing up to $10 million to monitor saline lakes in the Great Basin (E&E Daily, Dec. 8, 2022).

He also noted Utah Sen. Mitt Romney’s “Great Salt Lake Recovery Act.” The bill, S. 4536, would authorize a study on drought conditions and identify new technologies that could be used to refill the lake, including pipelines and desalination plants (E&E Daily, July 15, 2022).

“This is a marathon, not a sprint,” Wilson said. “This is going to take a decade, at least, of concerted effort like we’ve had the last few years to save the Great Salt Lake.”

But critics of Gov. Cox and the state Legislature said that timeline may not be fast enough.

“A lot of the solutions that we put in place are more long-term solutions, and they don’t deliver the short-term benefits,” said Hawkes, who is also the Great Salt Lake Brine Shrimp Cooperative’s vice chair and general counsel. “Frankly, all the short-term levers we have, we’ve pulled.”

Those steps include an emergency order Cox issued in early February to raise the Union Pacific Railroad Causeway berm that bisects the lake.

The 20-mile railroad causeway splits the lake into its saltier northern arm and the southern arm that includes both the Great Salt Lake and Antelope Island state parks.

The order was intended to both increase the water level of the southern arm and decrease its salinity to protect the lake’s ecosystem.

Other speakers countered that, given the complexity of water law in the arid state, small steps are the most productive way to achieve changes.

“The solutions with Utah water are silver buckshot; there are no silver bullets,” said Emily Lewis, co-chair of the Natural Resources and Water Law Practice Group at the law firm Clyde Snow & Sessions. “It’s lots and lots of little things.”

‘A post-mortem future’

Although several featured speakers at the two-day conference, including prominent researchers and lawmakers, said they are optimistic about the lake’s future, Zachary Frankel, executive director of the Utah Rivers Council, offered a more pragmatic take.

“The state’s policies, as one grades them based on the legislation that passed the Statehouse the last session, fail because it is a post-mortem future on the Great Salt Lake,” Frankel said.

Frankel pointed to a host of failed legislative efforts, including a nonbinding resolution that would have set a target lake elevation of 4,198 feet to ensure a healthy ecosystem. The measure would have enshrined the elevation as a priority for Utah’s state government, but would not have mandated any specific actions.

His organization has also pushed, unsuccessfully to date, to amend the state’s tax laws to lower property taxes while increasing water utility rates and requiring some currently exempt institutions, such as churches and universities, to pay their share (Greenwire, Oct. 26, 2022).

“What we’re not seeing are policies to permanently deliver water to the lake. We’re not even seeing a goal of what elevation it should be at, in the face of scientific consensus that it needs to happen, that we need to establish that lake level,” Frankel said.

In a report issued in February the Great Salt Lake Strike Team — comprising leaders of relevant centers and institutes at the University of Utah and Utah State University, and several state agencies — recommended the state set a range of acceptable lake levels, which would likewise set a minimum elevation of 4,198 feet.

Although Cox called the nonbinding resolution a “dumb thing” earlier this year, on Friday he told the University of Utah audience the state should set a goal to raise the lake’s level.

“Yes, sure,” Cox said, “but I’m also going to say this: There are policy things that matter, and there are policy things that don’t matter. This is a policy thing that doesn’t change anything.”

In a 30-minute speech that some attendees privately compared to receiving a “lecture” from the governor, Cox also pushed back on criticism that his administration and the Legislature are moving too slowly.

“You know what the Legislature hears from the left and from the scientific community? ‘What is wrong with you guys? You aren’t doing nearly enough,'” Cox complained. “And human nature is, ‘You know what? Screw you guys. If you don’t want our help, we’re done. We’re out.'”

He added: “That’s what we can’t allow to happen. Now, I’m not saying you can’t be critical, you shouldn’t be critical, right? But I’m saying be cautious with your criticism.”

Ferry, the executive director of the state DNR, conceded he is likewise wary of burning out public support for water conservation efforts, particularly after the recently wet winter.

“Record-low levels turned all eyes to Great Salt Lake, but in life, attention spans are short and especially in politics people want to move to the next crisis and solve the next crisis,” Ferry said. “I’m personally worried about message fatigue. … I think we have to be conscientious of that.”

