Caitlin Ochs documents the Colorado River’s water shortage crisis

For the past four years, National Geographic Explorer Caitlin Ochs has trekked up and down the Colorado River by foot, raft, car and air to document the impacts of climate change. By her estimate, she’s put in over 10,000 miles driving past surreal Southwestern vistas and austere desert. She’s made visits from the river’s source in the Rocky Mountains to what remains of its delta in the Gulf of California, just south of the U.S.-Mexico border. “It’s been a lot of audiobooks,” Ochs smiles. “I got through a 31-hour book on my last research trip.” Suffice to say, Ochs has developed a particularly profound relationship with the Colorado River Basin.

Coming out of these trips are photographs: of the landscape, markedly transformed by record-breaking heat and drought from climate change, and its people, primarily the farming communities who produce 15% of agriculture for the United States. The region is in its 24th year of megadrought. Studies suggest the Colorado River Basin is seeing its driest period in the last 1,200 years, and with a river that is 20% smaller than it was in the 1900s, the basin is facing an intensifying water shortage that Ochs argues might be “the largest climate adaptation challenge facing the country.”

This is the focus of her current project American Adaptation, supported by the National Geographic Society through a grant from the World Freshwater Initiative (WFI), which is supporting projects related to freshwater conservation, education, and storytelling over the course of five years. American Adaptation aims to focus a lens on the plight of farmers dealing with the intertwined effects of climate change, water shortage and water management policies set in place 100 years ago. 

For years, Ochs has covered environmental issues and pivotal moments in history, including scenes from the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City and the Black Lives Matter movement during the summer of 2020. She considers it a weighty privilege to be co-creating the visual map of this generation’s collective memory: “Any visual journalist is asking people to share their stories and their lives, and that’s a huge responsibility.”

It’s remarkable that someone with little outward relation to the Colorado River has come to have such a fierce determination to tell its stories. Growing up in Seattle, Ochs first came to appreciate the world of photography in high school. Hers came with a fantastic photography teacher and a rare darkroom. “My photographs from that time were not wonderful,” she recalls fondly, but those early days in the darkroom, learning to look at the world through still images and watching the photos emerge, are core memories for Ochs. “That was where I really fell in love with the process of photography. I’m very grateful for that class.”

Darkrooms continued to follow Ochs’s steps. In university, she pursued a degree in environmental policy, doubtful that photography would make for a viable career. But learning of the darkroom on campus, Ochs continued taking photography classes, and, two years into college, shifted focus to journalism in a moment of clarity.

‘Visual anecdotes’ along the Colorado

There’s a thread between each notch in the timeline that Ochs chooses to document. “My work always responds to what we are experiencing,” she reflects. “It’s trying to concisely capture visual anecdotes of our time—not only of what we’re going through, but what we’re feeling, what is impacting our lives.” With the felt effects of climate change reverberating throughout the country and the world, Ochs believes the water crisis in the Colorado River Basin is an urgent story. “The Western United States is changing and nobody knows how, but through this project, I’ve been exploring what these communities are experiencing and how they’re changing.”

Although the megadrought and plummeting water levels of Western reservoirs have been semi-regular subjects of environmental headlines in recent years, Ochs believes there is much to the story that gets left out.

At home in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ochs devoted a considerable portion of 2020 to reading and researching the Colorado River. “I got into all the policy, all the history, all the structural stuff,” she recalls, “and the more I learned, the more I was like, ‘This is a huge issue with so many opportunities to tell different aspects of the story, but the same little bits keep getting told. What’s happening in this river basin is so much larger than that.’”

The Colorado River is a critical freshwater system that extends through seven Western U.S. states and northern Mexico. One in 10 people living in the United States look to the river for their water, and agricultural needs rank highest in priority: More than 70% of the river is diverted to farmland. While it may be easy to look at the numbers and suggest cutting water from farms, Ochs finds the issue is nuanced.

“Many crops grown in the basin are exported, but if farmland goes out of production, what does that mean for our food security? What does that mean for our rural communities? This is a community that is not only experiencing the impacts of unprecedented heat and shortage, but they’re also under the most pressure to adapt.”

