Water Talk
Water Talk is a national podcast about all things Water hosted by Drs. Mallika Nocco (University of Wisconsin–Madison Extension), Faith Kearns (Arizona State University), and Sam Sandoval (University of California, Davis; University of California Agriculture & Natural Resources)
Water Talk
Ep 76: Water budgeting and bankruptcy
A conversation with Brian Richter (Sustainable Waters) about budgeting water for the environment and water accounting for the future. Released October 31, 2025.
Bienvenidos a Water Talk. In today's episode, we're talking about water sustainability, environmental flows, the Colorado River, the Rio Grande Rio Bravo, and much more with Brian Richter. He has been a global leader in water scarcity and conservation for more than 30 years. He's the president of Sustainable Waters. His work focuses on water for the environment, water scarcity challenges, and sustainable water use and management. Brian has consulted on more than 170 water projects worldwide. He is a water advisor to many different institutions, such as the United Nations, and has testified before the U.S. Congress on multiple occasions. He co-authored a book with Sandra Postel entitled Rivers for Life: Managing Water for People and Nature. And in 2014, he published a second book, Chasing Water, a Guide for Moving from Scarcity to Sustainability. He teaches water sustainability at the University of Virginia. And he does many more things.
Faith Kearns:So Sam, can you talk a little bit about Brian's work and what people might want to know as they go into this episode?
Samuel Sandoval Solis:So I think one of the books that really changed myself as a professional, as a water professional, is the book that he wrote with Sandra Postel, Rivers for Life, Managing Water for People and Nature. That one I will encourage everyone to read it. It really changed my way of seeing water and water for the environment, environmental flows. Now there are two primary topics on this conversation. One is environmental flows. And basically, it's the water that we keep in the river to sustain what is living in the river and along the river. And he's been working on that. That will be the first concept. The second one, water budgets, they also refer as mass balance. But basically, it is this concept that in a certain region in an spatial boundary and in an also in a specific period of time, you do water accounting. So you basically count in that specific space through time how much water is available or some inflows and how much water is being used, or leaving that geographical space.
Faith Kearns:Yeah, and then I think even backing up from that a little bit, just this idea of water for the environment, right, is something that I think people probably within the water field have gotten semi-used to talking about, even though I personally still find it to be challenging, just because I'm trained as an ecologist, right? And so I think of water for the environment as such a strange concept because water comes from the environment. And so I think I've been puzzled by that terminology for so long, and then really started to encounter it working in California at the statewide level because it's such an important concept there in terms of thinking about how much water we use for agriculture, how much we use for commercial and industrial uses, how much people use in urban areas. And so you'll see these pie charts sometimes that show 40 to 80 percent, depending on how you look at it, of water goes to agriculture, 50% goes to the environment. In California, we're talking right now. Other places have slightly different makeups, although it tends to fall within the same sort of general categories of agriculture generally uses the most water out of that big pie, et cetera. And so, yeah, it's a really interesting concept. And it was interesting to hear from Brian about it because I think I was understanding the concept of a water budget as more linked to water for the environment than I had before, in terms of like if you really are going to get into sector by sector use, you kind of do have to talk about water for the environment, even though I still find it at a fundamental level a challenging thing, like I said, because that is the source of the water, right? So the idea that we're allocating for the source is still conceptually strange to me, but I think on a pragmatic level, it's something that that ultimately does become necessary to talk about, as particularly we get into all these things about where is the water going? Where can we reduce? How can we shift things, right?
Samuel Sandoval Solis:Yeah, and it has this duality of being the nature, the provider, but also conceptualizing in our legal system as an user, so we can allocate water to that user. And it is that kind of mind setting that sometimes hurts because all the water comes from the environment. Without further ado, let's hear from Brian Richter. Brian, bienvenido. Bienvenida Water Talk. Thank you for being here. I am actually very excited to have you here. Before actually getting into the technical conversations, I would like to ask you, Brian, can you please share with us about a pivotal moment in your life that led you on your professional path?