But in separate remarks, Darren Parry, a former chair of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, argued: “We need to keep up the political pressure. … It seems they’re willing to take baby steps for a problem that is going to require leaps and bounds.”

Not a precipitation problem

Although persistent drought has gripped the West for more than two decades, the lack of precipitation is not the biggest hurdle for restoring the lake, according to the University of Utah’s Kevin Perry, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences who studies the dry lake bed.

“It’s really difficult to contemplate life without Great Salt Lake, yet due to an unsustainable water diversion, drought and climate change, we’re forced to do just that,” said Perry, who has biked across the entirety of the dry lake bed to collect samples of dust.

The largest pressure on the lake comes from human water use, Perry explained, citing statistics from the Strike Team report.

“The problems are not being caused by existential threats we have no control over,” Perry said, noting the largest consumers of water that would otherwise flow into the lake include agriculture, cities, and industry and mineral extraction. “It means that the future of the Great Salt Lake is actually within our power to fix.”

He added, “The water is being put to good use, but we are just simply using too much of it for the longer-term sustainability of the Great Salt Lake.”

One of the major issues as the lake dries is the dust clouds — tainted with arsenic and other elements like copper, sulfur, silver, phosphorus, chlorine, molybdenum and zirconium — that can inundate Salt Lake City and its suburbs, and create potential health problems for residents.

Perry explained that soil is typically composed of elements like silicon, aluminum, calcium, sodium, potassium, magnesium and titanium, but the Great Salt Lake — a “terminal” body of water that has no outlet — also has high levels of “evaporite minerals,” or salts like calcium, magnesium, sulfur, strontium, chlorine, lithium and boron.

“It’s basically sandy soil with a lot of salt crystals in it,” Perry said.

Perry’s research has also shown the lake soil is high in arsenic, a carcinogen that can lead to lung, skin and bladder cancers as well as cardiovascular disease.

“Every single measurement that I took of arsenic was more than a factor of 10 greater than recommended by the EPA for long-term exposure,” Perry said. “It’s ubiquitous in the soil of Great Salt Lake.”

When cold fronts move through the region, they can pick up dust off the lake and deposit large clouds over urban areas, he said.

“The larger particles can stay in the atmosphere for a few hours. The smaller ones could stay in the atmosphere for two weeks,” Perry said.

In addition to the potential for dust clouds tainted with heavy metals, researchers warn that a drying lake could also create havoc for an ecosystem that provides a resting spot and nesting area to millions of birds.

“A declining lake really means a reduction in habitat and food,” said Bonnie Baxter, director of Westminster College’s Great Salt Lake Institute.

Baxter is a biologist who studies the lake’s microbialites, rock-like structures in the lake that serve as a nesting ground for brine flies, which are a main food source for birds.

When lake levels fall, those microbialites, which resemble slime-covered large dome-shaped rocks, can dry out. But Baxter said research has shown that if the microbialites become wet again within a few months, the structures have proved to be resilient.

Baxter said, “We don’t have a lot of time, but if we can turn this around in a short window of a couple of years, I think the biology will respond favorably, and that gives me hope.”

The White House announcement that President Joe Biden on Tuesday will designate two long-sought-after national monuments in Nevada and Texas drew widespread praise from Native American tribal leaders, residents and conservation groups.

But it also raised questions about how the Biden administration will protect the sites and allow them to be fully enjoyed by the public.

What is clear is that the moves rank among the largest conservation initiatives undertaken by any administration in decades (Greenwire, March 21).

The centerpiece is arguably the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument, which will permanently protect 506,814 acres of federal lands considered sacred to Yuman-speaking Native American tribes in southern Nevada and serve as a connecting point between the Mojave National Preserve and the Castle Mountains National Monument to the west, in California, with the Lake Mead National Recreation Area to the east in Nevada.

Biden announces new national monuments in Texas, Nevada

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While Biden vowed last year to protect that Nevada site, the announcement that the president will also designate the Castner Range National Monument in West Texas was unexpected, even as it strikes a core administration goal to increase access to parks and open spaces to marginalized communities. Biden will announce the monuments at an event Tuesday afternoon at the Interior Department.

