Environmentalists often turn to conservation easements to conserve wildlife habitat, recreational uses and open space. Why not do the same for groundwater?
That’s the question researchers at the Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center are urging state lawmakers across the West to consider in a bid to conserve groundwater supplies threatened by persistent drought and overuse of existing supplies.
The idea is modeled on similar programs for land conservation, in which landowners and nonprofit land trusts strike agreements to set aside acreage to preserve features like wildlife habitat, open space or recreational use.
“These are a great way to address this issue where we’ve allocated more water rights than water in aquifers, but we may not want to be prescriptive about how we achieve those reductions,” said Katherine Wright, a senior researcher at PERC who led a recent report on the proposal.
