Devon Chodzin & Jose Fernandez

On the U.S. -Mexico border lies the Paso Del Norte Watershed. This arid watershed includes portions of southern New Mexico, western Texas, and northern Chihuahua, Mexico. At the center of the watershed are the cities of El Paso, Texas, U.S. and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. The cities of El Paso and Juárez are incredibly interconnected and make up the second largest binational region on the border and the largest binational workforce in the Western Hemisphere. As with many border towns, the relationship shared by these cities is complex and at times tumultuous, however as climate change worsens and shared resources become increasingly scarce, new agreements in the region will need to be reached in order to ensure either cities’ future. 

Hydrology

The formal boundaries of the Paso Del Norte Watershed is the basin of the Rio Grande between the Elephant Butte Reservoir in southern New Mexico to the town of Presidio, Texas. Key features in the watershed are the Elephant Butte Reservoir, the Caballo Reservoir, the Hueco Bolson Aquifer, Hueco Mesilla Aquifer, and a 328-mile stretch of the Rio Grande. With both El Paso and Juárez located within the Paso Del Norte Watershed, they share access to all the water sources within its boundaries. El Paso, being further upstream, has the ability to source water from the Rio Grande before it reaches Juárez. Across all sources, physical water scarcity is increasing. Annual precipitation in the region continues to decline from 24 inches to 17 inches in recent years. Both the Elephant Butte and Caballo Reservoirs are operating under 25% capacity. Lack of rainfall has also contributed to the lack of aquifer recharge, which has resulted in the increase of salinity in the Hueco Bolson Aquifer. 

El Paso

El Paso is located on the U.S. side of the border with a population of 868,763. Water in El Paso is municipally owned and operated by El Paso Water. The group manages drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater. Currently, the primary water sources in El Paso are the Rio Grande and Hueco Bolson Aquifer, an estimated 40% and 38% respectively. As physical water scarcity increases in the region, the water management group has made efforts to increase the diversity in the water portfolio in El Paso. 

Diversification comes in the form of desalination. The Kay Bailey Hutchison Water Treatment Plant, operated by El Paso Water, is the largest inland desalination plant in the world, treating up to 27.5 million gallons of drinking water daily. The Kay Bailey treats brackish water Hueco Bolson and although it only contributes 5% of total water consumed in El Paso, it improves the city’s capacity for water scarcity resiliency. 

Kay Bailey Hutchison Desalination Plant, El Paso, TX, U.S.

In addition to physical management, El Paso has taken steps to manage demand for water as well. El Paso Water uses a block rate to charge for drinking water with higher rates for higher volume consumers. Consumers with larger pipes are also charged at higher rates than those with smaller ones. Not every water practice in El Paso is a positive one. Since the 1940s, the acreage of farms in the El Paso area have been on the rise. Practices like flood irrigation are common in the region and result in unsustainable water use. As a result, El Paso has been forced to begin importing water from nearby Dell City as well as other municipalities in the region. High water demand has been a driving force for water innovation in El Paso, with a per capita water-use rate of 130 gallons, the ninth highest in Texas and substantially higher than the 80 gallons per capita in Juárez. El Paso’s latest water innovation is a Toilet to Tap program announced to be implemented by 2050. The program would treat stormwater and wastewater up to drinking water standards to be used by the city. In El Paso, aridification, climate change, and high-water use has pushed the city to be more diverse and efficient when it comes to water sourcing and pricing, however, demand side strategies have failed to drive the per capita water-use down.

Ciudad Juárez

South of the border is Ciudad Juárez. Juárez is the larger of the two cities with an estimated population of 1.5 million people. On average, the citizens of Juárez use less water than their American counterparts, about 80 gallons per capita compared to the 130 gallons per capita in El Paso. Water is primarily sourced from the Rio Grande and Hueco Bolson. The population of Juárez is primarily confined to the area on top of the Hueco Bolson due to geographic limitations. Water in the city is managed by the Juárez Municipal Water and Sanitation Board (JMAS). The board is municipally operated as a result of the decentralization of the Mexican government in 1983. Federal policies still have an effect on water management in Juárez as water is a guaranteed human right in Mexico since 2012. All citizens of Mexico legally have an equal right to water. Water as a human right does not mean free water in the city, but instead improved accessibility through infrastructure. Pricing for water in Juárez is unknown; however, illegal hookups to water mains have caused an increase in rates for residents and an estimated $11.4 million in lost revenue a month for JMAS. Illegal hookups are not the only obstacle to water management for JMAS. Juárez is the heart of the Mexican maquila industry. Maquiladoras are manufacturing factories located in Mexico, usually near the border, run by a foreign company. 

