Meet Colorado’s water plan architect: Q&A with James Eklund (interview)
Designing a comprehensive water plan for a state the size of Colorado is no mean feat. James Eklund, the architect behind the plan adopted in January 2023, shares the challenges faced and the invaluable lessons learned along the way.
Balancing public and private interests
The Colorado Water Plan offers a framework to address Colorado’s water challenges through collaborative efforts in water development and conservation. This grassroots initiative relies on the Colorado water community to identify and implement projects that benefit the state’s diverse water users.
One of the most significant challenges encountered when designing the plan was navigating the dual nature of water rights in Colorado.
“Crafting a statewide strategic plan regarding an asset (water rights) that is privately owned but that is also a public resource necessary to life as a challenge,” explains James Eklund, who leads the Water & Natural Resources practice at Sherman & Howard.
This task involved addressing deeply held beliefs across diverse communities while ensuring the plan’s applicability to all. The complexity was further amplified by Colorado’s role as a headwaters state, supplying water to 18 downstream states and Mexico.
Overcoming a monumental hurdle
Achieving proactive ownership of the plan among Colorado’s six million residents was another monumental hurdle. “That meant designing a civic engagement process larger than anything ever attempted in Colorado (or any US Western state),” he adds.
This extensive engagement effort was crucial for fostering a sense of involvement and commitment among the public. There were of course other challenges along the way. The Governor’s Executive Order set a 2.5-year deadline without additional budget or staffing.
“We had to design something that would land our spacecraft using nothing more than what we already had laying around,” Eklund says, drawing a parallel to the resourceful problem-solving depicted in the Apollo 13 movie. Despite these constraints, the team managed to develop a dynamic, living document capable of evolving with new data, scientific advancements and innovations.
Lessons learned
Eklund says there are several key lessons he gleaned from the planning process. One crucial insight was the importance of collaboration and genuine engagement. “You can’t push a rope. People need to be enlisted to pull for progress to be made,” he adds. “People must be provided with ways to comment and those comments must be truly heard.”
Recognising the unique characteristics of all involved was also vital. “Every user, basin, state and region is unique and those differences must be recognised for people to feel bought in,” Eklund points out. He also stresses the role of economic considerations in policy implementation.
“Money and markets matter,” he adds. “In our economic system, policy implementation doesn’t happen without financial incentives and, in our system, market-based pricing is the most efficient mechanism to assign value that makes sense for the water asset class.”
Eklund’s major influencers
Colorado’s record flooding, drought and wildfire events of 2013 profoundly influenced Eklund’s approach to water management. “These events demonstrated the interconnectedness of all our water issues,” he explains.
“The chain reaction from aridification and climate change to increased wildfire risk, invasive pests, diminished snowpack and dirtier runoff highlighted the need for comprehensive, integrated water policies.”
Eklund highlights the importance of involving emergency managers in water policy development and shifting the perspective from traditional drought to aridification. “We’re not really experiencing ‘drought’ in the West as that term is typically used,” he says. Instead, the region faces aridification, with more extreme dry periods and precipitation events, making past data less reliable for future
A unified system
Managing the Colorado River as a unified system remains one of the biggest challenges, according to Eklund.
"We currently incentivise two sovereign nations, seven sovereign states and 30 sovereign tribes to compete for their share of the resource,"
he explains. Such competition creates substantial disincentives for cooperation, which must be addressed for sustainable management.
Including all sovereigns in negotiations increases complexity but is essential for lasting agreements he believes. “The more parties to a negotiation exponentially increases complexity but there is no other way to lasting agreement,” he says.
Eklund also stresses that litigation is not a viable path forward. “Some parties have signalled that they are willing to litigate if they don’t get what they want,” he notes, pointing out that litigation leads to decades of conflict and uncertainty, while immediate attention is needed for river management.
The future
Eklund says the future of water policy and infrastructure projects in Colorado will evolve slowly without bold leadership but rapidly with strong leadership and acute water stress. “We must not fail to waste a crisis,” he says, emphasising the opportunity to drive significant progress in times of crisis.
For upcoming water policy makers and environmental leaders, Eklund offers a key piece of advice:
“Remember that the water business is fundamentally about people.”
Quoting Abraham Lincoln, he concludes: “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.”