To the residents of El Paso, especially in the poorer northern end of the city who have pushed for decades to preserve the old Army training grounds that are now renowned for the annual bloom of Mexican gold poppies each spring, the 6,672 acres are a valuable open-air space that connects to the eastern slope of the Franklin Mountains.

“I’m absolutely thrilled about the designation,” said Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), who in 2021 sponsored legislation that, if successful, would have established the national monument. “It brings me such joy to know that El Pasoans will soon be able to enjoy the beauty of this majestic, expansive landmark for years to come.”

Now comes the hard part.

Despite the designation of Castner Range National Monument on Tuesday as the third national monument in Texas, the former Army artillery range and training grounds remain, as they have for decades, closed to the public.

When people will actually be able to walk and recreate on the monument is an open question.

Though the Army stopped using Castner Range in 1966, its legacy of decades of use as a military training ground, beginning in 1926, have left it littered with unexploded artillery.

If you want to see the Mexican gold poppy blooms that carpet the desert floor at the site each spring, you need to walk along a 1-mile trail at the El Paso Museum of Archeology on the perimeter of the site.

And while supporters of designating Castner Range a national monument say its establishment provides disadvantaged communities in El Paso with much-needed recreational benefits, those also won’t be realized until it is made safe to visit.

The monument area is part of the Fort Bliss and will be managed by the Army.

Undersecretary of the Army Gabe Camarillo, who is an El Paso native, visited the Castner Range area last August and pledged to complete cleanup of unexploded ordnance there.

Camarillo said in a Tuesday statement that while Castner Range “has been an indelible part of U.S. Army history,” he added that “now it’s time to write a new chapter about the future of this natural treasure.”

He added: “Moving forward, the U.S. Army stands ready to execute a complete clean up, manage remaining munitions and make Castner Range safe for public access.”

As it stands today, little is known about what wildlife and plant species reside there, as well as the archeological resources.

National monument proponents say that as many as 27 wildlife or plant species that the Fish and Wildlife Service have listed for protection under the Endangered Species Act are present on the Castner Range site. Those include the ferruginous hawk, the Texas horned lizard, and the Franklin Mountains talus snail, among others.

The site in the Chihuahuan Desert also includes archaeological resources showing evidence of human habitation dating back 10,000 years, when according to a White House fact sheet the area was home to the Apache and Pueblo peoples and the Comanche Nation, the Hopi Tribe and the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma.

“Now we can get the real work of interpretation and narrative around Castner Range, providing access and context at the same time,” said Eric Pearson, president and CEO of the El Paso Community Foundation, which helped spearhead local efforts to get the new monument.

An expanded Nevada monument

The Avi Kwa Ame National Monument will be slightly larger than what had been originally proposed by advocates and Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) in legislation she sponsored last year to establish the monument that stalled.

The initial proposal for the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument called for preserving roughly 450,000 acres of BLM-managed lands, but White House press materials indicate it will include at least some Bureau of Reclamation and National Park Service lands, as well, increasing the size of the monument to 506,814 acres by adding parcels in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

“President Biden’s establishment of Avi Kwa Ame National Monument is a testimony to protecting and preserving lands with not just our children and grandchildren in mind but for generations to come,” Theresa Pierno, president and CEO of the National Parks Conservation Association, said in a statement.

Biden pledged to protect the area during a speech at the White House Tribal Nations Summit in Washington last year, saying he understood that it is a “sacred place that is central to the creation story of so many tribes” (Greenwire, Nov. 30, 2022).

The Avi Kwa Ame National Monument will protect biologically diverse and culturally significant lands in the Mojave Desert. Straddling the Nevada-California border, it’s nestled between the Mojave National Preserve; the Castle Mountains and Mojave Trails national monuments in California; and the Lake Mead National Recreation Area and four wilderness areas on the Nevada side of the border, including the Spirit Mountain Wilderness Area outside the eastern boundary of the monument that’s home to the region’s 5,600-foot-tall namesake peak.