Maquiladora in Ciudad Juárez, CI, Mexico

Manufacturing is a water reliant industry and causes a strain on the shared water supplies in the Paso Del Norte. The strain of the maquiladoras as well as the growing population have pushed Juárez to diversify its water sources as well. JMAS announced the construction of an aqueduct connecting Juárez to the Hueco Mesilla Aquifer to the west of the city. 

The Intervention

In El Paso, TX, and Ciudad Juárez, CI, the challenges are numerous and the potential interventions are manifold. The cities are facing a mix of physical scarcity coming owing to climate change-driven aridification and their limited ability to harvest rainwater from storms that pass over the megaplex. El Paso is at an advantage as a metropolis in an industrialized, first-world democracy, the United States superpower, but it cannot fool Mother Nature. So, while the city has made headlines as one that manages its scant yet diversified water sources brilliantly, greater tightening from aridification threatens to squeeze the city to a breaking point. What is perhaps more alarming is that El Paso shares its largest water sources, the Hueco Bolson and Mesilla Bolson aquifers, with Ciudad Juárez, a city that already boasts a population three times larger and continues to grow at over 3% annually, attracting migrants from across Latin America with its extensive industrial assembly sector. As influential as Mexico is, its pocketbook is quite small in comparison to the United States, so funding for municipal infrastructure progress at the national, state, and local levels is scarce. Ciudad Juárez has historically relied on the North American Development Bank for major upgrades to its water infrastructure, including the construction of wastewater treatment systems in the early 21st century. Today, the city does not have as diversified a water portfolio as El Paso, and its existing infrastructure struggles to serve its exploding population, especially as new residents settle in informal suburbs. It relies entirely on groundwater, drawing heavily from the Hueco Bolson and only recently introducing the Mesilla Bolson through an aqueduct into the municipal portfolio. The El Paso-Ciudad Juárez megaplex is overdrawing from these aquifers, which spells doom for both cities and the surrounding desert. These aquifers are also important to the megaplex’s neighbors to the north in New Mexico, so any water management decisions that either city makes impact this state. 

Physical interventions that free up water sources or policy interventions that manage urban water consumption are both necessary components of future water management schemes in the Paso del Norte watershed cities. However, the separate actions of these individual cities are not likely to outweigh the other. If Ciudad Juárez continues business as usual while El Paso continues to diversify its portfolio and tighten its demand, chances are that the interventions will still not be enough to guarantee long-term water sustainability. Similarly, if both cities end up taking meaningful steps to address their local scarcity issues, but those interventions proceed without coordination, the spillover effects from one city’s actions may negatively impact the other city. While there is precedent for El Paso Water and JMAS to coordinate and communicate, the cities need to act cohesively: through some variety of coordinated international action, especially regarding groundwater management, these two cities need to act as a united front that will supply water to their customers and act as good stewards of their local aquifers. There is precedent for binational agreements affecting water use and water quality along the Paso del Norte Watershed: the La Paz Agreement of 1983 formalized United States-Mexico binational environmental cooperation, which proved especially important for surface watershed management in the age of NAFTA. Beginning in the 1960s, American and Asian enterprises promised renewed economic growth for Mexico through the siting of assembly plants in Mexican border towns, where multinational corporations could pay reduced labor costs and import intermediate goods duty-free so long as they continued operations in these economically adrift communities. By the 1980s, there were 2,000 of these maquiladoras in border towns abutting all four US states that touch Mexico. These water-intensive operations also produced significant amounts of industrial effluent: “As the maquiladora system grew, the need for potable water and increasing pollution of watercourses grew hand in hand…The maquiladoras also threatened the water supply by using city drainage systems or failing to control the effluents they produced.” Large uptake of water for industrial use and for the new homesteads of maquila workers with improper disposal of both strained water systems on both sides of the border. 

