PALO ALTO, Calif. — The Columbia River is at a crossroads.
Negotiations between the U.S. and Canada over the river’s benefits are stalled. Thirteen runs of salmon and steelhead are threatened with extinction in the river basin. Hydropower supplies are pushed to the brink.
And climate change is intensifying all of these problems on the great river of the West.
This was the overarching takeaway from experts gathered for the 2025 State of the West Symposium at Stanford University earlier this month.
The biennial symposiums are convened to assess the economic and financial health of the North American West. This year’s symposium included experts from the U.S. and Canada for a daylong discussion of the history, health and future of the Columbia River.
How are the Columbia River and Canada related?
For decades, the Columbia Basin has been the nation’s premier source of clean, affordable hydropower. A treaty in place since 1964 has helped the U.S. and Canada manage the benefits of the river they share. Salmon runs fed the people, the land and the region’s identity. But those benefits are at risk.
The Trump administration has paused negotiations to update the Columbia River Treaty — and soured relations between the U.S. and Canada with the president’s tariffs on Canadian imports and rhetoric about annexing Canada.
The U.S. needs Canada’s cooperation, noted Jonathan O’Riordan, British Columbia’s former Deputy Minister for Sustainable Resource Management, at the conference.
“There is an existential threat to the Columbia because of climate change,” O’Riordan said. “With precipitation coming as rain rather than snow, the hydropower profile will change dramatically.” Canada, where the Columbia rises, in the short run will have the advantage as to consistency and abundance of supply, he noted.
The U.S. also depends on Canadian water storage to defend against flood risk, he said.
Managing competing needs for power, water, flood control, fish and agriculture is only going to get more complicated because of climate change, according to several experts.
What are the main stressors on the Columbia?
Growing seasons — including in Washington state — are going to keep moving earlier in the spring, and water needs for irrigators are going to be changing in ways harder to predict. How to modify existing water rights and the start of the irrigation season to be functionally useful and equitable in a changing climate is yet to be figured out, said Jonathan Yoder, distinguished professor for sustainable development in the School of Economic Sciences at Washington State University and director of the State of Washington Water Research Center.
The tension between the need to empty reservoirs to make room for flood storage and the need to hold water for irrigation in longer, drier, earlier and warmer springs and summers is real and “is going to be exacerbated,” Yoder said.
Fish are also going to need water to be spilled over dams to moderate water temperatures, noted O’Riordan.
The Columbia also is being pushed to the limit for power, with more demand on the way, said Kurt Miller, executive director of the Northwest Public Power Association, which represents utilities and other energy interests across the region.
“I represent members in rural communities with gigawatts of new demand, wanting to be served,” Miller said. “There is a huge line at their doors and they want affordable, reliable energy that is carbon-free … there is no more additional hydropower, we are out.”
How is climate change affecting the Columbia?
The Columbia and the Lower Snake River, its largest tributary, are warming due primarily to dams and climate change, according to the state Department of Ecology. A new environmental assessment of dam operations has been delayed, with a public comment period extended until mid-August.
A panel of tribal experts noted that agreements made by the Biden administration to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to help Native nations bring salmon back to blocked areas are in limbo as the current administration cancels grants and renewable energy spending.
“We just have no idea what to expect,” said DR Michel, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and executive director of the Upper Columbia United Tribes, which represents tribes pursuing a multiyear strategy to return salmon above Chief Joseph and Grand Coulee dams. “The way people talk about it, power is a benefit but fish is a cost. That is to me asinine. Backwards,” Michel said.
The thousands of tribal people his organization represents aren’t looking to bring the river all the way back to its original condition. But it is out of balance today.
“We are just looking for a median, not swinging it all the way back,” Michel said. “I have a great granddaughter, 3 years old now, that is who I work for, and who I get up in the morning for. I want to correct that historic wrong, bring the salmon home, and be able to do what we did for thousands of years.”
He and others are worried for the fate of salmon runs as the river warms. Even robust runs, such as sockeye returning to the Upper Columbia, have in some years died by the thousands in hot water, or been delayed in the migration to their spawning grounds in B.C.
Improvement in fish returns with better fish and hatchery management and improvements at the dams since the 1980s still have resulted in only about 2.3 million salmon, on average, returning to the Columbia Basin each year. While better than the record-low numbers of the 1990s, that is a fraction of historic abundance, and nowhere near recovery goals.
Can Canada and the U.S. overcome a political divide?
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has found that dam removal on the Lower Snake River, in addition to other measures, will be necessary to restore Columbia Basin salmon runs to fishable abundance. However, funding and other commitments made by the Biden administration to help replace services of those dams in preparation for dam removal, should Congress approve it, also are in doubt under the new administration.
Power producers and other river users have long opposed dam removal on the Lower Snake and still do. The conflicts over water, power and salmon are all worsened by the current political climate between Canada and the U.S. “This is very personal and painful,” said Murray Rankin, the closing speaker at the conference, and former B.C. minister for Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation.
One result of that rhetoric is to create national unity in Canada such as he has not seen in his lifetime, Rankin said. “We had long got used to American condescension and ignorance of our country but now it is much worse, this is a basic betrayal of whether Canada should exist at all. He wants to break us so America owns us.” That will not happen, Rankin said.
“Even if the U.S. uses its economic power to bully us, we would never surrender our sovereignty.”