“The president’s action today will safeguard hundreds of thousands of acres of cultural sites, desert habitats, and natural resources in southern Nevada, which bear great cultural, ecological, and economic significance to our state,” the Honor Avi Kwa Ame coalition comprised of Native American tribal leaders, local government officials, conservation groups and residents said in a statement.

The Interior Department will enter into a memorandum of understanding to manage the new monument in cooperation with tribal nations that consider the lands along the Nevada-California border sacred, including the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe and nearly a dozen others in Nevada and Arizona, the White House said. However, the presidential proclamation says that the Bureau of Land Management will have “primary management authority” over sections of the landscape it already controls, and the National Park Service will have primary oversight of sections of the new monument that include Lake Mead NRA.

“Together, we will honor Avi Kwa Ame today — from its rich Indigenous history, to its vast and diverse plant and wildlife, to the outdoor recreation opportunities created for local cities and towns in southern Nevada by a new gorgeous monument right in their backyard,” the coalition said.

The need to protect the Avi Kwa Ame site has been underscored the past few years by strong interest from renewable energy developers.

For example, a solar energy developer had proposed a commercial-scale project on more than 2,500 acres of BLM lands, including 2,000 that were inside the proposed monument boundary.

The White House said Tuesday that the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument designation “will not slow the positive momentum of clean energy development in the State of Nevada,” where BLM is processing roughly 36 renewable energy applications for projects with a capacity to produce 13,000 megawatts of electricity, or enough to power about 4 million homes.

Massive Pacific Islands sanctuary?

Biden on Tuesday will also sign a presidential memorandum directing Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to evaluate using her authority under the National Marine Sanctuaries Act to designate a marine sanctuary covering an enormous 777,000 square miles — including the existing Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, southwest of Hawaii — within the next 30 days.

A new marine sanctuary at that size would allow the Biden administration to reach the goal outlined in the “America the Beautiful” initiative to conserve 30 percent of the nation’s waters by 2030, the White House said.

The White House said Tuesday that the vast area of the Pacific Ocean would encompass “all areas of U.S. jurisdiction around the islands, atolls, and reef of the Pacific Remote Islands,” protecting a region that “has a rich ancestral tie to many Native Hawaiian and Pacific Island communities.”

In addition, the review of the area for possible designation “would allow the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to further explore the area’s scientific, cultural, and ancestral linkages, and tailor its management accordingly,” according to a White House fact sheet.

The process to explore a possible sanctuary designation will also include Raimondo working with Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to “conduct a public process to work with regional Indigenous cultural leaders to appropriately rename the existing Pacific Remote Islands National Monument, and potentially the Islands themselves, to honor the area’s heritage, ancestral pathways, and stopping points for Pacific Island voyagers,” the fact sheet said.

Environmental groups were largely pleased with Tuesday’s announcements, which in addition to the two national monuments and possible marine sanctuary also are expected to include new initiatives on tapping the ocean for renewable energy and committing federal land management agencies to incorporate establishing wildlife mitigation corridors and other measures into land-use planning.

But they were also stung by Interior’s approval last week of the massive Willow oil and gas project in the Alaskan Arctic. The administration has defended the move, saying that Interior didn’t have leeway to void oil company ConocoPhillips’ leases (Greenwire, March 17).

“I’m glad to see President Biden taking these modest but important steps for conservation, but his actions on fossil fuels still leave us in a deep hole,” said Randi Spivak, public lands program director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “As the climate crisis accelerates and unravels our planet’s biodiversity, it’s clear we can no longer afford to stroll toward solutions. It’s time for the Biden administration to start sprinting.”

This story was updated at 2:30 p.m.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced the creation of two national monuments in Nevada and Texas, and directed the study of a possible marine sanctuary southwest of Hawaii that’s so large it would allow the administration to meet its goal of conserving 30 percent of the nation’s waters.

“Our natural wonders are literally the envy of the world. They’ve always been and they always will be,” Biden said at the Interior Department headquarters as he touted his administration’s conservation record and the new monument designations. “They’re central to our heritage as a people and they’re central to our identity as a nation.”

