Mexican river delta slowly nursed back to life

In a drought-hit Mexican border region at the center of growing competition with the United States for water, conservationists are working to bring a once-dying river delta back to life.

- Daniel Rook

On a stretch of the Colorado River, which on the Mexican side of the frontier is mostly a dry riverbed, native cottonwood and willow trees have been planted in place of invasive shrubs. It is the fruit of two decades of work by environmentalists along the lower part of the river from the US-Mexican border to the upper estuary of the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez.

"If we give a little water and care to certain sections of the river, we can recover environments that had already been completely lost," said Enrique Villegas, director of the Colorado River Delta program at the Sonoran Institute, a US-Mexican civil society group. The Colorado starts in the Rocky Mountains and winds its way through the southwestern United States, feeding cities and farmland along the way. By the time it crosses into Mexico most of its water has already been consumed.