Agenda

1. BIENVENIDOS! WELCOME!

2. Agenda SCERP Border Institute Objectives Watersheds Watershed Approach Transboundary U.S-Mexican Objectives of BI Case Studies Tools Mechanisms Tour Break-Out Session

3. SCERP/CIPAS 10 universities in all 10 border states Established in 1990 Sustainability Sciences Projects, Programs, Monographs, etc. Boundary Organization Policy Conference

4. SCERP and Watersheds • Watershed focus for over a decade • Transboundary Watershed Research Project, Atlas, and Vision • Border Watersheds Vulnerability • Border Water GIS Summit • MOU with USGS and with INEGI

5. Border Institute Series Science-based “think tank” style 100 top-level border, and subject experts Regional and long-term view Informed papers, presentations, & panels Break-out session to provide feedback in the form of policy recommendations

6. Past Border Institute Topics • Demographics and its impacts • Environmental infrastructure & finance • Energy, trade, and the environment • Water management planning • Environmental health and indicators • Ecosystems protection and preservation • Air quality management

7. Border Institute VIII Means and Mechanisms for Collaborative Planning and Operation of Transboundary and Shared Watersheds How better align what’s being done on both sides Motivate what isn’t yet happening on the other side

8. Seminal Origin of All Issues

9. Introduction to Watersheds • A collaboration story • Definitions • Approach

10. Collaboration Most [environmental] problems have arisen and resist solution because they involve conflicts between what individuals see in their own self interests and what is the collective good. Simon Levin, 2005 Kyoto Laureate

11. Collaboration: Role of Feedback Tightening feedback through more local control and monitoring and quicker information turnaround enhances cooperation, collaboration, and coexistence.

12. A Sustainable Watershed On the Cuenca de Rio Turia, near Valencia Spain, 15,000 farmers have successfully negotiated the supply and quality of water for their irrigation for at least 550 years.

13. Collaboration Based upon Trust It is a closed market free-for-all… but it works. “The key is that the community is still small enough for trust to be maintained.”

14. Collaboration: Tight Feedbacks Their problems are negotiated at a “Tribunal de las Aguas” meeting on the steps of the cathedral every Thursday morning.

15. Trust and Data Exchange Trust evolved from knowledge, which was derived from an information exchange, which needed a mechanism Some similar mechanism is used to share what we have learned needs to be done. To a point… We need a better mechanism

16. Recognition of Watersheds • National Academy of Sciences • US EPA, Interior, Army Corps of Eng. • Good Neighbor Environmental Board • 2004 Mexico Water Law recognized Organismos/Consejos de Cuencas • Goldman Prize 2006 Yu Xiaogong

17. What is a Watershed? A watershed is the area of land that drains water, sediment and dissolved materials to a common outlet along some point in the stream channel. Many ecological and human processes occur within a watershed, and contribute to the health (and economic benefits) of a watershed

18. Connections Watersheds are a geographical feature, but in reality they are more a series of connections between both natural and man-made processes…

19. Connections Understandably, the term ‘Watershed’ infers the notion of connections of distinctly water aspects, but a wider view is needed to comprehend the impact of the various influences

20. Depictions 4

21. Depictions 1

22. Depictions 2

23. Depictions 3

25. What are these images missing? Each depiction does a good job incorporating various characteristics, but each lacks a very important aspect… Watersheds have no regard for political boundaries and are not so easily placed into a contained framework

26. Problem: The missing features • Watersheds do not fit one cookie-cutter shape, they vary drastically…there’s no one focus to solve all • They do not respect political sovereignty… political discontinuities must be addressed • Watersheds unite many factors…but who’s responsible for what is the difficult detail to pinpoint

27. What’s in a watershed? 1. Water • Surface Water Bodies • Groundwater/Aquifers • Stormwater • Floods or droughts • Wetlands • Near-shore coast!

