Water has always been the key to life in the American West. Without a series of land-grabs, water schemes and the industrial revolution, sprawling farms, ranches and cities would have just been a dream. Now, the artificial conditions created to fuel the rapid expansion have created a nightmare.

Today, towns are being evacuated to get citizens out of harm’s way. Cities are using dwindling water supplies to wage hopeless fights against fire. The situation will proceed to get worse.

The past year has been the driest or second driest in most Southwestern states since record keeping began in 1895. Almost 75 percent of the American West is experiencing severe drought, which puts more than 57 million people in harm’s way. While the West has long experienced boom and bust cycles of precipitation, climate change is increasing the volatility and intensity of these cycles.

Temperatures in the Pacific Northwest hit all-time records in late June. Cities such as Portland and Seattle experienced temperatures over 110 degrees, which rivaled the heat experienced in Phoenix, Arizona. The heat wave caused at least 100 deaths.

“We’re really seeing the fingerprints of climate change in the new normals,” MichaelPalecki, who manages the project at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, said when the normals were updated.

Last year tied 2016 as the hottest year on record. Global temperatures continued rising thanks to heat-trapping greenhouse gases and a devastating heat dome.

While drought and dry weather occur and vary naturally in the region, the increasing temperatures pushing the American West over the edge are human in origin. Some scientists suggest that the word drought is no longer accurate, because it implies that the water shortages may end. According to their analysis, the added heat and winds from climate change supercharged the drying process, making the current drought the second worst in the last 1,200 years. The Colorado and Rio Grande rivers are trickling compared to their long-term averages.

Thanks to global warming, we can’t rely on the past to predict the future.

“The region would have been in a state of drought regardless, but climate change is pushing this event to be one of the worst in 500 years,” says Ben Cook, a climate scientist at Columbia’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. “The previous mega-droughts lasted 20, 30, even 40 years, really eclipsing anything we’ve had to manage in the last 100 years,” says Cook.

The effects of the drought are impacting many stakeholders across the West. Unfortunately, millions of Californians are running out of water. Compounding the problem, millions of Americans rely on California for food. Along the California-Oregon border in the Klamath River basin, water reserves are so low that farmers in the region will receive only 8 percent of the water they usually get. The Yurok and Karuk tribes, which steward salmon and other fish populations along the river, are concerned that it won’t have enough water to keep the fish healthy.

The Colorado River, the source of water for almost 40 million people, is dropping. It hasn’t reached the ocean in years. The decline in the river’s flow is exacerbated by both a 20-year drought and climate change. But it has been a century in the making. Cities cannot solve this problem alone because approximately 75-80 percent of Colorado River water is used for agriculture.

Human-caused climate change, in tandem with human reshaping of the natural hydrological systems—by damming rivers, growing vast fields of crops, and more—have shifted the baseline conditions so thoroughly that there is no way to return to what used to be considered normal. Farms and cities have begun imposing water restrictions.

Today’s catastrophic conditions are influenced by many factors, including a La Niña that began late last year. A La Niña makes it more likely that Pacific storm systems drift northward toward the Pacific Northwest and Canada instead of California and the Southwest.

“It’s incredible, how much of the West is in extreme or exceptional drought right now,” said Sandra Postel, Director of the Global Water Policy Project.

In much of the western United States, water demand has exceeded supply for decades.

Global warming and climate change are compounding the problem by shrinking water supplies even more. That’s bad news for millions of people and for the farmland that produces most of the country’s fruits and vegetables. Water cutbacks are reverberating through California’s $50 billion agricultural industry, which employs tens of thousands of people in many small towns across the state.

“Politicians in the 1920s ignored science and promised more water to the cities and farms than the river can deliver. So we’d be in trouble even without climate change. But warming temperatures are making the problem worse, by increasing evaporation so less water can make it downstream to users,” John Fleck, director of the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program.

Read the full story about the drought in the American West and its implications for cities across the region.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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Editor’s Note: California is America’s most populous state with about 39 million people. It just overtook Brazil as the seventh-largest economy in the world. It’s the fifth-largest supplier of food in the entire world. The drought in California is a global problem for many reasons.

By Justin Gillis and Matt Richtel, The New York Times

As the worst drought in recorded history ravages California, and its cities face mandatory cuts in water use, thirsty crops like oranges, tomatoes and almonds continue to stream out of the state and onto the nation’s grocery shelves.

But the way that California farmers have pulled off that feat is a case study in the unwise use of natural resources, many experts say. Farmers are drilling water wells at a feverish pace and pumping billions of gallons of water from the ground, depleting a resource that was critically endangered even before the drought began.

California has pushed harder than any other state to adapt to climate change, but scientists warn that improving its management of precious groundwater supplies will shape whether it can continue to supply more than half the nation’s fruits and vegetables on a hotter planet.In some places, water tables have dropped 50 feet or more in just a few years. With less underground water to buoy it, the land surface is sinking as much as a foot a year in spots, causing roads to buckle and bridges to crack. Shallow wells have run dry, depriving several poor communities of water.

Scientists say some of the underground water-storing formations so critical to California’s future — typically, saturated layers of sand or clay — are being permanently damaged by the excess pumping, and will never again store as much water as farmers are pulling out.

“Climate conditions have exposed our house of cards,” said Jay Famiglietti, a NASA scientist in Pasadena who studies water supplies in California and elsewhere. “The withdrawals far outstrip the replenishment. We can’t keep doing this.”

Cannon Michael, a farmer who grows tomatoes, melons and corn on 10,500 acres in the town of Los Banos, in the Central Valley, has high priority rights to surface water, which he inherited with his family’s land. But rampant groundwater pumping by farmers near him is causing some of the nearby land to sink, disturbing canals that would normally bring water his way.

