Panhandle among regions at greatest risk from climate change

By Greg Rohloff

The Amarillo Independent

Over the next 40 years, if the rate of greenhouse gas emissions does not slow, the Panhandle is among the areas of the United States projected to suffer the worst water shortages.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and Tetra Tech, a water and energy consulting and engineering firm, presented findings on the projections for water use in 2050 and the effect of greenhouse gases on drought and deluges, and project that Texas agricultural areas are among the areas that will experience the most drastic effects. The findings were presented Tuesday in a conference call.

More than 1,100 counties in the lower 48 states face a greater risk of water shortages with 400 of the counties facing an extremely high risk for drought. The report uses public records on water use data and climate projections from the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Those projections show that the greatest effect of global warming is most likely to occur in the farm belt area of the Great Plains and the Southwest. The number of counties at highest risk is 14 times greater than previous projections.

The criteria for the assessment included the projected demand for water from rain and snowmelt, groundwater demand, susceptibility to drought, freshwater withdrawal rates and the increase in summer water shortages. Counties meeting two of the criteria are considered at moderate risk whle those meeting three or more are considered high risk.

Tetra Tech, which earlier this year was awarded the design and construction contract for a wind farm near Woodward, Okla., prepared the study on risk of water shortages. A second study gathers Department of Agriculture figures on crop production values for those at-risk areas. The USDA figures value the crops for 2007, the most recent year available, at $105 billion.

For Texas, in 2007 the 249 at-risk counties produced $5.3 billion in crops that year, including about $1.8 billion in cotton, $1 billion in corn and $682 million in wheat.

Sujoy Roy, principal engineer and lead author on the report for Tetra Tech, said the water figures used for the study were taken from public data on such areas as irrigation, power generation cooling needs and municipal water demand. He then projected rates of increase without any changes in practices, and compared that amount with the projections from the 16 global climate model projections from the climate change study group to determine which areas were most at risk.

For Dan Lashof, director of the council’s Climate Center, the analysis is further reason to push Congress to enact measures to counter the effects of climate change, and the wider swings in weather patterns that would likely occur. Otherwise, he said, cities and states would bear economic costs of dealing with water shortages and changing weather patterns’ effect on agriculture and the food supply.