The oft-repeated idiom in the American West that 'whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting' is oft-repeated for a reason. Throughout the semi-arid and arid landscapes of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Southern California, water has always been a precious resource that brought with it a host of intractable political problems. And those problems could be getting even stickier, according to a forthcoming paper by researchers at the University of Colorado.

The paper suggests there's a fifty-fifty chance that the water reservoirs of the Colorado River will dry up by 2050 if water management practices remain unchanged in a warming planet. With the Colorado River currently supplying water for about thirty million people, this could be a big problem.

The findings represent a worst-case scenario if global warming reduces the water flow of the Colorado by 20%, and if the current water consumption in Southwestern U.S. cities does not slow down.

But the study's authors also said the widespread adoption of conservation practices could go a long way towards reducing risk. Recognizing that risk and feeling the growing pressure for water in the American West, municipalities, water conservancy districts and other actors are implementing innovative water-savings programs that create financial incentives for landowners to rip up all or part of their water-sucking lawns and replace them with drought-tolerant, native landscapes.

Las Vegas, Nevada
In the Las Vegas area, the Southern Nevada Water Authority will pay homeowners and businesses $1.50 per square foot for the first 5,000 square feet and $1 per square foot for lawns replaced with desert-friendly plants. The maximum rebate for a single customer in the Water Smart Landscapes Rebate program would be a whopping $300,000. Granted, you'd have to have a lawn the size of three football fields.

In the ten years since its inception, more than 130 million square feet of lawns have been replaced with less water-intensive plants. As a result, the city of Las Vegas has seen its water use drop by 18 percent, or 15 billion gallons per year, even as the city's population ballooned.

Officials working with the program in Las Vegas estimate that for every square foot of lawn converted to water-smart landscaping, 55 gallons of water per year is saved.

Salt Lake City, Utah
Utah has the highest per capita water use in the country, and the non-profit Utah Rivers Council wanted to do something about it. The group created a program that encouraged people to remove that hard-to-water strip of grass in between the sidewalk and the street, so common in cities and towns across the U.S.. In the "Rip Your Strip" program's first year in 2006, program sponsors expected 100 pledges, instead they got over 1,000. Since then, the plan has been wildly successful with 5,000 Utahns taking the pledge.

According to the Rivers Council, the average Utah home where the strip was ripped is saving 5,000 gallons of water yearly.


Denver, Colorado
The city of Denver jumped on the xeriscape bandwagon early. In fact, workers at Denver Water coined the term back in 1978 to refer to a set of seven common-sense water conservation and design practices for dry climates. To encourage uptake of xeriscaping principles, the city adopted an Irrigation Efficiency Program that pays homeowners associations, commercial or irrigation-only customers $21.50 for each thousand gallons of water saved annually over a five-year contract period.


Los Angeles, California
If you have 200 to 2,000 square feet of green grass (dead lawns don't qualify), then the City of Los Angeles is willing to pay you to rip it out. The L.A. Department of Water and Power's new Residential Drought Resistant Landscape Incentive Program will now offer a cash incentive of $1 per square foot of lawn replaced with low-water alternatives. The new rebate also applies to the strip of lawn between the sidewalk and curb, which makes good sense because watering with sprinklers is next to impossible in that little strip without creating run-off -- and under the new drought ordinances in L.A., creating run-off is illegal.

Images via Univ. of Colorado; Southern Nevada Water Authority
Follow Tim Hurst on twitter