28. What’s in a watershed? 2. Water Diversions (lost water, habitat, and assimilative values) • Dams • Reservoirs • Channels • Irrigation • Pipes • Treatment plants

29. What’s in a watershed? 3. Ecosystems • Habitats e.g. riparian • Listed species • Invasive species • Natural attenuation • Ecological processes

30. What’s in a watershed? 4. Point and Non-Point Runoff Pollution • Pesticides • Fertilizers • Pathogens e.g. E coli • Contaminants e.g. gender benders • Hazardous Waste e.g. acids, inflammables, carcinogens

31. What’s in a watershed? 5. Diseases • Pathogens • Hosts • Vectors • Breeding Grounds

32. What’s in a watershed? 6. Us! • Navigation and Transportation • Energy (Deposition, Leaks) • Agriculture and Industry • Mining • Communities including Tribal Nations

33. What’s in a watershed? 7. Politics • Subsidies • Treaties • Loans • Sales/Markets • Transfers • Supreme and Other Court Decisions

34. What’s at risk in a watershed? All of the above

35. Bowl of Benefits or the Value of Unifying a Watershed • Ecosystem Services (provisioning e.g. food, regulating e.g. floods, supporting e.g. nutrient cycling, hosting e.g. habitats) • Hydrological Resources • Ecological Processes

36. Value of Unifying a Watershed • Flood, scour, erosion, and sedimentation control; • Drought and shortage mitigation; • Infrastructure (i.e. water piping and treatment) burden sharing or reduction; • Groundwater recharge and protection from contamination and salination;

37. Value of Unifying a Watershed • Instream flow conditions including fisheries, navigation, and recreation; • Flood plain and agricultural lands preservation; • Non-point pollution minimisation or mitigation; • Habitat, especially wetlands, protection and restoration; and • Disease prevention and control

38. Watershed Approach • Watershed scale, inclusiveness, and connectedness • Land and water use and treatments • Transcend all political boundaries • Non-point as well as point sources • Transfers only within a shed

39. Watershed Approach • Offers opportunity for solutions • Reuse • Recharge • Restore • Recharge • Remediate

40. Absence of Watershed Approach • Lining of the All American Canal • Salton Sea restoration • Yuma Desalination Plant • Bajagua “fit” • Recurring water debt and deficit issues • Mexico consultation before a “shortage” is declared on the Colorado River