Biden used his authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to establish not only the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument on lands considered sacred to Yuman-speaking Native American tribes in southern Nevada but also the nearly 7,000-acre Castner Range National Monument in northern El Paso, Texas.

The former Army artillery range and testing ground in the Chihuahuan Desert in western Texas includes unique wildlife and archaeological resources showing evidence of human habitation dating back 10,000 years, when the area was home to the Apache and Pueblo peoples and the Comanche Nation, the Hopi Tribe and the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma.

Biden also signed a presidential memorandum directing Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to evaluate using her authority under the National Marine Sanctuaries Act to designate a marine sanctuary covering an enormous 777,000 square miles — including the existing Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, southwest of Hawaii — within the next 30 days.

A new marine sanctuary at that size would allow the Biden administration to reach the goal outlined in the “America the Beautiful” initiative to conserve 30 percent of the nation’s waters by 2030, the White House said.

The conservation announcements come a week after Biden enraged environmentalists and climate activists with the Interior Department’s approval of the massive Willow oil and gas project in the Arctic. The administration has defended the move, saying oil company ConocoPhillips held leases and that, legally, Interior didn’t have much room to maneuver.

But the White House also emphasized its pledge to increase protections in the Arctic Ocean and the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, where the Willow project will be located. Those moves were announced the night before the Willow project decision was released.

On Tuesday, the administration also unveiled a suite of new policies, including what the White House is calling the first-ever “United States Ocean-Climate Action Plan,” which will serve as a road map to potentially utilize “the power of the ocean” for energy production, among other things.

The White House Council on Environmental Quality will also issue guidance to federal land management agencies to incorporate “ecological connectivity” and the designation of wildlife corridors “into federal planning and decision-making” documents, like resource management plans.

For example, the White House said the Bureau of Land Management in the coming weeks will seek public comment on the development of a rule that would “update and modernize” the way the bureau manages the 245 million acres under its jurisdiction.

The Biden administration also announced a memorandum of understanding among the Fish and Wildlife Service, National Alliance of Forest Owners, and National Council for Air and Stream Improvement Inc. that focuses on protecting at-risk and federally protected species on “private working forests nationwide,” the White House said.

But the highlight was the designation of the Avi Kwa Ame and Castner Range national monuments.

The initial proposal for the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument called for preserving roughly 450,000 acres of BLM-managed lands, but White House press materials indicate it will include at least some Bureau of Reclamation and National Park Service lands, as well, increasing the size of the monument to 506,814 acres.

“It’s a place of reverence, it’s a place of spirituality and it’s a place of healing,” Biden said of the Nevada monument. “And now it can be recognized for the significance it holds and be preserved forever.”

The Interior Department will enter into a memorandum of understanding to manage the new monument with tribal nations that consider the lands along the Nevada-California border sacred, including the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe and nearly a dozen others in Nevada and Arizona, the White House said.

The Avi Kwa Ame National Monument also apparently did not carve out 2,000 acres, as requested by San Francisco-based renewable energy developer Avantus, that the company needed to build the 400-megawatt Angora Solar Project, according to the White House.

But, regardless, the White House said in press materials, “The designation will not slow the positive momentum of clean energy development in the State of Nevada.”

The Castner Range National Monument was slightly smaller than the 7,000 acres advocates had proposed, consisting of 6,672 acres on Fort Bliss that make up “the southern component of the Franklin Mountain range, just outside of El Paso,” according to the White House.

The Army, which will manage the national monument site, ceased training operations there nearly 60 years ago.

“It’s just breathtaking,” Biden said of Castner Range. “The people of El Paso fought to protect this for 50 years. Their work has finally paid off.”

The White House also promoted the Castner Range designation as a step toward providing more access to federal lands for low-income and underserved communities in the region. However, the Army will need to clean up the site, which as a former military training ground is littered with unexploded artillery.

The Avi Kwa Ame and Castner Range national monuments will cover a combined 514,000 acres, marking by far the largest public lands preservation move of the Biden administration.

Biden pledged last fall to protect the Avi Kwa Ame area during the White House Tribal Nations Summit, about a month after he designated the 58,804-acre Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument — his first — which protects a historic World War II Army camp and surrounding peaks in the Tenmile Range in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. The Forest Service manages the monument.

