What is Terracing?

By Giovanni Cordova   

Project submitted through Grand Challenges Scholars program, Sustainable Water Resources Team.

Terracing is a proven tool utilized by countries around the world to combat water scarcity and climate change. New Mexico’s Water Authority showed that up to 97% of water captured by a terrace can effectively penetrate into Albuquerque’s aquifer.

The Rio Grande is fueled by the melting snow located in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, and as climate change continues to progress, our ability to reliably rely on this snowmelt will only continue to diminish. Farmers in New Mexico rely on the river flowing during the critical months of the growing season, and as snow begins to melt earlier in the year, the farmers have an increasingly limited supply of water to use for irrigation.

To remedy this issue in the past, the state created water storage locations, such as Elephant Bute, to hold onto off-season water to save for the growing season, when farmers actually needed the water. As climate change continuous to shift the ratio of off-season water to growing season water into a less favorable situation, the state will have to create additional storage facilities to house the water for longer periods of time throughout the year.

The issue with building additional lakes and damns are two fold. They are more ecologically destructive than storing water in an aquifer, and much less efficient. Lakes and dams store water with an evaporative loss of 10-15%, whereas aquifer storage has an evaporative loss of only 2%.

With New Mexico’s scarcest resource being water, having a reliable, high-efficiency, year-round storage solution is of utmost importance, and as such, New Mexico should prioritize the development of aquifer storage solutions over the more conventional surface storage methods.”