What Will it Take to Save the Great Salt Lake?

Let’s be clear: we are not on track for a healthy Great Salt Lake. Northern Utah may have dodged the Governor’s recent drought declaration, but Great Salt Lake is just one hot summer away from falling back into what Dr. Bonnie Baxter calls “the scary zone”—the same danger zone we were in the year before the lake hit its historic low. Without significant intervention, we could be staring down another record low as soon as next year.

Whether Utah truly has the will to do what it takes for the lake has become a central question, explored in a series of recent local and national reports.

In late March, the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) released “Utah’s Moonshot”, outlining the key legal changes, administrative moves, and investments the state has made so far to respond the crisis at Great Salt Lake, and describing the potential for water leasing en masse to support the lake’s restoration.

Objectively, we have transformed the way water is managed in Utah – making some of our water policies perhaps the most progressive in the west and greasing the wheels to begin sending water to the lake. 

But progress is slow – too slow for the Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board, who recently took aim at agricultural water users, suggesting that the state create a plan to buy out farmers – or force the sale of their water rights if they don’t bite. 

Agriculture is of course the state’s largest water user, but threatening agricultural producers may hamper the ongoing efforts to meaningfully reduce their use. Building trust with farmers and finding palatable solutions to reduce their use – while honoring their traditions and communities, and keeping them economically whole – is a delicate process. A recalibration of our agricultural priorities and a revitalization of our rural economies is certainly long overdue but, but we need to proceed with care and a spirit of collaboration.

In the New York Times, Leia Larsen dives deeper—highlighting both the complexity of the challenge and the contradictions in our response. 

RadioWest joined the query, digging in the question last month with some GSL heavy hitters who acknowledged the shifting landscape of political will (TLDR: it’s not what it once was), the long-term nature of this crisis, and the limited window we have before disastrous impacts hit our air quality, the lake’s ecosystem, and the industries that depend on it. 

Yes, we’ve made meaningful progress, but that’s just “building the basecamp to climb Mt. Everest” as Ben Abbott put it. (Sobering reminder that no one has ever saved a saline lake from decline before.)

An old pier in a dried-up portion of the Great Salt Lake.

One thing is clear: we didn’t get here overnight. And we won’t get out of this quickly either. There is no big bucket of water waiting for the Great Salt Lake. No magic solution– just tradeoffs. It’s going to take a lot of smaller moves—collective reductions in use, across all sectors, at every level. (Yes, that includes your lawn.)

What kind of reductions? Well, it depends on who you ask and the timeframe you’re comfortable with, but roughly 10% reductions across the board – as the GSL Commissioner’s Office has softly recommended – would get us to a more stable, albeit still threatened, lake level of 4195 feet in 30 years. 

To restore the lake to its minimum healthy level of 4198 feet over a 20-year period, we’ll need an additional 500,000-1,200,000 acre-feet of new water flowing to the lake each year, depending on drought conditions. (1 acre-foot = 325,851 gallons.) We’re talking about a lot of water.

Some argue this is unrealistic. Others say it's not nearly fast enough. 

For perspective: a 19% reduction in all water depletions across the Great Salt Lake Basin would yield an estimated 399,000 acre-feet of annual savings.

More aggressive reductions—30 to 50%—could get us to a healthy lake level within 5-10 years, but at this point, don’t seem to be near the discussion table. 

As GSL Commissioner Brian Steed emphasizes, any near-term solution for the lake needs to be: ecologically sustainable, economically viable, politically possible, technically feasible, and legally sound.

View of Antelope Island.

Some good news: the Great Salt Lake Basin Integrated Plan – expected in 2027 – will give us a much clearer picture of how water is used across the GSL Basin and where the most promising opportunities might be, while also enabling us to model different strategies under a range of future scenarios. 

This will bring some much-needed clarity and strength to our decision-making. These past few years, some of our approaches have been untested, redundant, costly, or perhaps not the best use of time and resources. Solving an urgent crisis of this magnitude is no easy task and the systems we’re trying to shift are enormous.

So the question becomes: how do we hold all of this? How do we balance the scale and complexity of the crisis with the urgency of action, waning political will, and the real constraints of our systems?

It will take sustained effort, patience, and new collaborations across aisles and sectors– in the words of Dr. Bonnie Baxter, “vigilance over time.” Change, as they say, moves at the speed of trust.

Great Salt Lake is just one piece of a much larger water picture in Utah. Hopefully, it’s waking us up to the need for a smarter, more honest relationship with all the waters in our state. Colorado River negotiations have never been tenser and the strain between growth and water supply is real.

While this is a newer focus area for our organization, we’re in it for the long haul—and we’re excited to start sharing more about our work to to advance actionable policies for the lake, build broad and lasting relationships across sectors, and turn community concern into meaningful action for smart water policy in Utah.

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I’d love to hear from you! Shoot me an email at chandler@stewardshiputah.org with your questions, concerns, hopes, dreams, memes, etc. 

Better yet, join Stewardship Utah’s Summer Book Club! For our water feature, we’ll be reading Life After Dead Pool by Zak Podmore. We’ll be discussing it via Zoom (with Zak!) on Thursday August 28rd at 7pm.  Sign up here.

And if you’d like to get more involved in hands-on efforts to support the lake, join us on Saturday, August 23rd at SLCC’s Miller Campus for the People’s Great Salt Lake Summit. Agenda and registration coming soon.