Reporter Robin Bravender contributed.

The Supreme Court on Monday appeared closely divided on whether to side with the Navajo Nation in the tribe’s high-stakes fight against the Biden administration and four states to protect its right to water from the drought-stricken Colorado River.

While the court could decide the case on narrow procedural grounds, some of the more moderate conservative justices questioned whether a ruling for the Navajo would obligate the federal government to build a vast network of pipelines and pumps to deliver water to the tribe or upset the delicate balance struck by the 40 million people who rely on the massive waterway that travels among seven states and Mexico.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett pressed an attorney for the Navajo Nation on whether it expected the federal government to not only assess the tribe’s needs, but also supply the water it requires.

“It seems like maybe it is what you’re asking,” she said.

Shay Dvoretzky, a partner at the firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, said the tribe is seeking a plan and an assessment and is hopeful that the United States would help implement that plan. If the Navajo are dissatisfied with that plan, he said, they might raise a separate claim.

“Right now,” he said, “there is no water even to pipe.”

At issue in the consolidated Supreme Court cases, Interior v. Navajo Nation and Arizona v. Navajo Nation, is an 1868 treaty under which the federal government — after forcing the Navajo to abandon their nomadic life and restricting them to a reservation — promised that the tribe would have the land and water necessary to establish a permanent home.

In the 1908 Supreme Court case Winters v. United States, the justices said that Native Americans are presumed to hold water rights if that access is necessary to ensure full use of reservation lands.

A lower court in 2021 applied Winters to find that the Interior Department had a legal obligation to assess and address the Navajo Nation’s water needs. The Biden administration is fighting that decision before the Supreme Court (Greenwire, March 16).

Justice Neil Gorsuch, a member of the court’s conservative wing who has voted in favor of tribal rights, grilled the Justice Department on how the U.S. government could ensure a permanent home for the Navajo Nation without providing the necessary water.

“Is it possible to have a permanent home, farm and raise animals without water?” Gorsuch asked.

He asked Frederick Liu, assistant to the solicitor general, if the federal government could dam the Little Colorado River above the Navajo reservation, thereby cutting off the nation’s access to water. Liu said that act would interfere with Winters.

Gorsuch responded: “Clearly there is a duty to provide some water to the tribe under this treaty.”

He followed up by asking whether a party in the Navajo Nation’s position could bring a breach of contract claim if it turns out the permanent home they were promised turns out to be the Sahara Desert.

Liu said no.

“Really?” Gorsuch said.

Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh probed the broader implications of a ruling for the Navajo Nation.

Liu responded that the provisions the Navajo Nation has relied on are not distinct. Most treaties, he said, set aside reservations to provide homelands for tribes and support for agriculture.

If the court finds for the Navajo, he said, “we would be facing similar suits across reservations across the country.”

Liu added, “This would impose on the U.S. sort of an amorphous duty to take another look at these issues.”

Alito asked how the Navajo Nation would have accessed water in 1868, the year of the treaty. Liu responded that the reservation at that time was located far from the Colorado River and would have relied instead on the Little Colorado River — a tributary that is located in Arizona — and groundwater.

The justice also pressed the Navajo Nation about where it would draw its water from. “You've studied the problem," he said. "Is there any realistic possibility that you can get the water that you think that you need from sources other than the Colorado River?”

Dvoretzky, the attorney representing the Navajo Nation, replied, “I think it is very likely that some water from the lower mainstream would ultimately be needed.”

Alito likewise questioned attorneys for both sides over how much water the tribe could use, repeatedly asking for detailed information on per capita use.

“If I had been shown a seat-of-the-pants calculation that per capita water on the Navajo Nation is greatly in excess of per capita water for residents of Arizona, do you think that would be incorrect?” Alito asked.

Liu replied: “No one denies there are water needs on the reservation.”

Dvoretzky later noted that residents of the reservation typically use just 7 gallons of water a day, compared to a national average of 80 to 100 gallons.

After arguments, Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren said that number doesn’t provide the “quality of life that we want” on the reservation.