In the photographs of American Adaptation, Ochs hopes to build a story in which farmers and agricultural communities can recognize themselves and their experiences.

Ochs has come to understand life on the river through the years spent walking alongside the farmers and communities who depend on it for their livelihoods. One community in the upper Colorado River Basin, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, has inhabited the basin for centuries. The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe Farm & Ranch, encompasses thousands of acres Ochs says were painstakingly cultivated from desert land and converted to robust fields of wheat, corn, oats and alfalfa with their portion of river water.

After two decades of drought, however, the farm received a scant 10% of their annual water supply in 2021. “The first time I visited this farm was winter of 2022, and 6,000 acres of their 7,000-plus acre farm were fallow,” Ochs says. She saw wide circles of dry, unplanted land taken care of by a slim crew—the farm had to lay off half their staff. “They were just watching this land wither, very stressed about what the future holds, wondering, ‘Are we going to get water?’”

In the West, water rights work similarly to mining law. Ochs puts it concisely: “First in time, first in right.” Legally coined “prior appropriation,” this rule is the foundation of western water law, in which the first party to divert water for a beneficial purpose can acquire and maintain senior rights to the water.

Although 30 federally recognized Indigenous Tribes in the Colorado River Basin hold such rights to a collective 25% of the river, Ochs explains that their perspectives have been largely excluded from the legal systems that determine the river's governance today. The Colorado River Compact, codified in 1922, quantified Western states’ water allocations but left Tribal water rights—as well as the rights of Mexico—unaccounted for. Only recently has the river’s governance begun engaging Tribal leadership in the conversation, and many Indigenous communities seeking to settle their water rights remain marginalized.

Furthermore, these policies were written at a time when shortage and climate change were overlooked, Ochs observes. Today, legal allocations amount to more water than the river has. Without a good plan to respond to shortages like the current, this means those with less senior rights are the first to have their water cut, according to prior appropriation—leaving those communities to disproportionately bear the burden. Times like these throw structural inequities into stark relief.

But even with an unreliable water supply, Ochs has seen the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe Farm & Ranch endure and adapt through incredible hardship. To survive, the farm integrated a series of innovative projects: developing an extensive climate adaptation plan that looks decades into the future, installing more efficient irrigation systems and working with The Land Institute on a pilot program to test alternative crops that may thrive better in dry, hot conditions. They’ve also invested in building a mill to get more value from the crops they are able to grow during years with less water. Despite these changes and a recent season with normal water, the farm continues to worry about future dry years.

Downriver, another farming community in Pinal County, Arizona, is adapting to changes in other ways. “Farmers here were the first group of people to lose their Colorado River water allocation entirely under federal mandates triggered by historic shortages,” Ochs explains. “2023 marked the first year these farmers navigated a complete loss of river water.” These farms now rely purely on groundwater, placing increased pressure on aquifers and building wells. Some are choosing to sell their land to use for solar power.

Ochs is documenting one such farmer, currently in conversations with a solar company. If the deal is finalized, all 2,500 acres of his land will convert to solar. He is all but certain the deal will go through.

“It’s more economical,” she shrugs. Ochs’s aerial photographs depict fields of solar panels side-by-side with farmland. “Visually, we are living these changes. What the Western U.S. will look like—I don’t think anyone really knows.”

Continue south, and you run up against California’s Imperial Valley, the largest irrigation district in the country with some of the most senior rights to the Colorado River. The half-million acres within this region receive more water than the entire states of Arizona and Nevada combined, but even here, there is nuance. 

Ochs spent several seasons with a fourth-generation farmer whose family has grown lettuce in the valley for over a century—the farm just celebrated its 100th anniversary in November. “There is no other source of water for this community. Water here exists only because they diverted the river through a massive canal,” she explains. To the farmers here, every drop of water the valley is asked to give up equates to land becoming desert.

“What they’re thinking is, ‘Our home, as we know it, will turn to desert.’ But this is true for many relying on the river, and compared to deep cuts made by some in the basin, farmers in Imperial Valley have given up very little water due to their senior priority.”

A future for water

There’s no denying that there’s a sense of loss on both ends of the spectrum. Through her visual storytelling, Ochs hopes to humanize a climate issue that has been abstracted from the very real experiences along the river basin and contribute to a dialogue of understanding between impacted communities and river managers.