Brian Richter:Yes, Sam. Well, it actually took place in your state of California. I had decided to start graduate school, and I was starting up at Humboldt State University up in Arcata. And during the summer, I took a job as a whitewater rafting guide in the Sierra Nevada on the Stanislaus River. And I had started into graduate school thinking I wanted to be an ecologist, a wildlife ecologist. But during the course of that rafting season, I came to learn that they were planning to build a new dam on the Stanislaus River that was going to inundate, flood the stretch of river that we were running in the rafts. And I was just flabbergasted. I didn't know why in the world they would do that to such a beautiful place. And so I wanted to learn a lot more about why they were going to build this dam, what was the purpose of the dam going to be. And I really didn't have much of a water background before that. But because I dove into that issue, I got really, really interested in water issues in general and how water management decisions are made and the impacts of water management on the natural environment. That was really the trigger. From then on, it was just water all the way.
Faith Kearns:Thank you so much, Brian. The Stanislaus is such a beautiful river. I can see how it would, it's a great thing to have as part of your origin story. So you work on water for the environment. And I think it's not necessarily a concept that people are super familiar with outside of our field. And so I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about what water for the environment is, its importance, and how it relates to environmental flows and then maybe environmental activism as well.
Brian Richter:Sure. Well, this concept of water for the environment is a relatively new consideration, if you will, in managing water. And so everybody knows water gets managed, gets used, I should say, for a lot of different things. We use it in our homes, we use it in our cities, we use it in our industries, we use it to grow food and fiber out in agriculture. But for a very long time, for centuries, we never really gave a thought to the idea that maybe we needed to leave some water in the rivers themselves in order to sustain the life there, the ecological health of those river systems. And it really wasn't until about the 1950s that a couple of scientists started to say, hey, because during the 1950s and 60s in the United States, we were building dams like crazy. I think I read that we were building on average one complete dam per day, every day of every year. And so there was an awful lot of alteration happening to America's rivers. And finally, some scientists said, hey, you know, this is having a big impact. And as they're building these dams and the associated reservoirs, they're capturing all the water flow in the river. And at times they might not be releasing hardly anything to the downstream environment. And so that was when the work on water for the environment really began. And it matured quite rapidly over the ensuing decades. And I got involved in it pretty much in the 1980s. I had the opportunity to start working on one of the nature conservancy's early land holdings, early reserves in central Arizona. And I was fortunate enough that it was situated right on the Hassayampa River. And so I was able to be start getting involved in one, the science. How do you decide how much water the river actually needs? And then also, what is the policy or legal procedures that you need to go through in order to secure protection for those necessary flows, which we now refer to as environmental flows. And so as I said, the science matured very rapidly. There's now literally probably thousands of scientists that are involved in the science aspects and the legal aspects, the policy aspects. And we continue to push the frontiers of doing that better and better. And I think one of the most important things that's happened in the recent decades has been the understanding that it's not just the physical and biological science that's necessary to succeed in protecting the necessary environmental flows. But there's also a huge social component to this, meaning that if society, if the other users of the water aren't comfortable with what you're trying to do, you're going to face a lot of opposition and you may not ultimately be successful in trying to protect those necessary flows.
Samuel Sandoval Solis:Brian, this is an extremely good conversation because I think you have gone from the science now into the policy and adapting. And I think along those lines you find a concept that is called a water budget. And in that concept of water budget, you also relate that water budget for many different uses and users. And also you're bringing a concept quite interesting that is called water bankruptcy. So can you explain those two, water budget and water bankruptcy?
