Colorado Front Range

About

Water use in Colorado is changing. Drought is diminishing supply. Urban growth is increasing demand. Markets are exerting pressure to move agricultural supplies to where the demand and price are highest—to growing Front Range cities.

The Colorado Water Plan projects a municipal and industrial water supply gap up to 560,000 acre-feet. It seeks to reduce this gap to zero by 2030 through conservation, water use efficiency, innovative water-sharing agreements, and water-smart growth planning. Simultaneously, it looks to protect irrigated agriculture and see agricultural economic productivity keep pace with growing state and national trends.

Water is the building block of a strong economy in Colorado. When water leaves an area, economic opportunity leaves with it. Freshwater ecosystems are often degraded. The Freshwater Trust (TFT) is quantifying the impacts water transfers have on local communities to guide actions that protect agriculture, local economies, and ecosystem health. Those actions usually require a combination of irrigated farmland preservation, optimization of water supplies and production practices, modernization of irrigation infrastructure, and habitat restoration; but without precision analytics, knowing which actions need to be taken where—or how much those actions will cost—is nearly impossible.

TFT’s multi-objective decision support tools help partners and clients understand the value of reliable clean water and the full cost of recovery when water leaves an area. When people have the tools to accurately assess impacts, they gain new ability to prevent or mitigate those impacts—ensuring that agriculture, nature, and rural communities continue to thrive, and that Colorado can achieve its water plan goals.