NM’s Climate Adaptation Plan Ignores Shrinking Water Supplies

The 2024 New Mexico Climate Adaptation and Resilience Plan (CARP) is under revision for publication in February 2027. The 2024 version and an early draft of the revised version treat New Mexico’s permanent drying out as a footnote. A state climate adaptation plan in the desert southwest that does not address water supply has a fundamental failure to live up to its name. The CARP’s “Water Systems” theme addresses only built infrastructure — pipes, treatment facilities, delivery systems. It does not address the present and future condition of the water supplies those systems depend on.

New Mexico Water Advocates was invited in 2025 to join the New Mexico Community Resilience Group (CRG), an advisory forum convened by the state Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department (EMNRD) to strengthen coordination between state and local climate resilience efforts and to help ensure that community priorities are reflected in the revised CARP. New Mexico Water Advocates participates in that group. From that vantage the plan’s treatment of water supply is woefully inadequate.

Many New Mexico communities are in or approaching water bankruptcy — a condition in which their water demands structurally and chronically exceed available renewable or long-term supply and a return to the previously normal water supply is impossible. Water bankruptcy in New Mexico is driven by decades of groundwater mining. It is created by routine upstream depletion of river water owned by downstream users. Water bankruptcy is not a future risk to be managed; for many regions and communities it is the present reality requiring adaptation now to prevent very bad outcomes including collapse. A New Mexico climate adaptation plan that does not name increasing water scarcity or prescribe a response to it is fundamentally incomplete.

The Lower Rio Grande is in water bankruptcy, and is now subject to the “Settlement,” which is really a negotiated bankruptcy recovery plan that the U.S. Supreme Court accepted, issued as a decree, and will enforce. The Governor has lauded the end of litigation, saying that it brings certainty to Lower Rio Grande communities and farmers. In reality, the water supply future for Las Cruces, NMSU, and all other municipal and self-supplied industrial and commercial water users is now extremely uncertain. Certainties include great constraints on total water use and substantial cutbacks in groundwater pumping. Compliance will cause major disruptions.

Communities across New Mexico who rely on mined groundwater as their sole source of water supply also are in water bankruptcy, including Clovis, Portales, and Cannon Air Force Base. Other communities are not yet at the end of their water supplies but are well on the way, and the community and economic consequences are being disregarded.

The Albuquerque Metro area and entire Middle Rio Grande are approaching water bankruptcy in the form of an explicit violation of the Rio Grande Compact due to unsustainable uses of the river and the aquifers beneath and beside it. If the State doesn’t act quickly and decisively to prevent that violation, the U.S. Supreme Court will eventually issue the Middle Rio Grande’s tough water bankruptcy recovery plan and enforce it.

The 2024 CARP’s failure to address water supply originates from Governor Lujan Grisham’s focus on developing “new” water and not working toward solutions to living within our means. The CARP is silent on the 2022 State Engineer’s Water Policy and Infrastructure Task Force’s unanimous water management and planning recommendations — while quoting Task Force water infrastructure recommendations.

New Mexico Water Advocates asks the EMNRD staff responsible for the CARP revision to address the following, working closely with the Office of the State Engineer and the Interstate Stream Commission:

• Recognition that present and projected water supply deficits in the Middle and Lower Rio Grande basins and in regions depending exclusively on mined groundwater require adaptation now.
• Integration of the Water Task Force’s eight water management and planning recommendations, unanimously adopted by the 2022 Task Force and subsequently neglected by the State, as the CARP’s omissions demonstrate.

Without changes to recognize the realities of New Mexico’s historical unsustainable water withdrawals, increasing aridification, and our existential requirement to adapt to water supply scarcity, New Mexico’s economy and quality of life will not survive.