Drought is on everybody’s mind right now as the State of Colorado reckons with a snowpack that is about half of normal, and with the realities of sharing the Colorado River with other states. North Fork High School students, along with community leaders, met last week to play a game based on how communities can survive water scarcity.
Katya Schloesser works for the Center for Education, Engagement, and Evaluation at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. A former educator, Schlosser is also a hydrologist with a focus on snow science. She lives in Gunnison and for more than a decade, she's worked with North Fork High School teacher Mike Munoz and his students using scenario-based role -playing games designed to make rural communities more resilient to hazards.
Schloesser explained the game. “Tonight students will be taking the role of community members and leaders, and they're going to be on pretend basin roundtables. And their job will be to make investments in drought resilience strategies, which is something that our leaders are doing all the time. to make our communities more resilient to drought. And then they'll see how that plays out in a game and seeing what impacts they experience based on what they invested in.”
Besides the students, who had been playing the game in class for several weeks, community members included staffers from the Western Slope Conservation Center. as well as Delta County Commissioner Wendell Koontz and former Paonia Mayor Neal Schwieterman, both members of the Gunnison River Roundtable. Here's WSCC Outreach Coordinator Keshia Anderson playing an oil and gas foreman, followed by others at her table.
“My goal is to produce as much oil and gas as possible while keeping my crew and the site safe,” said Anderson.
Other players followed: “I'm a ditch company manager and my goal is to keep water moving, delivering irrigation water efficiently and reliably to my ranches and my neighbors”
“My role is US Forest Service Forester. My goal is to manage the forest for as many uses while keeping the ecosystem healthy as the climate changes.”
'I'm a Department of Agriculture representative. My goal is to ensure that local farmers and ranchers have access to state -provided resources to plan for drought.”
“I'm the Tribal Water Resources Division Leader, and my goal is to keep water resources healthy and sustainable for the tribes.”
Each table representing different communities received 25 units of funding to invest in different strategies to mitigate the effects of drought. Here are a few of the strategies, read by a community game player.
“Fix and improve local water infrastructure; Establish a new water rate structure. Host a soil and water conservation workshop for local ranchers and farmers; Improve ditches and irrigation systems; Support mental health for farmers and ranchers; Develop a collaborative water sharing agreement; River habitat restoration project. Assess and mitigate fire risk to watershed health.”
Schloesser read out each year's new forecast, and each group rolled the dice to determine what new challenges their communities were up against.
“A year passes,” said Schloesser. “Snowpack is low, and there is very little rain. So now your community is in severe drought. So you have a whole new set of impacts. You didn't get a lot of snow, a lot of rain, so you all are taking five water droplets out of your supply.”
At the end of the game, Commissioner Koontz introduced a video of a speech by Becky Mitchell, the director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. Mitchell is also the Colorado Commissioner to the Upper Colorado River Commission.
“The Colorado River is not broken, but we are,” Mitchell told her colleagues. “The river is doing exactly what rivers do when you take too much from them for too long. It's responding to reality, and right now, for some, that reality is inconvenient. For more than a century, we built a system on optimism and entitlement. We planned for abundance, labeled it normal, wrote it into law, and when the water showed up, we spent it. When it didn't, we blame the weather, climate change, or each other. Anything but the simple math.”
With these sobering thoughts, the game came to an end. Several days later, on Saturday, February 14, the seven states in the Colorado River Compact were unable to come to an agreement on how to share water. The U.S. Department of the Interior took over, saying it will proceed quickly with public comment and environmental analysis. The current agreement expires this fall.