Brian Richter:Yes. Well, I was fortunate in that I had some really, really influential mentors early in my water career. And the one that first comes to mind is a fellow named David Harrison. He was an amazing water attorney in Colorado. And David was also the chair of the board of directors of the Nature Conservancy at the time. And David and I had a lot of interactions about this, and David really impressed upon me how important it was to understand in quite a lot of detail how each increment of the available water is being used, is being consumed, and how much might be left flowing down the river, being unused. And David felt very strongly about this because he said, Brian, you're never going to get what you want unless you can figure out how to ensure that everybody else has what they need. And so what he meant by that was you really have to understand how much water each of those different what we call sectors of water use, how much is needed for the city, how much is needed for the farms, how much is needed for the industries, as well as understanding how much water the environment needs. And so by carefully calculating how much water was already being used for each of those different purposes, you get a robust picture, a holistic picture of what's happening to the water flow.
Samuel Sandoval Solis:And what about bankruptcy? So what is you you were discussing? So you do a budget, you figure out who is using water and then the bankruptcy.
Brian Richter:Yes. Well, the the the bankruptcy really comes from the fact that I think you know I really came to that term after overworking the metaphor of bank accounts. In its simplest description, I think a water budget is very much like your personal banking account. And you need to understand how much how many deposits, how much replenishment of water is coming into the water budget account, and then your expenditures, as I was saying, where each increment of water is being used on the other end. And you really understand need to, just like your personal banking account, you need to understand what's the balance look like. And in many of these systems, unfortunately, we're now in a situation where we are overdrafting our water budget, meaning that we're consuming more water in these river basins than is being naturally replenished by snow melt and rainfall and aquifer recharge. And so we've gotten ourselves in a real pickle in essentially all of these places that we've been studying recently. I think it would be safe to say more than half of the river basins in the western United States are facing some real challenges and might arguably be in a state of bankruptcy or meaning that the water is not being used in a sustainable way, that we're consuming more water in many cases than is physically available. And I'll take a moment to explain how that can happen because to a lot of your listeners, they may think, how in the world do you consume more than is available? But also that we are not leaving enough water flowing in these systems to support the ecological health of those systems as well. To the point of using more than is available. I think one quick story is the Colorado River system, where for the last couple of two, three decades, in three-quarters of the years, we have consumed more water from the Colorado River basin than is being replenished in that basin. We've been able to get away with that primarily by taking water out of the big reservoirs in the system. So when people hear the news headlines about the level of Lake Powell is going down, it's dropping, it's dropping, the level of Lake Mead is dropping. That's because we're consuming more water than is coming down the river system, and we're having to tap into that water that's been stored in those big reservoirs, and as a result, we're depleting the volume of water in those reservoirs. Another example is how we're depleting groundwater. So we're just finishing this study in the Rio Grande Bravo, and it was very frightening. We had some terrific scientists that were able to estimate the volume of groundwater depletion that's been taking place, and it's quite frightening. We're really pumping an awful lot of groundwater, much of which hasn't been carefully measured and monitored previously, and now we're able to come up with some of the first estimates of what that looks like, and it's quite frightening. So I'll close this by just giving you the summary finding from the Rio Grande was that half of the water being consumed in the Rio Grande Bravo basin is being provided by natural runoff, snow melt, rainfall, coming down into the river system, recharging the groundwater aquifers. The other half of the water that's being consumed is only made possible by depleting the water being stored in the reservoirs and depleting groundwater aquifers. So that's a pretty frightening conclusion we're essentially 50% unsustainable. Half of that water is unsustainable.
Faith Kearns:Thank you so much. I think, Brian, I agree with you on groundwater. It is a the more we learn, the more frightening the picture gets for sure. And I guess I'm just thinking how how we might start to get out of this water bankruptcy situation. And particularly, I guess, as you were talking, I was also just thinking, it's not like we can file chapter 11 if we want to really extend the metaphor. And so I'm not really worth sure what the solution is. And then we've got this sort of looming other thing, right, which is climate change and ratification. And so, I'm just thinking how like it you kind of lose track a little bit of the balancing of the checkbook metaphor with this, like, it's almost like the whole financial system is is sort of, I again, I don't know how far to take the metaphor, but yeah, just wondering what your thoughts are in terms of how how we address this, especially in a changing climate.