Precedents, case studies, opportunities to improve

The La Paz Agreement is an excellent precedent for binational agreement because it paved the way for meaningful environmental collaboration on environmental issues that impact the border’s several transboundary watersheds. The treaty established 100-mile “buffer zones” where no one state’s sovereignty entirely trumped the other, creating an environment where the two countries could more easily collaborate on environmental remediation projects. What existed in the Paso del Norte watershed prior to La Paz, the feckless International Boundary and Water Commission, was dissatisfactory and woefully under-resourced.However, La Paz has not witnessed extensive implementation. The surface water quality issue is subject to fluctuations in attention from governments and citizenry. Where pollution remediation falls on the priority list of American and Mexican leadership is subject to the throes of partisanship, as well. In 2000, the rightward shift of both the American and Mexican federal governments helped facilitate the downsizing and decentralization of La Paz’s governance, destabilizing existing programs to monitor and reduce pollution. The incentives to regulate the maquila industry are especially backward; both countries have incentives to keep their hands off the industry: Mexico wants the revenue from investment in their real estate and workforce and the United States-based executives want to keep their assembly operations in a country where labor and capital are cheap. Most importantly, the existing La Paz Agreement offers no regulation of groundwater withdrawals. As the agreement is specific to the issue of surface water pollution, groundwater issues are entirely ignored, which is a large oversight considering the region’s heavy reliance on pumping groundwater and the declining quality of local groundwater resulting from over-pumping.

We propose the drawing of a strong treaty between the United States and Mexico that specifically outlines a management, pricing, and recharge plan for aquifers that straddle the border. This treaty will drastically reduce the institutional scarcity affecting this region. We argue that the region is experiencing institutional scarcity because there is a lack of formal structures that sufficiently manage any joint water infrastructure planning, especially with respect to groundwater. This vacuum leads to managerial scarcity due to mismanagement on both sides of the border. The treaty will enlist the help of the International Boundary and Water Commission to dedicate funds and resources towards the generation of legally binding long-term aquifer management plans. We take our inspiration from the Genevese transboundary aquifer management agreement that was first adopted in 1978 and renewed in 2007. This small aquifer straddled the Swiss-French border underneath the Swiss canton of Geneva. Midcentury demographic change and separate withdrawals on both the Swiss and French sides of the border contributed to swift overwithdrawal that threatened the aquifer’s sustainability. Without immediate intervention, the aquifer was expected to be depleted by 2025. Perhaps what was most essential to the success of this aquifer management plan was the artificial recharge station that pumped water from the Arve River. This river already served as the primary source of naturally infiltrating water. From there, committees representing the different water administrators on the Swiss and French sides negotiated pricing schemes for water withdrawals and set limits for withdrawals based on the information available to each government. Extensive technical data needed to be recovered in order to generate hydrogeologically sound estimates. In the case of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, any transboundary water planning requires cooperation on data collection and management. 

For managing the Genevese Aquifer, a committee of local representatives is accountable to the water users; specifically on the Swiss side, the Canton of Geneva can handle the transboundary issues directly as a committee member. In the Paso del Norte case, a similar committee may have representatives from each county that draws from the aquifers or representatives from New Mexico and Texas negotiating with Mexican/Chihuahuan officials. This may be difficult to achieve given the structure of the United States and the requirement that international agreements be handled at the federal level, but potential cooperation between the federal government and the governments of Texas and New Mexico that let the locally affected governments steer negotiation with Mexico could keep the committee beholden to the local water users. This proposal is not without potential limitations. International agreements require that both parties come to the table voluntarily and international actors with differential access to power and capital may use that power to undermine the agreement. Additionally, artificial aquifer recharge is difficult in this region because the Rio Grande’s low flows are already used as a water source for El Paso and many communities further downstream. Artificial recharge would likely come from an additional dedication of reclaimed wastewater for aquifer recharge, plus a healthy stormwater harvesting program that would direct stormwater towards aquifer recharge. Chances are that an agreement that would manage aquifer withdrawals in this region would lead to water table restoration as quickly as seen in the Genevese Aquifer, so a Paso del Norte transboundary watershed management committee would likely spend additional time performing joint planning operations and would need to set up legal and physical infrastructure for information and resource sharing. This would be especially difficult, as neither country’s water user wants to be responsible for risks that the other faces. However, filling this institutional void will be necessary to ensure a sustainable future for this growing desert community, so the formation of a capable binational agreement and planning board will be a necessary first step towards integrated planning.

Works Referenced

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