In the dry Colorado River Delta, the future of these green oases hangs in the balance

In northwestern Mexico, just south of the US border, there’s a massive, dusty expanse of beige. But it wasn’t always this way. It’s the Colorado River Delta, where the river once met the Pacific Ocean and created a sprawling network of forests and wetlands. For decades, though, nearly every drop of the river’s water has been used upstream, and a vast triangle of brown has been left in the delta’s place.

But there are a few notable exceptions.

An agreement between the US and Mexico allocated a tiny portion of water to restore the Colorado River Delta. Governments and nonprofit groups have used that water for the past 12 years to build habitats for the animals that used to call it home, bringing back little oases in the otherwise barren delta. But that agreement expires at the end of 2026, and conservationists hope these defiant green islands don’t disappear.

Dodging the high-90s heat of a late October day, Aída Navarro sat under a shady tree and marveled at the unlikely cluster of trees around her. She coordinates a coalition of nonprofits called Raise the River, which has regrown a handful of “restoration sites” like this one.

“They’ve created a forest out of nothing,” Navarro said, pausing for a moment. “Well, out of water and a lot of hard work.”

Navarro’s group receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation, which also supports KUNC’s Colorado River coverage.

Teams of workers from the nonprofits have carefully laid pipes and dug canals across acres of dry, sandy, silty land and created environments that now feel very much alive. The chatter of birds, the earthy odor of mud, the subtle splash of frogs and surfacing fish — they all feel a world away from the flat, brown desert just outside the perimeter.

“If you had been here, let’s say, five to eight years ago, you would have seen a Mad Max scenario,” she said. “Desert and garbage.”

Now, Navarro and her peers hope that the same political will that created these places will enable them to continue growing.

“It would be basically a crime to let all this effort and these places die if we didn’t have more water in the future,” Navarro said.

Mexico and the US are seeing new presidential administrations, and tension at the highest levels of government could mean that these relatively small restoration sites, far away from each nation’s seat of government, could become an afterthought. Without a new binational agreement to keep water flowing to the delta, conservationists and the plants and animals who depend on their efforts could be literally left out to dry.

“We need to start being less humble about how amazing the work has been,” Navarro said, “and we need to start fighting even harder to keep it up.”

‘A crucial route’ for birds

The Colorado River Delta’s restoration sites offer a rare glimpse into the past.

For millions of years, the delta was where the river reached the sea. Snowmelt from a spiderweb of tributaries across the West, as far away as Wyoming, reached the end of its journey here and flowed into the Pacific Ocean. This formed a messy span of green, with meandering waterways and dense vegetation covering over 2,000 square miles.

That wide, lush area served as a homeland for the Cucapá indigenous people and a pivotal habitat for many animals. Perhaps most importantly, it played host to millions of birds yearly. On long migrations from North America to South America, those flocks would stop to rest in the safe, food-rich environs of the delta.

While the vast majority of those habitats are gone, today’s restoration sites are still a chorus of tweets, chirps, and flapping wings. At the Miguel Alemán restoration site, less than a mile onto the Mexican side of the border, Alejandra Calvo Fonseca carefully pushed her way through the tangled brush. She researches birds with the nonprofit Pronatura Noroeste and can identify just about any species that visits these parts.

Calvo Fonseca paused to identify a woodpecker chattering in the trees above, then a hawk flapping across a clearing. Her favorite, a belted kingfisher, is tattooed on her forearm.

“It’s a crucial route,” Calvo Fonseca said in Spanish. “Recent studies showed that in spring, this area receives up to 17 million wetland birds. So I think it’s necessary to take action to protect these sites and create more like it.”

While they cover a relatively small amount of land, the restoration sites are still an important stopover for birds.

“This place can seem small. These habitats, sitting here in the middle of the desert, can seem small, but they are very consequential,” said Jennifer Pitt, Colorado River program director for the National Audubon Society.

Pitt’s group receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation, which also supports KUNC’s Colorado River coverage.

Pitt said 30% of all birds in North America — about 3 billion — have been lost in the past 50 years.