Brian Richter:Well, Faith, it's a great question. And I'm glad you bring up the issue of climate change, because probably many of your listeners understand what climate change is doing to our water resources availability, but it's scary. And so again, maybe a couple of quick examples might help to illustrate. In the Colorado River system, the climate scientists estimate that already something like 10 to 15 percent of the river's flow is being lost to climate change-induced effects. And meaning evaporation is increasing a lot, the amount of water required to grow the same crop on the same field is is greater now. We're drying out the soils to an extent that the soil moisture has to be refilled, has to be restored in the spring before we'll start to see runoff into the river systems. So, anyway, there's a number of semi-complicated effects that the climate that a warming climate is having on water availability. But in the Colorado River system, it's something on the order of 10 to 15 percent less water already because of climate change. Those climate scientists are also telling us look out because between now and 2050, we might lose another 20 to 30 percent more. And so when you're in a situation, a bankrupt situation already, and you're facing the fact that your natural replenishment of the water system is going to be decreasing, that makes the challenge even more enormous to try to rebalance, to get back to a sustainable long-term approach to managing that water. Similarly, in the Rio Grande, we estimated that already the flows into the Rio Grande are 17% less than they were in the past century, and a good portion of that is is due to climate change. And again, the scientists there are saying, and you know, another 25 to 30 percent reduction in the coming decades. So my my hair on the back of my neck is standing up. I've been working on water scarcity issues for more than four decades now, and I've never been more concerned, more fearful, more alarmed than I am today. It's very, very sobering. And so you ask about what we can do, Faith, and the good news is that the water community has tested all kinds of viable strategies in literally thousands of places around the planet. Okay. We've tested things, we've tried things, we've seen what works, we've seen what fails, we know the precautions around different approaches, we have excellent guidelines, guidance principles to go upon, to use. So, in other words, we have the tools in chasing water. My book Chasing Water referred to the toolbox. We have the tools. We don't need a miracle, we don't need a techno a substantial technological advancement to be able to address these problems. What we lack is the ability to one change behaviors effectively, and two the political leadership and will to make the hard decisions and the mandates that are going to be necessary to move us toward the resolution of this water bankruptcy. And so I mentioned before that it's really the social science that my personal story, I thought, oh, I'm working with a bunch of smart scientists and engineers, and we can figure out how to do this. And voila, we come up with the solutions and and we put them out there and go, okay, just implement this and everything will be okay. Well, those smart ideas aren't always welcomed with open arms by the people that are that have been using the water for decades and in fact for generations. And so we have to figure out how do we engage those communities of water users in a meaningful and effective way through open dialogue, so that they feel like they are part of the decision-making process and that they feel like they're part of the design of the solutions for how to solve this problem. They understand they have a problem. They just don't want to have solutions shoved down their throats by somebody else. And particularly somebody who doesn't necessarily know the details of urban water management or irrigation farming the way that they do. Okay, so that's part of it. There is a social science here. I've had some really, really interesting conversations and collaborations with some behavioral scientists in the recent years that I think shed some light on potential ways forward. But the other part is this aspect of political leadership and will. You know, I've had so many political leaders, city managers, for instance, say, Brian, what's the last thing in the world a mayor wants to have to tell their residents of their city? Stop using so much water. And because people are they're very addicted, it's probably not the word, they're very accustomed to using water in the way that they've been using water. It's an imposition to ask them to change the behavior of the way that they use water. And so it's there's a social process of education and and helping them to understand, make sure they understand why some changes are needed, and so on and so forth. But sometimes the the changes that are needed have much higher political risk, much higher political consequences. So take the Rio Grande Bravo, okay? How are you gonna get them from using that 50% of the water that's unsustainable? It's gonna require some pretty determined and committed political leadership to make sure the message gets out there. Look, we have a very, very serious problem. We have a crisis here. We're gonna need to make some very, very big changes. And it's gonna begin with setting some goals and some targets, and it's gonna require us to implement some of the best available strategies. And we're gonna have to figure out how we're going to finance that, how we're going to be able to incentivize the changes in behavior. And but we're gonna have to do this much improvement each year to be able to move us toward a resolution of this bankruptcy over some time span.