“In order for us as a nation to be thriving and prosperous on our own,” Nygren said, “the fundamental thing is water.”

Fight dating back decades

Arguments also repeatedly touched on the court’s 1964 ruling in Arizona v. California.

In that case, the court declared Arizona had a right to 2.8 million acre-feet of water from the Colorado River and rejected California's claim that it had a right to those same waters.

The lawsuit also formalized the division of waters in the Lower Colorado River Basin — allocating California 4.4 million acre-feet of water and Nevada 300,000 acre-feet of water, in addition to Arizona’s flows — and designated the secretary of the Interior as the region’s water master.

But the Navajo Nation was left out of that lawsuit, spurring the long battle over the tribe’s rights to water from the river.

Liu told the court, however, that allowing a lower court to order water deliveries from the Lower Colorado River would violate the court’s 1964 decree.

“Basically all the water in the Lower Basin is allocated,” Liu said.

He acknowledged that the Navajo Nation could claim about 6,400 acre-feet of water from the Central Arizona Project, the state’s largest water delivery agency, under the Arizona Water Settlements Act (AWSA) of 2004.

But that would require Congress to approve a water settlement agreement with the tribe.

An acre-foot of water is equivalent to about 326,000 gallons, or enough water to cover a football field to a depth of 1 foot. The water included in the AWSA could provide about 19,000 families up to 300 gallons of water per day for one year.

Liu suggested, however, that the nation could pursue water from the river's upper basin, the water allocated to Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

“That upper basin water is farther away than the lower Colorado mainstream, but it's far more accessible,” Liu said.

Dvoretzky explained that the Navajo Nation’s reservation sits adjacent to the Colorado River in northern Arizona that is actually upstream from Lake Mead, the reservoir created by the Glen Canyon Dam.

The upper and lower basins are divided at Lees Ferry, a site 15 miles downstream of the dam.

Toward the close of Monday’s argument, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson questioned whether she and her colleagues should focus in their ruling on the narrower procedural issue of whether the Navajo Nation has the power to legally claim that the United States has a fiduciary duty to assess and protect the tribe’s water rights.

“The decision that we’re making right now is not on the merits about whether the Navajo is correct on its argument that the United States has breached its duty?” she asked Dvoretzky.

He replied that, for now, the court only needs to focus on the tribe’s ability to stake its legal claim.

The court is expected to issue its ruling by early summer.

Reporter Ellie Borst contributed.

Global temperatures are rising at unprecedented rates. Irreversible climate impacts are battering the Earth. And the most ambitious international climate target — halting warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius — is swiftly slipping away.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in a dire report Monday that the damaging effects of global warming are no longer a future threat but are already happening. Societies must take immediate — and radical — action to limit the collapse of ecosystems, slow the financial risk of storms, and address intensifying drought and heat waves, the report says.

“It warns that the pace and scale of what has been done so far and current plans are insufficient to tackle climate change,” said IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee. “We are walking when we should be sprinting.”

The report is the final installment in an enormous climate assessment the IPCC has been conducting for more than seven years. The organization has published six major reports as part of that assessment cycle since 2015.

Three installments summarized the current scientific knowledge on the ways the planet is changing, how those changes are affecting human and natural systems, and what societies must do to halt the warming. The overall project also included three special reports on topics including the effects of climate change on land systems, the Earth’s frozen places and the impacts of global warming above 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The final report released Monday synthesizes all of these findings into one conclusive document. It contains no surprises — just a blunt echo of the findings from earlier reports and fundamental conclusion: Climate change is dramatically reshaping the planet, and global action isn’t happening fast enough to stop it.

Climate change is already having widespread effects across every region of the world. Temperatures are rising and extreme weather events are growing more severe, including worsening wildfires, floods, droughts and hurricanes. Sea levels are rising at accelerating rates, and many coastal communities and island nations are facing existential threats from encroaching waters.

Food and water insecurity is on the rise as droughts intensify and agriculture suffers. Infectious diseases are increasing. People around the world are already being displaced by worsening weather and climate extremes.

