Watershed Symposium 2022

Watch this panel discussion on YouTube

The Great Salt Lake has shrunk to the lowest levels ever recorded. Utah's journalism community has responded by combining resources to cover the story together as the Great Salt Lake Collaborative. Newsrooms that normally compete are sharing stories about the lake—and embarking on joint reporting projects to discover what solutions exist to the problem of drought, climate change, and over consumption of water in the West. A team of reporters from the Collaborative recently traveled to California to learn how communities around Owens Lake and Mono Lake responded to the crisis facing those lakes. Loss of in-flows turned Owens Lake into a dust bowl and the largest source of dust pollution in the United States. Mono Lake faced the same fate until a nonprofit secured its right to exist.

The panel will cover what the reporters learned about how Utah could mitigate dust from Great Salt Lake's dry lakebed, the lessons Utah could learn from the legal fight for Mono Lake, and how the communities around Owens Lake and Mono Lake are finding solutions to mitigate the loss or reduction of those lakes. How (if) we can apply the lessons learned in California, what the obstacles might be here in Utah, and potential solutions as we grapple with the shrinking Great Salt Lake.

Learn more in the Great Salt Lake Collaborative's "At Water's Edge" story map, which illustrates the challenges at Owens and Mono lakes and how they can inform the future of the Great Salt Lake, as well as the full series of articles and reporting.

GSL is shrinking and the water users throughout the basin are struggling. A comprehensive supply-demand study of the entire GSL basin has never been accomplished so the Utah Division of Water Resources, USBR and water users have applied to do a basin study to provide the information necessary for sound decision-making.

This year the United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) has WaterSMART funding available through the Basin Study program for the first time in 5 years. In partnership with water conservancy districts, water users associations, irrigation companies, universities and environmental advocate groups throughout the basin, the Utah Division of Water Resources has applied for a basin study. Basin Studies are collaborative planning efforts cost-shared with non-Federal partners to first assess water supply and demand, then identify strategies to address imbalances. This would be an enormous task, never before undertaken but such a study must be done because only collaborative efforts can attain meaningful solutions to a sickening lake and reduced water supply. Water resource management in the GSL Basin is complex, collective effects on the lake from upstream activities are poorly understood, and upstream water users struggle to understand how best to mitigate adverse impacts to GSL while meeting the needs of water users, making it a perfect basin for this type of study. Attendees will learn what the study would entail and how it would be helpful for water management and policy in the GSL basin.