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Tomás searches the sand for the remains of dead crabs. When he finds one, he holds it up for a closer look. It’s five o’clock in the morning and the sun is already rising in the delta of the Colorado River. “See that?” he asks. Many crabs die from lack of water, he explains. The estuary was penalized by the lack of fresh water, which caused the death or departure of thousands of species. The most visible evidence of this is the remains of dead crabs that lie amidst what is now the desert. But Tomás Rivas, a 47-year-old marine biologist, is part of an alliance of nongovernmental organizations that have been working for a decade to restore the river’s ecosystems, which have disappeared since the water flow stopped. In recent years they have succeeded in gradually persuading the native species to return. “We’ve noticed the return of the mussel and the freshwater snail,” he says.
What happened to Tomás and his companions seems like a fight against the tide every day. Just hours earlier, they celebrated a milestone: the bed of the Colorado River emptied into the waters of the Gulf of California. A century ago, the river normally flowed from its source in the American Rocky Mountains to the Sea of Cortez. However, since Mexico diverted the river into a canal system in the 1940s, freshwater and saltwater encounters have been rare as the river has been reduced to 3% of its original size. Back then, after a lot of work, they finally managed to let a shy river flow into the delta. Between hugs and happy faces, the team explains how difficult it is. “It was just a trickle,” says Rivas, a member of the Sonoran Institute organization.
Tomás Rivas Salcedo in the estuary south of Mexicali, Baja California state Iñaki Malvido
This association is one of six working in Mexico and the United States to save the Colorado River and restore ecosystems lost to drought. The organizations are made up of technicians, engineers or oceanographers who dedicate their knowledge to the fight against climate change. They are all dedicated to reforesting hectares and creating green lungs where there are none. One of them, ProNatura, is also working on monitoring birds that have returned to this corridor after restoration. Another, Let’s Restore Colorado, has developed its own nurseries to produce thousands of trees that will later be used to build forests in the middle of the desert.
The problem they face is the drought in all their faces. The governments of the United States and Mexico, which share three water basins—Río Bravo, Tijuana, and Colorado—signed a treaty with the latter in the 1940s to guarantee the annual supply of water to its southern neighbor. However, due to the changing conditions that the Colorado River has been through, the agreement has been updated with various legal acts signed by the two countries. One of the most recent, the 323 from 2017, notes that some of the water must be used for the environment.
The “little trickle” that stretches out to the Sea of Cortez is thanks in part to the full moon, which raised the tide the night before. Jesús Salazar (Alianza Revive el Rio Colorado)
The area through which the Colorado River has historically flowed in Mexico is desert. The government of Miguel Alemán dedicated the Morelos Dam on the border in 1950, the country’s first diversion, diverting water from the river into a canal system to accommodate the largest volume of water to reach the state of Baja California, thereby avoiding loss the mass of this liquid. This meant that the natural channel disappeared, and as a result, green space around its entire route died.
In Act 323, both governments and a group of NGOs agree to contribute equally 86 million cubic yards of water to restore Colorado’s ecosystems, improve estuarine conditions, and replenish the aquifer. In addition, the three signatories pledge to contribute $3 million each for scientific research and monitoring; and an additional $3 million more for site restoration, such as reforestation with native tree species or habitat restoration. By the end of 2022, the parties had already met half of what was set.
Those commitments have begun to show their form years later. And the positive impact of those 2017 pledges is starting to be reflected in projects like the Save the Colorado River Alliance. The group brings together six organizations, three Mexican and three American, operating in the seven US states through which its channel passes and in the Mexican state of Baja California. A dozen sites have been successfully restored on the south side of the border.
The Morelos Diversion Dam, which diverts most of the canal to the Irrigation Canal (which flows on the left in the picture) Jesús Salazar (Alianza Revive el Río Colorado)
Ecosystems regenerate with water
In order to undertake a more strategic restoration, the organizations have agreed that official water deliveries will be made through the canals at specific points where they have invested to accompany this delivery with site rehabilitation. An example is Chaussé, where last summer the NGOs counted every liter that came in. Around 74 hectares were reforested there with around 25,000 trees.
Such was the success that animals returned that were never seen again. At that time, NGO employees enthusiastically photographed a family of beavers that had arrived at their restoration site. The reforestation in this place was designed by the organizations thinking about climate change and the possibility that there will be no more water to distribute in the future. With that idea in mind, one of the engineers told América Futura that the trees planted had a drip irrigation system that provided the flora with very little water.
Two employees from the Sonoran Institute measure the liters that are delivered to an environmental clean-up site. Inaki Malvido
The goal is to use water wisely, punishing trees to allow them to develop more roots, and seeking water from the water table. The teams want to prepare the species for future water shortages without having to become extinct. “In the United States, they have been working on this for a long time, but in Mexico we are more passive,” explains Enrique Guillén Morán, head of the NGO Alliance’s irrigation department.
The teams restored some of the forests that originally inhabited the site. “At the beginning of the 20th century, when the rivers of the Colorado River were cut off in Mexico and the normal canal was channeled for agriculture, all the cottonwood and willow forests died, all the native vegetation died,” says Eduardo Blánquez, restoration coordinator for the organization Let’s Restore Colorado.
The reforested area of the Miguel Alemán Restoration Site surrounded by arid desert and Jesús Salazar farmland (Alianza Revive el Río Colorado)
In the small green oases they have built, the air we breathe is three to four degrees cooler than the sweltering heat of the desert. The natural regulation of temperature is one of the benefits of reforestation. Blánquez explains others, such as producing seeds to use as fodder for local livestock or restoring food chains. The sites are also carbon sinks and nature reserves. “With our grain of sand, we contribute to curbing climate change, not only to help ourselves, but to help the world,” he says.
Another location is Miguel Alemán on the border with the United States. On the other side of the wall, a few meters away, you can see a restored site. On the Mexican side, they built one to create a bird corridor. “This is a very important migration corridor for birds, so spaces had to be created for them,” says oceanographer Gabriela Caloca, water and wetland coordinator at the organization ProNatura Noroeste. So they created a 170 hectare forest from scratch. “Miguel Alemán is doing this to demonstrate that it is possible to restore a place that was thought to be completely dead, already deserted.”
Reforestation there brought back about twenty bird species. Their surveillance of the species includes capturing them, putting rings on them to mark they’ve been there, and releasing them. Birds counting on the return include the verdigris, roadrunner, cowboy and basketball, local workers say. The restoration in the middle of the desert has ensured that, like the other restored ones, it fills up with summer visitors looking to soothe the heat of nature with some fresh air and a little water.
Alejandra Calvo from ProNatura holds a bird in front of the book she uses to identify it. It is a juvenile verdigris, even without the yellow head that is characteristic of it, that fell into the bird surveillance networks of the Miguel Alemán Environmental Remediation Agency Iñaki Malvido
Calvo inspects the Verdin’s leg width. Inaki Malvido
After measuring the width of their legs and the length of their wings and attaching a ring identifying the individuals already seen at that location, check the wear and tear of their feathers. Inaki Malvido
The tools used to carry out the bird monitoring, in which a number of metrics are noted to see the type of birds arriving at the recovery site as well as their health status. Inaki Malvido
All the teams working in the restoration sites are made up of scientists and academics who analyze every circumstance and consequence before taking any step. A few kilometers from Miguel Alemán, in a town called Janitzio, Caloca raises his hand and shows what looks like a garbage dump. This is the Alliance’s final project, into which they will invest their resources, water and money to grow a new green lung on this inhospitable land. “That’s how every site was before it started, but we’re going to do the same thing that we did here in Miguel Aleman.”