Oct. 24, 2024
By John DeVoe
For thousands of years, cultures and economies and ways of life have been tied to the Columbia River and its fish.
The Columbia River is, by volume, the fourth-largest river in the United States. While 40 percent of the river’s mileage is in Canada, for some, the international border is simply a modern creation that doesn’t reflect the cultural, linguistic, or familial ties between those who make the Columbia Basin their home.
Not long ago, the Columbia was the most prolific salmon river in the world. Columbia River salmon would migrate to and spawn near the river’s headwaters in Canada in a journey of over 1,200 miles from the ocean. Today, the Columbia is one of the most industrialized and monetized rivers in the world. There are now 14 dams on the Columbia mainstem, and many more on its tributaries. Salmon runs are now one-tenth or less of the river’s historic abundance, even with hatchery supplementation, and every mainstem Columbia dam above and including Grand Coulee in Washington state lacks fish passage. Wild, non-hatchery salmon runs are in serious trouble.
Signed in 1961 and ratified in 1964, the Columbia River Treaty (CRT) is a transboundary water management agreement between the U.S and Canada. Historically focused on just two subjects — hydropower and flood risk management — the CRT requires coordinated operations of the Columbia and Kootenai rivers on both sides of the border. In the late 1950s and early 1960s when the treaty was being negotiated, Tribes and First Nations were not consulted or involved. Even today, Tribes, First Nations, and ecosystem voices are not involved in Treaty governance.
In fact, ecosystem concerns have never been a part of the Treaty. Both the U.S and Canada simplistically, and wrongfully, assumed that ecosystem functions could be addressed by domestic actions in each country, and that hatcheries could mitigate for lost fish runs. Meanwhile, those most impacted by Treaty operations, now for several generations, have never benefitted from the resultant hydropower revenue the Treaty has facilitated.
A decade ago, the U.S. began to engage in a fairly robust process of reviewing the tenets of the Columbia River Treaty for its mandatory update, including consultations with U.S. tribes in the basin and development of the so-called Regional Recommendation for modernization of the Treaty.
The Regional Recommendation made several important suggestions, among them designating ecosystem function as a third treaty purpose. It also called for a study to review flood risk to identify opportunities to allow more water downstream during the spring freshet to benefit salmonids, hinted at changes in Treaty governance, suggested exploration of fish passage options at the upstream dams, and called for water of sufficient quantity and quality to ensure abundant salmon and steelhead runs in the basin.
Over the past several years, teams from the two countries have met repeatedly to negotiate. These meetings and the terms of the negotiation have never been shared with the public, and participants have operated in secret under non-disclosure agreements. There has been minimal and, perhaps, to someone cynical of the process, deliberately ineffective communication in the U.S. about the status of negotiations.
Over the summer the U.S. and Canada announced an “Agreement in Principle” (AIP) on a renegotiated Treaty. While the AIP has still not been released for review, we have some sense of its contours, including the basics of what has been negotiated to date.
What we wanted. Conservation interests in the U.S. wanted more water over the border to help migratory fish (including a dry year strategy to augment flows in hot, low flow years), a review of flood risk to explore the possibility of higher spring flows to help salmon, improved governance to add a voice for the health of the river to Treaty dam operations, a recognition of tribal interests and losses, and an ability to fold climate impacts into the Treaty’s dam operations to increase resiliency and fish passage to get salmonids back into at least some of their former range.
What we got. As we understand it, the AIP is a major disappointment for U.S. conservation interests, and appears to largely confirm the status quo, with no additional water to augment streamflows for fish. The flood risk study never happened, and flood risk management will actually become more conservative in, apparently, three out of every 10 years, likely meaning even lower flows for fish during those critical years.
The AIP also calls for a Joint Ecological Board (JEB) staffed with representatives from Tribes and First Nations. While this is good, any recommendations of the JEB can be ignored as long as a written explanation is provided. Whether this is sufficient to begin to address the historic injustices and systemic racism visited upon Tribes and First Nations by the Treaty is not for us to determine, but it appears underwhelming. U.S. hydropower interests got significant relief on the Canadian Entitlement to one half of downstream power benefits, thus reducing their costs substantially. And while there is a recognition of, and some support for, additional work on fish passage in the AIP, ecosystem function was not added as a third primary purpose of the Treaty.
What’s left to do? The AIP must now be fleshed out, and there is some opportunity for the U.S. to negotiate for reform and change in that process. There are also unilateral actions the Biden Administration could take now and in the time before it leaves office, such as adding a voice for the health of the river to the U.S. Entity. Also, about five million acre-feet of water stored behind non-treaty dams in Canada could be used for streamflow augmentation in the lower Columbia for salmon health, but to do so the U.S. would need to prioritize the health of the river and salmon and actually pursue negotiations for some of that water. So far, it’s not clear if that is happening.
What can you do? Please review the U.S. Conservation Caucus letter to Pacific Northwest senators at WaterWatch.org, and contact your U.S. senators to demand a better deal for the Columbia and ecological health of the river in the remaining Treaty negotiation process. There are possible side deals involving non-Treaty stored water, and the U.S. could take unilateral actions now to help address the historic wrongs perpetrated and perpetuated by the Treaty.
Columbia River Gorge banner photo by Jan Tick. This article originally appeared in the fall 2024 issue of WaterWatch of Oregon’s Instream newsletter.