Learning from shared scarcity: the Colorado River, the Yellow River and the world

This blog is co-authored by Yiwei Gan.

One of the largest rivers in the world struggles to reach the ocean. Spread across a huge slice of a continent, its basin supports millions. Yet the weight of its work to irrigate and power booming farms and cities in an increasingly arid zone is straining the river to a breaking point. For many working in the western water space, this describes the Colorado. A river whose over-work and over-allocation, despite its fundamental role in sustaining life for half a continent, seems in many ways singular.  

Yet this is also the Yellow River. A river thousands of miles away that sustains a population four times that of the Colorado Basin is also confronting foundational issues of overuse and growing water scarcity. Even though they are an ocean apart, with different climates, physical, and institutional settings, water users in both basins are…