Samuel Sandoval Solis:So you've been talking quite a lot on the Colorado River and the Rio Grande, Rio Bravo. And some solutions. So, how can we get out of their current state in a more sustainable water management? Not to put you in the spot, this might be content for one or full episodes or seasons, but any ideas on those two basins?
Brian Richter:Well, Sam, I was very heartened by you know some of the recent discussions about in the Colorado River system, about moving away from fixed numbers of water shares between the upper basin and the lower basin. You know, a hundred years ago, you know, some agreements were made in the Colorado River Compact that said that the lower basin was, you know, essentially entitled to something on the order of seven and a half million acre feet per year. Having fixed numbers like that of water allocation, I think are becoming very problematic in this era of climate change. And so there has been in the recent year, the conversation has begun to shift toward let's move away from fixed allocations of water to individual states or upper basin, lower basin, whatever. And let's start to base the allocations on shares or percentages of what's actually coming down the river. The Australians have been doing this for a good long time. It's a very, very smart way of allocating water as proportional shares rather than fixed numbers. And so I think that's that's the beginning of a way forward on this. And I think that you're gonna see if they move forward successfully on that idea, on that concept in the Colorado, I think we'll start to see other places like the Rio Grande, Rio Bravo, you know, perhaps emulating something similar. Just coming up with a different formula for water allocation, though, doesn't solve the problem, right? Getting the same percentage of a lesser volume is, you know, is not an easy thing to accomplish. So everybody's gonna have to figure out how to how they're gonna be able to use less water. They're gonna end up with a with a less proportional share of what's actually coming down the river. And that's gonna require a tremendous amount of innovation and and willpower and and again leadership. You know, I say in chasing water, Sam, that the first step is really admitting that you have a problem and also acknowledging that therefore something needs to be. To be done differently than the way that we've been doing it in the past. And then begins the process of building a shared vision or a shared plan for how we're all going to be able to make those kinds of adjustments so that we can get the system back into some kind of balance. So, Sam, without going into the details of the particular solutions or strategies, although we certainly can go there in irrigated agriculture or in urban water management, I think that just the concept of acknowledging the problem and developing a shared vision for how we're going to rectify that problem are essential starting points on that path towards sustainability.
Faith Kearns:Thank you, Brian. There's no getting around the fact that that talking about some of this stuff is challenging and kind of heavy. And I'm just wondering, you know, after your four decades in the field, if you could just share with listeners kind of what gives you a sense of hope or what keeps you putting one foot in front of the other and continuing to work on these issues for your your entire career.
Brian Richter:Okay. So yeah, so the unfortunate part of this is that, you know, it really takes a crisis, unfortunately, before we see change. The upside is that human beings are remarkable animals. When necessary, we seem to be able to come together and make the investments or build the coalitions that are necessary to save ourselves. And that has to always give us hope. Certainly there will be some technological advancements. I think AI will be helpful, for example, in this. But most importantly, learning how to how to work through those social challenges and the political challenges, I think, is going to be the most important part. And we're going to see, because we're being forced to, we're going to see some radical changes in water policy being made in the Colorado, the Rio Grande Bravo. It's just as imminent. I mean, anybody who works in the water, has been working in the water community for any time sees that, you know, again, whatever metaphor you want to use, we're heading for a cliff. We have got to hit the brakes. We've got to pull back. And we will, but the degree of change and the speed of change is going to be unlike anything we've ever seen before because we absolutely have to.
Samuel Sandoval Solis:Yeah, totally agree. Our backs against the wall or our buckets without water. We can also use that analogy. Brian, we always like to ask our guests if there is anything more that you would like people to know about your work and how can we support your efforts?
