How green are the greens

In 2023, University of Delaware doctoral candidate Mehrnaz Haghdadi and doctoral student Nora Lucas headed to the Colorado River Basin to conduct fieldwork for Haghdadi's research focused on indigenous water sovereignty.

As they drove through the desert, they kept seeing patches of green rising from the arid landscape. Haghdadi, who is from Iran and had never seen a golf course in her home country, had absolutely no idea what she was looking at.

"I'd never seen this much green in the desert before; it was something strange," said Haghdadi, who, along with Lucas, studies in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences. "I couldn't understand that the light green covered landscapes we kept seeing were golf courses in the middle of the desert. So, all the unique curiosities came after that, and I was wondering about where they get the water from."

Those unique curiosities turned into a paper, "Golf (dis)courses: A political ecology analysis of water usage in an arid area," published in the journal Environment and Planning: Nature and Space.

The research focused on the water use of 12 golf courses in St. George, Utah, an arid, rapidly growing city in the Colorado River Basin. The Colorado River Basin provides water to seven states and more than 40 million people, but is facing an escalating water crisis as the two largest reservoirs in the United States fall to historically low levels due to a 20-year drought and rising demand.

Drawing on spatial analysis of the golf courses, city water-use records and policy documents, they found that the golf courses consume more water than both local residential use and regional averages.

Maintaining lush, green landscapes in these climates requires extensive irrigation, which strains local water resources and can exacerbate drought conditions. In addition, the construction and maintenance of golf courses increase water demand, impacting local surface water and aquifers, which can, in turn, create tensions among interest groups and exacerbate water insecurity.

From 2018 to 2022, golf courses in St. George withdrew an average of 1.99 billion gallons of water per year, equivalent to the water use of 32,900 residents and accounting for 38% of the county's secondary water use (untreated water primarily used for irrigation).

In addition to examining the water use of these golf courses, Haghdadi and Lucas also focused on the discourse surrounding golf courses in the area - namely, how golf courses continue to operate with minimal restrictions despite being large water users in the Colorado River Basin.