Watershed Symposium 2024

Summary:
As Utah faces water scarcity, reevaluating water allocations to reflect the highest social value is crucial. By integrating social values into aquifer storage and recovery projects, communities can boost water's contribution to well-being, ensuring security, resilience, and equitable access for future generations.

Full Abstract:
Water resource management regimes allocate water across different users and, at least implicitly, across time. The traditional focus has been on satisfying the demands of municipal, residential, agricultural, and commercial uses. Increasingly, demands for water in Utah to support ecological functioning have been recognized. However, as communities grapple with the challenges of water scarcity, there is a growing recognition for the need to assess whether current allocations reflect highest and best use of water now and into the future. What is needed are allocations that get the most social value for each acre-foot buck. This requires determining a “social value of water” in each of its uses, including use now versus use in the future and in different circumstances — for example, in good and bad years for precipitation. This presentation explores the concept of assessing social values of water in the context of aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) projects. We show that by properly accounting for social values across all situations, the total contribution of water to social wellbeing in communities can go up, even as the physical amount of water is unchanged. Current approaches may be severely missing that mark. The presentation will highlight the importance of understanding and quantifying the broader economic and social dimensions ASR projects and other management actions and their potential to enhance water security, community resilience, equitable access, and economic activity for present and future generations.

The poster session is a forum for presenters from around the world to highlight programs and to share successful ideas with colleagues by presenting a research study, a practical problem-solving effort, an innovative program, and more. Poster presentations provide other conference participants an opportunity to quickly and easily become acquainted with a variety of topics.

Summary:
Exploring challenges and gaps with implementing conservation and protection best practices for sensitive lands around Great Salt Lake and the Jordan River. A critical and often overlooked component of a healthy watershed.

Full Abstract:
While communities are putting greater focus on increasing density and redeveloping urban spaces, critical natural lands and agricultural areas at the edges of our cities continue to be a target for new development. But at what cost? Many city general plans include general guiding principles and goals oriented toward preservation of critical lands, but the tools to actualize these goals often lag far behind development pressures. Our decentralized local land use policies can be a patchwork of strengths and weaknesses, and on a regional issues like preserving sensitive lands around Great Salt Lake, how do you coordinate efforts for the best outcomes. Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County offer a useful and ongoing case study. Both have adopted plans with aspirations to “expand natural lands and watershed protection,” and specific goals to “over the next 25 years, …protect and restore critical wildlife habitat, sensitive natural lands, and open space.” There have been some important wins: setting aside a natural buffer area between the Inland Port in Salt Lake City and wetlands of Great Salt Lake, establishing the Legacy Nature Preserve along the northern extent of the Jordan River in North Salt Lake, and other significant greenways and riparian restoration projects across the Jordan River. But is the rate of suburban, light industrial development outpacing conservation of remaining critical natural areas, particularly integral upland areas that are part of the Great Salt Lake Shorelands ecosystem? Have we done enough? This presentation explores some of the gaps and challenges reconciling broad preservation and restoration goals associated with general plans, and the deficit of codified land use tools encoded in local laws and ordinances. With a very decentralized local government land use structures, lack of coordinated regional frameworks and cooperation around sensitive lands, and often conflicting development pressures, real estate development is often outpacing preservation and restoration of critical lands adjacent to our waterways and Great Salt Lake, putting the capacity for improving water quality, conserving water, sustaining habitat resources of migratory pathways to Global Important Bird Areas and other wildlife at high risk. We present the need for establishing a Shoreline Heritage Area around Great Salt Lake and coordinated efforts to protect and conserve riparian and other natural lands around the Jordan River and Great Salt Lake for both human and wildlife welfare. We’ll present brief case studies with some hits and missed opportunities, as we continue ways to increase coordination and cooperation around our shared conservation efforts.

Summary:
How much water is Utah actually delivering to the imperiled Great Salt Lake? Are we heading toward a healthy Lake or costly mitigation? In this workshop, we explore a new report showcasing sobering findings exploring the consequences drying up the Great Salt Lake could have on Wasatch Front residents’ health and the state’s pocketbook.

Full Abstract:
If the Great Salt Lake is in peril, Utah is in peril. Great Salt Lake water levels are on a long-term decline – due to decades of upstream water diversions and climate change-driven aridification in the basin – exposing a vast expanse of dry lakebed that contains a number of toxic components. This creates a looming public health and economic crisis for residents of Northern Utah and the Wasatch Front. What are the financial and public health impacts to the millions of Utahns living adjacent to the Lake if we fail to deliver enough water to address current lakebed exposure issues and prevent continuing decline? In this session we will explore findings from a year of research that has culminated in a revelatory new report showcasing sobering findings concerning the consequences that drying up the Great Salt Lake could have on the health of Wasatch Front residents and the costly mitigation measures that could be required to suppress dust if Utah doesn’t succeed in raising Lake levels. We will present findings from what is, to our knowledge, the largest and most comprehensive review of the medical science of public health impacts from Great Salt Lake lakebed exposure. We will summarize what hundreds of papers show are the many and serious health implications associated with exposure to lakebed dust, discuss the possible presence of overlooked toxins in Great Salt Lake dust and their likely impact, and compare this emerging health emergency to that of other desiccated lakes around the world. In an analysis of efforts to deliver water to the Great Salt Lake, we will explore how effective Utah has been in meeting targets to deliver an additional 500,000 to 1 million acre feet of wet water each year to the Lake – the amounts needed to raise the Lake to a minimum healthy level and prevent catastrophic dust storms. Finally, we will examine whether we are headed toward a future of mitigation, like Owens Lake, and provide an updated and more detailed estimate of the costs associated with keeping dust from a desiccated Great Salt Lake on the ground.