Human societies have all the tools they need to begin dramatically reducing their carbon emissions, the report notes. Yet greenhouse gases aren’t falling at the rates required to meet the Paris climate targets established in 2015.

The Paris Agreement calls for world nations to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius, while striving for a more ambitious target of 1.5 C. The 1.5 C target requires carbon emissions to drop by about half within the next decade and to hit net zero by 2050. The 2 C target allows only a little extra time: emissions must hit net zero by 2070.

Yet global climate action isn’t proceeding nearly fast enough, and the world is increasingly likely to miss the 1.5 C target — at least temporarily.

‘Survival guide for humanity’

It’s possible that human societies could later lower the Earth’s temperatures back below that threshold by using natural or technological strategies to draw carbon back out of the air. But the higher global temperatures climb before that point, the more difficult it would be to draw them back down.

“It is almost inevitable that we will at least temporarily overshoot 1.5,” said Jim Skea, an energy expert at Imperial College London and co-chair of a IPCC working group, at the launch of a previous report last year.

Monday’s synthesis report echoes that warning. At the rate the world is currently burning carbon, the 1.5 C threshold is likely to arrive in the next decade or so. Even if human societies begin immediately to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the world is still likely to overshoot that target.

And even if the world later succeeds in reducing global temperatures back below 1.5 C, some climate damages can’t be undone. Sea-level rise is virtually irreversible once it’s happened, at least for hundreds or thousands of years. The world’s vast ice sheets respond to climate change on very slow timescales and can’t be quickly refrozen once they’ve melted. Plants and animals that go extinct because of climate change are gone forever.

Still, the report stresses that even though some climate impacts are unavoidable, they can be limited with deep and rapid emissions reductions.

The report notes that “adverse impacts and related losses and damages from climate change escalate with every increment of global warming.” That means every little bit of warming that’s avoided can make a difference. Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees was the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious goal — but 1.6 degrees is better than 1.7, and so on.

Limiting warming as close as possible to 1.5 C requires a fundamental overhaul of nearly all aspects of human life, the report notes. Every sector of society must decarbonize as swiftly as possible, including energy, transportation, buildings, industry, land use and agriculture.

Humanity already has all the tools necessary for these radical changes at its disposal, the report’s authors stressed Monday. What’s required now is the political will to make it happen.

Key to those efforts is a willingness on the part of high-income countries to provide the financial resources necessary for all parts of the world to both reduce emissions and adapt to the changes that have already occurred.

The report “tells us that climate change is throwing its hardest punches at the most vulnerable communities, who bear the least responsibility,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme.

She pointed to a number of recent climate-related disasters that have devastated vulnerable regions of the world, including Cyclone Freddy, which recently killed hundreds of people in Madagascar, Mozambique and Malawi.

In the past decade, the report grimly notes, human mortality rates from climate disasters like floods, droughts and storms were 15 times higher in highly vulnerable regions of the world, compared to more developed places.

“Money cannot solve everything, but it is critical to narrowing the gap between those who are most vulnerable and those who enjoy greater security,” said Lee, the IPCC chair, adding that three to six times the current amount of financing is required to address the issue.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres echoed the calls for increased responsibility on the part of high-income nations in a video message launching the report Monday (see related story).

Developed nations should commit to hitting net-zero emissions by 2040, he said — that’s 10 years earlier than most countries, including the U.S., have committed to. Emerging economies should continue to aim for net zero by 2050, he added.

“The climate time bomb is ticking,” he said.

The new report, he added, can be seen as “a survival guide for humanity.”

IPCC assessment cycles typically conclude every six to seven years. That means the next assessment will probably conclude around 2030.

The latest cycle is coming to a close more than 30 years after the IPCC was established. In that time, scientific certainty around the causes and effects of climate change has solidified. There is no doubt left that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet at unprecedented rates and that rising temperatures have catastrophic effects all over the world.

The biggest remaining uncertainty is how quickly the world will act to stop it.

The changes the Earth endures in the future “will be shaped by the choices we make starting right now,” Lee said.

“So let’s hope we make the right choices, because the ones we make now and in the next few years will reverberate around the world for hundreds, even thousands, of years.”