On Thursday, December 13, 2018, at the 2018 CRWUA Conference, there will be a panel discussion about the Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan (LBDCP), moderated by John Fleck, University of New Mexico Director of Water Resources in the Department of Economics. Panel members include: Thomas Buschatzke, Director, Arizona Department of Water Resources; Ted Cooke, General Manager, Central Arizona Project; John Entsminger, General Manager, Southern Nevada Water Authority; and, Peter Nelson, Director, Coachella Valley Water District and Chairman, Colorado River Board of California.
The Bureau of Reclamation expects a shortage declaration under the 2007 Shortage Sharing Agreement for Lake Mead in 2020. The LBDCP will set the reduction target guidelines for water providers in each of the Lower Basin states.View the Agenda ⟶Register for the Conference ⟶
John Fleck, University of New Mexico Water Resources Program
John Fleck is Professor of Practice in Water Policy and Governance and Director of the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program. Much of his career was spent in journalism, focused since the 1980s on the interface between science and political and policy processes, with special emphasis on climate and water in the southwestern United States. He was the Water Resource program’s writer-in-residence for three years before transitioning to academia full time in 2016. In the field of water resources, his primary interest is in nurturing the collaborative water governance needed to adapt to scarcity in the southwestern United States as populations grow while climate change reduces water supplies. That goal animates the Water Resources Program, where he and his colleagues work with graduate students who will become the region’s future water managers. In both the Water Resources Program and the Department of Economics, he also works on translational activities – helping make the technical work done in academia of maximum benefit to political and policy processes.
Publications
• Water is for Fighting Over: and Other Myths about Water in the West, Island Press, 2016
• High-Tech Desert: The Great Decoupling of the West’s Water, Breakthrough Journal, Summer 2016
• What Seven States Can Agree to Do: Deal-Making on the Colorado River, Stanford Rural West Initiative, August 2012
• The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus, Bulletin of the American Meteorology Society, September 2008
Online
• Jfleck at Inkstain:, A few thoughts from John Fleck, a writer of journalism and other things, living in New Mexico | Twitter ⟶