Insights and Impact: Indicators for Land and Water Sustainability in the Colorado River Basin

Welcome!

This is the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy’s inaugural report on indicators for land and water sustainability in the Colorado River Basin. We stand at a critical moment in the history of the Basin: action is urgently needed across all levels of management that safeguard precious land and water resources for future generations. But how will we know if conditions are really improving? Indicators can help. While they cannot paint a complete and detailed picture of everything going on, they can provide a useful snapshot, prompting constructive, policy relevant questions and observations about whether people and the environment are doing better than in the past, and, ideally, why. This report aims to present a curated suite of indicators that can be tracked through time and across space to identify trends and highlight connections between physical and social conditions related to land and water resources in communities that rely on the Colorado River.