This post was written by The Ground Floor contributor and ULI senior resident fellow, Ed McMahon.
Las Vegas, America's fastest growing city, and site of ULI's Fall Meeting, was built on big dreams, cheap land, cheap gas and abundant water. So an article in yesterday's Washington Post caught my eye. The article, "Warming May Exacerbate Global Water Conflicts," made several key points: First, global warming will intensify droughts. And it will intensify flooding, but in totally different places.
According to Stephen Schneider, editor of the journal Climatic Change and a lead author of the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel in Climate Change (IPCC), in places "where the atmosphere is configured to have high pressure and droughts, global warming will mean long dry periods." According to the IPCC, that means drying out in areas such as the Middle East, North Africa, South Australia and the U.S. Southwest.
These will not be small droughts. Richard Seager, a senior researcher at the Lamont-Dougherty Earth Observatory at Colombia University says that "19 different computer models of future trends, predict that sometime before 2050, the Southwest will be gripped in a dry spell akin to the Dust Bowl drought," which lasted through most of the 1930s.
Whoa! If this is true, and indications are that drought is already gripping the Southwest, then freewheeling Las Vegas is headed for big trouble.
The once mighty Colorado River which supplies most of Las Vegas' water is already looking sickly. The reservoirs of both Lake Mead and Lake Powell have sunk to historic lows -- so low, in fact, that the pumps that supply Las Vegas will be above the water line in less than three years according to the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
Yet growth pressures and housing demand in Las Vegas have not abated. Demographers predict that Greater Las Vegas will add 1 million more residents in the next ten years, reaching a population of 3 million by 2010.
Water is not the only problem. Las Vegas is also running out of land, hemmed in by mountains, national parks, military bases, Indian Reservations and endangered species habitat. Developers who 15 years ago paid less than $40,000 an acre are now paying more than $300,000 an acre. In a 2006 auction of public land, a developer paid $639 million for 2,655 acres.
To survive in a new world of limited land, rising gas prices and diminishing water supply, Las Vegas is going to have to become a national model for green building, smart growth and low-impact, sustainable design. Living in a desert has always been a challenge, but the realities of geography and global warming are going to force Las Vegas to go green or suffer the consequences.
As a planner in San Diego, I agree that water is going to be the big issue in the coming years. The various water authorities that draw from the Colorado River have been exceeding their allotments for years already. Green building and alternative landscaping is going to be key, and convincing the municipal powers that be to incorporate these measures strongly into General Plans and Development Standards has got to be a major priority of planners throughout the country.
Posted by: Brad | August 29, 2007 at 02:38 PM