“For so long, water management has been in this very small sphere of policymakers and water managers,” Ochs says. “I don’t think there is an awareness in the public as much about why changes need to happen, what the history and the policy is that got us to this point.”

Many of Ochs’s photos have a palpable sense of place, showcasing the vast physical landscape and the dramatic impact that the presence—or absence—of water has on it and its people. Other photos capture everyday scenes: hands and the things they carry, people backdropped by the fields they call home. They are made all the more resonant for their innate familiarity and humanity.

Of her work, Ochs notes, “My approach is really collaborative in the sense that I see it as an exchange and a sharing process. I think there has to be trust between me and the people I photograph, and that’s the beauty of having time.” 

Time is foundational to Ochs’s craft. Whether it be one day or 100 days on the scene, she hopes her images feel truthful and foster empathy within viewers and between different communities. 

In the case of American Adaptation, she says, “It’s not a fun conversation to talk about using less water. While there are really cool technical solutions and things we could be doing differently, until they have time to scale up, there will have to be cuts and shortage, and that’s really scary. If you don’t have that layer of trust and dialogue between communities, it’ll be hard to arrive at compromises.”

Considering her time between the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe Farm & Ranch, Pinal County and Imperial Valley, Ochs’s project raises an angle concerned with water access and justice. Who should bear the burden of climate change? How do we imagine more equitable burden-sharing during times of scarcity? Should someone lose all their water while someone else retains most of theirs? Farms are mapping possible pathways forward on their own with programs like The Land Institute, but these are questions that policymakers must grapple with on a legal and structural level.

Fortunately, now happens to be an excellent time for these conversations. For the first time in a century, interested groups are renegotiating the current river management system to create a long-term plan. Although states have passed temporary drought agreements to conserve water in the short term, these plans expire in 2026—what happens then? 

Soon, Ochs will be hitting the five-year mark on this story, but rather than nearing any end point, it’s defining her direction going forward. “Water has become a central theme of my work. Documenting so many people’s connections to the Colorado River, it became so clear that water is a fundamental thread connecting us all. Water is quite literally life. It is also how we feel and experience climate change.” 

There’s a fact that farmers love to highlight most, she says. “If you’re eating lettuce in New York in wintertime, it was probably grown in Imperial Valley with water from the Colorado River.” Water shortages in the West are not unrelated to the rest of the country, or even the rest of the world, she argues. Sure, agricultural production could move elsewhere, but food security in the U.S. would be indelibly affected. 

Zooming further out, the Colorado is one of many snowfed rivers, and its usage pattern mirrors global patterns of water use. Just like with the Colorado, “70 to 80% of the world’s rivers are diverted for agriculture, globally,” Ochs compares. “This is just how humanity has developed freshwater usage, and other rivers are experiencing drought too.” She points to the Amazon, the Rhine.

Ochs sees the next few years as a pivotal yet exciting moment in the story of the Colorado River Basin. “Federal agencies dealing with Western water have collectively allocated $15.4 billion to enhance the resilience to drought.” That’s an unprecedented amount of money to invest in sustainable river management planning, scalable technological and scientific solutions and freshwater protection. It’s also an opportunity to right long-standing equity issues built into obsolete policy systems. 

“Much is available with this incredible, unprecedented amount of funding, and how we use it, what we do with it, could provide some map for river systems around the world.” 

As the West looks towards the momentous changes to come, Ochs plans to be there, camera in hand, to continue telling the story. “We are connected,” she emphasizes. “The Colorado is one of the smaller major rivers in the U.S., but it is a critical lifeline for millions experiencing climate change at an accelerated rate. This connects to a larger story unfolding across the world. People are feeling the impacts of climate change—whether its flood, sea level rise, fires or drought. If this basin finds solutions in coming years, there could be implications for many others under climate stress.”

ABOUT THE WRITER
For the National Geographic Society: Melissa Zhu is a content strategy coordinator at the Society with a passion for writing. When she's not focused on advancing the nonprofit mission of Nat Geo, you might find her immersed in a good book or admiring the world around her on a long walk.