New Mexico joins federal freshwater challenge to improve water conservation partnerships

New Mexico and three other states are joining the America the Beautiful Freshwater Challenge, Brenda Mallory, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, announced at Tingley Beach alongside the flowing waters of the Rio Grande on Thursday.

In all, 50 new members are joining the partnership, including nonprofit New Mexico Wild.

Hawaii, Michigan and Minnesota are also joining the initiative to protect, restore and reconnect 8 million acres of the country’s wetlands and 100,000 miles of rivers and streams by 2030. The partnership was launched during Earth Week in May with 100 inaugural members, including the Navajo Nation.

“I think, collectively, the result will be that our waters across state lines and across regional lines will actually improve together,” Mallory said.

No funding is attached directly to the initiative, but it does foster partnerships between federal, state and local entities working on water conservation. The partnership could help bring together local knowledge with state and federal resources.

“We know that the best conservation is locally led and locally advanced, and so really leaning into what the communities think is important for the success of their initiatives is really important,” Mallory said.

Tannis Fox, a senior lawyer with the Western Environmental Law Center and part of the Protect NM Waters Coalition, said that New Mexico’s waters help fuel the state’s $2 billion outdoor economy and provide habitat for species such as the peregrine falcon, the black bear and the Rio Grande cutthroat trout.

“New Mexico waters are in peril,” Fox said. “We are in the eye of a perfect storm. We are in an arid state to begin with, and climate change is hitting us hard. Today, 66% of our state is in drought conditions.”

But the state Legislature has put down money to start building out a state surface water permitting program, with an appropriation of $7.6 million to boost the effort in the most recent legislative session.

Last year’s Supreme Court decision in Sackett v. the Environmental Protection Agency, which limited the federal government’s authority to regulate wetlands that do not have a continuous surface connection to larger bodies of water, put New Mexico’s waters at risk, according to Dan Roper, New Mexico program lead for nonprofit Trout Unlimited. Trout Unlimited was a founding member of the Freshwater Challenge.

“We know that in order to have a healthy Rio Grande, we need protected tributary streams and wetlands upstream and adjacent to here, regardless of if they have a surface connection to navigable water,” Roper said. “By some estimates, as many as 95% of our streams and almost 90% of our state wetlands are at risk due to both the Sackett decision and the fact that we don’t yet have a state permitting program in place, though we are working hard to do that.”

It is unclear how the Supreme Court decision could impact acequias, said Vidal Gonzales of the New Mexico Acequia Association.

“All these small and ephemeral and intermittent streams that may only flow during spring runoff and in the monsoon season are all part of the holistic system that feeds the acequias,” he said. “When these smaller streams become polluted, it flows downstream into our communities, including our water, crops, farms, ranches and the cattle that we rely on for survival.”

The America the Beautiful Challenge is part of President Joe Biden’s America the Beautiful Initiative, which is trying to conserve at least 30% of the nation’s lands and waters by 2030.

“So far, he has taken action to conserve more than 41 million acres of lands and waters, putting him on track to conserve more lands and waters than any president in history,” Mallory said.