Brian Richter:Well, Sam, you know, you're among the thousands and thousands of professors around the world that are making enormous contributions in both your teaching and in your research. But let's start with how important it is. The good news for our students is that there's job security in water. This is not a problem that's going to go away anytime soon. The urgency means that more and more positions are going to be created in our field. So, you know, that's the same revelation that I had, Sam, back when I was in high school. I grew up in San Diego, and at that time we had mandatory water conservation. And it was like a light bulb went off of my head. And I said, gosh, you know what? If I could become a water expert, I'd have job security for the rest of my life. Prescient for a high schooler, I guess, at the time. But one of them is definitely the education. We need to keep building that community of people that are aware, and not just at the professional grade, but also in the general public. I think the general public is still woefully water illiterate. I talk about that a little bit in Chasing Water, and other people have written about the importance of water literacy in the in the general population. And what an informed public, in Jefferson's words, back at the time he was writing the U.S. Constitution, what does an informed public mean? And we need to we need to get better and better at teaching the professionals of tomorrow, but also in educating the the general public. So I think that's a really, really important note. And always, in Barack Obama's words, keeping hope alive. I've never felt myself more challenged. I'm definitely a glass half-full guy. I've been an eternal optimist throughout my entire life and career. This moment is challenging that optimism as much as any point in my life, but I remain committed to believing that we could we can do this, that we can be successful in this. And hopefully some of the things I've said today will shed some light on what we need to be able to accomplish in the coming years in order to be successful.
Samuel Sandoval Solis:Hey, Brian, thank you so much. Muchas gracias, and definitely also here another perennial optimism. And thank you for all the work. And yes, we we will continue the hope. Thanks a lot. So it is time for our parting gift. Faith, what what is your parting gift from this conversation?
Faith Kearns:Yeah, I have to say I was really just appreciating the ability to talk with somebody who has been at this for such a long time. I mean, I sometimes can feel like I have been at this for a very long time already, as I sort of go from, you know, it feels like I went from early career to late career, like very, very quickly. And so, you know, it I always appreciate talking to people who've been at it for another even decade or two, and hearing all the way from Brian's initial inspiration about his career, which is probably not super different than a lot of us have, that moment where we kind of figure out how important water is to us, and then all the way through to a career really committed to getting these technical details of water budgets right in very specific places. And so that to me is a really interesting trajectory and just always heartened to hear of people who keep keep going and keep at it because it's not necessarily an easy thing to do. How about you, Sam?
Samuel Sandoval Solis:I had actually many parting gifts, but in basically in two categories. The first one is all the different details that he was navigating between all these different basins, the Colorado River, and some of his visions of like providing some really good steps to move forward, and this concept of not dividing quantities by shares, and that it will not be the solution, but it is one first good step on the Rio Bravo. I mean, mentioning that yeah, we have a severe problem there, we know it, it is scary, but also that we'll have to fix it. So I think those were a very two parting gifts. The second category, I will put it in his last comment, hope. And I think that was great. I think it's good to relate or to hear from someone else that is so much experience, that is feeling the heat, and that is providing a good advice for everyone to keep the hope. And for me, it is that that we are in the same struggle, and we just need to keep the hope and and our good work to move this forward. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for joining us.
Faith Kearns:Thank you for listening to the Water Talk Podcast. I'm Faith Kearns and I'm the Director of Research Communications with the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative at Arizona State University.
Samuel Sandoval Solis:My name is Samuel Sandoval. I'm a professor at UC Davis and a cooperative extension specialist in water resources management at the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Mallika Nocco:I'm Mallika Nocco, Assistant Professor and State Extension Specialist in Agricultural Water Management at the University of Wisconsin Madison. If you enjoy our show, please review, listen, like, and subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts. Please find transcripts and additional content at WatertalkPodcast.com. Original music by Paloma Herrera Thomas.