41. Back to Data and Feedbacks

42. Water Management Information System for the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo Basin Center for Research in Water Resources – University of Texas at Austin CNA IMTA Hydrologic Unit Code (HUC) of the Rio Grande basin on the American side. Source: USGS-NHD. Data Type: Coverage Feature Class, Geometry Type: Polygon, Coordinate System: GCS_North_American_1983, Datum: D_North_American_1983, Prime Meridian: 0. Scale: 1:100,000 Cuencas and Sub Cuencas for the Rio Bravo basin on the Mexican side. Source: IMTA as a shapefile using ArcView 3.2. Original projection: Lambert conformal conical, NAD 1927; Scale: 1:250,000 The Rio Grande/Bravo basin was divided in hydrological sub regions according to the USGS - NHD criteria on the USA side (region 13 that includes 9 subregions), and the CNA criteria on the Mexican side (region 24 that includes 7 subregions). This information is included as a feature class within the Rio Grande/Bravo basin geodatabase IMPORTING TIME SERIES INTO THE GEODATABASE The ArcGIS format is applied to all time series data in order to include and relate them to the monitoring and control points in the geodatabase. The Time Series standard format of the ArcHydro schema was changed, adding one more table called TSGroup that contains information related to the agency from which the data is derived. Actually there are more than five million records included in the Rio Grande/Bravo Geodatabase Digital Elevation Model of Mexico. Grid resolution: 90 m. Source: INEGI. Original projection: Lambert; Datum: Nad 1927 PROJECT DESCRIPTION The Rio Grande/Bravo is a transboundary water source shared by the United States of America and Mexico. The river is the lifeblood for much of the economic activity in the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo valley on both sides of the border. Recent drought conditions have increased tensions over water sharing in the basin. Several areas of conflict and possible negotiated remedies have been identified, but there is a lack of data available to use in analysis of alternative solutions to these problems. Although separate research efforts have been carried out in the United States and Mexico, there is no integral database that includes information from both sides of the Rio Grande/Bravo basin yet. As in many watersheds, knowledge and information available about the basin are fragmented, disjointed, incomplete, and sometimes inaccurate. At this time in Mexico there is limited capacity to develop efficient management plans for the water in the Rio Grande/Bravo basin, given the existing infrastructure and the methods of application and distribution of the water. In addition, some decisions about water management are only partially supported, causing with it alterations in the global ecosystem. For these reasons it is fundamental to improve the administration and management of water in this basin. This will require assessment of water availability and how to manage it appropriately for agriculture, industry and other services, also taking into account ecosystem preservation. In this project, the Center for Research in Water Resources (CRWR) of the University of Texas at Austin, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), the Mexican Institute of Water Technology (IMTA), and the National Water Commission (CNA) of Mexico have cooperated to develop a relational database containing geographic, hydrologic, hydraulic and related data for the basin. This geospatial database has been implemented using the recently developed ArcHydro data model, which facilitates access to hydrologic information by models, and was to the entire Rio Grande/Bravo basin. This geodatabase is available to Mexican and U. S. federal, state, and local organizations, and training has been provided in Spanish and English to facilitate its use. This work assists in enhancing bi-national cooperation between Mexico and the United States concerning water in the Rio Grande basin, providing accurate and reliable data necessary for analysis and resolution of water resources issues. Participants: Dr. Daene C. McKinney, Dr. Carlos Patiño & Dr. David Maidment Contact and Information: carlos_patino@mail.utexas.edu http://www.crwr.utexas.edu/riogrande.shtml This research was partially funded by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the North American Development Bank Original Digital Elevation Models of the Rio Grande basin on the USA side in the Seamless format. Grid resolution: 30 m. Source: USGS Original projection: GCS_ NAD 83 The DEMs for the Rio Grande/Bravo basin were classified by hydrologic subregions. The cell size for the whole basin is 30 m and every DEM includes a buffer of 10 Km in order to delineate correctly the watersheds. The final projection is Albers equal area; datum NAD1983 • WRAPHydro Data Model objectives • To build a hydro data model for the WRAP project from the basic Arc Hydro model. • This model would be called WRAP Hydro. • To devise a new method of defining the basin boundary to act as an analysis mask for processing grids and watersheds. • To develop a new vector based method for determining watershed parameters using the Arc Hydro-WRAP model. • To verify the validity of dividing the basin into subregions for parameter development. • To explore the possibility of efficiently adding stream networks and control points after completing the process of developing the parameters. WRAPHydro data model schema format Gage stations where the drainage areas calculated with the methodology of this research are compared with the drainage areas reported by the USGS, IBWC, TCEQ, and Mexican National Water Commission for the whole Rio Grande/Bravo basin. It can be seen that the biggest difference of around 4,000 square kilometers is found in the gage station located at Fort Quitman (gage number 2). This difference is because the drainage area value reported by the USGS for this station considers part of a closed basin located upstream, which does not contribute to the Rio Grande/Bravo basin. In general, the difference between the drainage areas calculated for every control point in this research and the values reported by the official agencies of both countries of this basin is less than 3% Connectivity in the Rio Grande/Bravo basin after the WRAPHydro Tools were applied to get the Precipitation, Curve Number and Drainage Area parameters. Also, the watersheds were re-delineated for every hydrological SubRegion and assembled using the Raster-Network regionalization technique. The red lines show the river network connectivity in this binational basin.

43. Data for Binational Watershed Policy-Making

44. But the Problem is: Further fragmentation of data by “stove-piping or pigeon-holing” • Supply • Quality • Health • Treatment • Disposal • Habitat

45. Incongruities • Water supply is a U.S. Department of Interior and a SEMARNAT-CNA responsibility in Mexico. • Water quality is a U.S. EPA and a SEMARNAT and Salud shared responsibility. • Water-borne and water-associated human health is a U.S. Public Health and a Salud mandate in Mexico. • Water and wastewater infrastructure are jointly managed by both the IBWC, BECC, NADBank.

46. Power Discontinuity

47. The Solution is a Transboundary Watershed Approach

48. Overcoming Divisions • The La Paz Agreement provides for cooperation and annexes. • EPA-SEMARNAT Border 2012 Program does not include the U.S. Department of Interior. • The North American Partnership for Prosperity and Security has not matured enough. • The binational IBWC/CILA are trusted and empowered to address such water issues.

49. Overcoming Divisions • The San Diego-Tijuana region has written a Tijuana River Watershed “Vision” that acts as a template for binational collaboration. It has established a Binational Water Advisory Committee (BWAC) that informally advises the two local Consul Generals’ Border Liaison Mechanism (BLM) Water Technical Council.

50. Overcoming Divisions • Through the International Joint Commission (IJC) the U.S and Canada have a draft Water Quality Agreement for the Great Lakes that can inform the U.S.-Mexican process. • A water ethos and conservation education programs is a critical component of most watershed programs elsewhere.