“That is a frightening trajectory,” she said. “So I think anything we can do to support bird life here in the delta has ramifications for places as far away as Minnesota and Alaska and Canada, all the way down into Central America and even Patagonia.”

Political uncertainty ahead

The future of the Colorado River hangs in the balance. Climate change is shrinking its supplies and the people, farms and businesses that use it are keeping up a steady demand for water. Policymakers are caught in a standoff, disagreeing about the best way to stretch out dwindling water supplies across 40 million people in big cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix and Denver plus a multibillion-dollar agriculture industry.

Without an answer to that equation, and with uncertain political futures on both sides of the border, will policymakers be able to set aside enough water — or any at all — for the plants and animals that live in the Colorado River Delta?

“I think that looking at the past and how the US and Mexico have been collaborating is a good start, but it’s probably not going to be enough,” said Carlos de la Parra, who served as an advisor during previous water talks between the two countries. “As the effects of climate change continue to be very much apparent, we’re seeing how each of the stakeholders are looking out for its immediate fears.”

While Mexico has been part of formal Colorado River treaties with the US since 1944, the two countries started discussing how to respond to 21st-century drought in 2007. Since then, the International Boundary Water Commission has overseen a series of agreements that have impacted the delta.

In 2014, one agreement saw the river actually reach the sea. The nations agreed to lift a dam at the Mexican border, sending water into nearly 100 miles of dry riverbed. That event, called a “pulse flow,” was designed to replicate a naturally occurring spring flood.

In 2017, the countries inked a deal called Minute 323, ensuring that water could continue flowing into the part of Mexico with restoration sites. Colorado River experts hope a similar deal will be signed after the current one expires in 2026, but a new era of uncertainty in cross-border politics and water management stands in the way.

Mexico recently welcomed a new presidential administration after scientist-turned-politician Claudia Sheinbaum was elected the country’s first female president. The U.S. will have a new president in January when Donald Trump returns to the White House. Trump has been an outspoken critic of Mexico and has a track record of contentious relationships with the country’s politicians. US state officials appear hopeful that Trump will not interfere with ongoing domestic water talks, but his administration’s attitudes towards Mexico could stymie cooperation with that country’s government.

Talks between the two governments are set against uncertainty about the Colorado River within the US. The seven states that use its water are deeply divided and currently mired in a standoff about how to share the pain of future cutbacks fairly. They also face a 2026 deadline, and their decisions could shape the broader future of the river before the US and Mexico finalize an agreement.

De la Parra, who now chairs the nonprofit group Restauremos el Colorado board, said that puts Mexico in a difficult position.

“Mexico wishes to be part of the conversation, but at the same time wishes to have a recognition that there’s an international treaty,” he said. “There’s really no clear formula, no clear science about this. We really have to play it by ear.”

The people getting their hands dirty in the delta say they need to raise awareness about their work to ensure it gets more support. The groups working at the restoration sites are optimistic that policymakers will send more water their way if they see the results of the work already done.

“We’re already in motion. It’s just a matter of keeping up with the good work and good will,” said Aída Navarro. “I really hope that the new administrations in both countries will realize how meaningful and how groundbreaking this work is.”

‘There is no place beyond hope’

Those working at the restoration sites say the Colorado River Delta is a good case study about policymakers’ ability to respond to climate change. Jennifer Pitt, with the Audubon Society, called the delta’s birds a kind of “canary in the coal mine.”

“With the challenges of climate change coming at us at an unprecedented rate and increasing peril and frequency,” Pitt said, “It seems like the more we can do to support these habitats, the better chance we have of making our world a habitable place in the long run.”

She said some restoration is possible with less than 1% of the Colorado River’s average annual supply and that it would be worse for policymakers to “backtrack” on their previous commitments to help the environment given the relatively modest amount of water involved.

The first US-Mexico agreement to provide water for the environment lasted five years, and the soon-to-expire agreement lasted nine. Navarro hopes the next one will last at least that long, allowing restoration work to keep up its momentum.

“If this could happen here, in a place that was considered basically dead and forgotten, and now we see all this rebirth of vegetation,” she said, “To me, it’s a signal that there is no place beyond hope.”

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC, and supported by the Walton Family Foundation.