“Now, water is going to have to flow uphill,” said Mr. Michael, who plans to fallow 2,300 acres this year.

In the midst of this water crisis, Gov. Jerry Brown and his legislative allies pulled off something of a political miracle last year, overcoming decades of resistance from the farm lobby to adopt the state’s first groundwater law with teeth. California, so far ahead of the country on other environmental issues, became the last state in the arid West to move toward serious limits on the use of its groundwater.

Last week, Mr. Brown imposed mandatory cuts in urban water use, the first ever. He exempted farmers, who already had to deal with huge reductions in surface water from the state’s irrigation works. Mr. Brown defended the decision on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, saying, “They’re providing most of the fruits and vegetables of America to a significant part of the world.”

In normal times, agriculture consumes roughly 80 percent of the surface water available for human use in California, and experts say the state’s water crisis will not be solved without a major contribution from farmers.

California’s greatest resource in dry times is not its surface reservoirs, though, but its groundwater, and scientists say the drought has made the need for better controls obvious. While courts have taken charge in a few areas and imposed pumping limits, groundwater in most of the state has been a resource anyone could grab.

Yet putting strict limits in place is expected to take years. The new law, which took effect Jan. 1, does not call for reaching sustainability until the 2040s. Sustainability is vaguely defined in the statute, but in most basins will presumably mean a long-term balance between water going into the ground and water coming out. Scientists have no real idea if the groundwater supplies can last until the 2040s.

“I wish we could do it faster,” Mark Cowin, director of California’s Department of Water Resources, said in an interview. “I wish we would have started decades ago.”

But Mr. Cowin noted that the state, after neglecting groundwater management for so long, had a lot of catching up to do. Years of bureaucratic reorganization and rule-drafting lie ahead. “This is the biggest game-changer of California water management of my generation,” Mr. Cowin said.

In the near term, as the drought wears on and the scramble for water intensifies, farmers are among the victims of the drilling frenzy, as well as among its beneficiaries.

Growers with older, shallower wells are watching them go dry as neighbors drill deeper and suck the water table down. Pumping takes huge amounts of electricity to pull up deep water, and costs are rising. Some farmers are going into substantial debt to drill deeper wells, engaging in an arms race with their neighbors that they cannot afford to lose.

“You see the lack of regulation hurting the agricultural community as much as it hurts anybody else,” said Doug Obegi, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco.

Against this backdrop, water-thirsty crops like almonds are still being planted in some parts of the Central Valley to supply an insatiable global demand that is yielding high prices.

The land devoted to almond orchards in California has doubled in 20 years, to 860,000 acres. The industry has been working hard to improve its efficiency, but growing a single almond can still require as much as a gallon of California’s precious water.

The expansion of almonds, walnuts and other water-guzzling tree and vine crops has come under sharp criticism from some urban Californians. The groves make agriculture less flexible because the land cannot be idled in a drought without killing the trees.

Not even the strongest advocates of water management foresee a system in which California farmers are told what they can plant. As the new system evolves, though, the growers might well be given strict limits on how much groundwater they can pump, which could effectively rule out permanent crops like nuts and berries in some areas.“We want to be careful in dealing with this drought not to go down the command-and-control route if we can avoid it,” said Daniel Sumner, professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis.

“It interrupts the flexibility, the creativity and the resilience that people in agriculture have already been using to deal with severe water cutbacks. ”So far, the over-pumping of groundwater has helped farmers manage through three parched growing seasons.They were forced to idle only about 5 percent of the state’s irrigated land last year, though the figure is likely to be higher in 2015. The farmers have directed water to the highest-value crops, cutting lesser crops like alfalfa. They have bought and sold surface water among themselves, making the best use of the available supply, experts like Dr. Sumner say. And the farmers’ success at coping with the drought has meant relatively few layoffs of low-income farmworkers.

Still, costs are up and profits are down for many farmers and the thousands of small businesses that depend on them, spreading pain throughout the Central Valley and beyond. “It’s been a tough couple of years, and it’s just getting tougher in rural parts of California,” said Dave Kranz, a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation, a growers’ organization.

Because groundwater has helped keep production up, replacing a large proportion of the surface water farmers have lost, the drought has not led to big price increases at the national level, even for crops that California dominates.

Once the drought ends, a growing population and a climate altered by human-caused global warming will continue to put California’s water system under stress, experts say. A major question is how to manage the groundwater to get Californians through dry years.

Meeting that goal may have as much to do with how surface water is managed as with how much is pumped from the ground.

Several California experts used the metaphor of a bank account to describe the state’s groundwater supply. Deposits need to be made in good times, they said, so that the water can be withdrawn in hard times.

Yet for decades, California farmers have been overdrawing many of the state’s water-holding formations — its aquifers — even in years when surface water for irrigation was plentiful, the equivalent of overdrawing a checking account.

That will need to change, the experts said, with pumping being limited or even prohibited in wet years so that the underground water supply can recharge. Some land may need to be flooded on purpose so the water can seep downward.

The need for groundwater recharge may ultimately limit how much water farmers can have from the surface irrigation system, even in flush years — the same way that deposits in a bank account limit how many fancy dinners one can eat. Yet in a state where irrigation rights have been zealously guarded for generations, such limitations may not go down easily.

“It would be silly to think you are not going to have any fights,” said Denise England, the water expert for Tulare County, toward the southern end of the Central Valley. She cited an aphorism of the West: “Whiskey’s for drinking, and water’s for fighting over.”

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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