What the Colorado River Drought Means for California

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KQED

News, News Commentary, Politics

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2026

⏱️ 55 minutes

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Summary

The Colorado River basin and its two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, are facing record-low water levels, and the seven states that rely on the water system can’t agree on what to do about it. Now the federal government may need to step in, with the Trump Administration proposing a plan that would cut 40 percent of the Colorado River’s water supply to Arizona, California and Nevada over the next decade. We’ll talk with environment journalists about what this could mean here in California. Guests: Camille von Kaenel, California environment reporter, Politico Luke Runyon, co-director, The Water Desk, Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder Celene Hawkins, director, Colorado River Program, The Nature Conservancy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:58.7	Welcome to Forum. I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Mina Kim.
1:03.4	The Colorado River has really made the West, as we know it, possible. It's allowed millions of
1:08.9	people to live in the desert. It's turned dry farmland green. It's helped fuel cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas. But there is not enough water in the river to go around. We've got rising temperatures. We've got decades of overuse. We've got a long-term drying trend that are all shrinking the Colorado River system, and it's
1:29.7	pushing major reservoirs to very historic lows. States across the West are now fighting over how to
1:36.9	share what's left. So where do we go from here? We are joined by Luke Runyon. He's co-director of
1:44.1	the Water Desk at the Center for Environmental
1:46.4	Journalism at the University of Colorado. Welcome, Luke. Hi, thanks so much for having me. So it's been a
1:53.1	rough year for the river. There's currently a drought. Give us a sense of how bad it is. Yeah, we're
2:00.6	really gearing up for a pretty unprecedented year in the Colorado River Basin,
2:05.6	which, you know, we've had some pretty bad years in recent memory, and this one is gearing up
2:10.2	to be even worse than those. So the drought of record for the basin was set back in 2002,
2:21.4	really, really dry year, you know, kind of unprecedented conditions then.
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